Are they "mansions," or are they just big houses? I guess for me, a "mansion" has servants' quarters on the third floor and a back staircase down to the kitchen. Maybe more than one living room. Whatever they are, Oil City is full of them. My father always said that they're evidence of the days when poor farmers would strike it rich in the oil boom and move into town to build the most ostentatious homes thy could imagine. He claims that, despite their venerable age, these are the McMansions of the poor who tastelessly flaunted their newfound and unaccustomed wealth. I'm not sure I agree... They're hardly ostentatious.
Farming the dense clay soil of the region didn't make many people rich. But a lot of farmers got oil leases back in the late 1800s, and they moved into town and built grand homes. My father, again, claims that some of these houses include fanciful features that were just for show: grand central staircases that wind in a semicircle and end at the ceiling, going nowhere; ornate double doors that open onto brick walls; fake gold chandeliers; secret passageways behind bookshelves... The point was to impress visitors with their grandeur. I don't know...they look like normal Victorians to me. Also, I believe that people around here prefer to downplay their wealth rather than displaying it. If anything, all those German and Scotch-Irish farm-folk tended to frown on too much ostentation, surely even after striking it rich.
Down in Pittsburgh, it's still fashionable to buy a decaying old mansion on the Northside or in Regent Square, set up camp in the kitchen, and slowly refurbish it. Will that kind of thing ever happen here? Is it currently happening? Affordable housing is a real issue, and so a lot of these old single-family homes are now bizarrely sectioned off into dark, labyrinthine little apartments. If you were into the old house thing, this would be a pretty affordable location to buy one and fix it up. On one hand, there are a lot of neglected or abandoned properties around here. On the other hand, you don't really see many houses for sale.
Someone did this place up right--juxtaposing modern features onto a traditional canvas. The grounds are interesting, too, though I didn't want to be too conspicuous about photographing them.
What I did not know when I bought an old house is that people who buy old houses spend all their time working on them. I've got other hobbies; I do not want to spend my free time installing weird wallpaper and painting all this old-fashioned wooden gingerbread froo-froo. I mean, look at this thing. It's beautiful, but you'd have to repaint it every 10 years or so. Vinyl siding would be out of the question. And you couldn't install efficient windows because the old ones add so much to its aesthetic appeal. But look, I count three upstairs porches...two on the second floor and one on the third. And there may be more in the back.
In Oil City, a lot of relatively plain houses, like this one, still sport a jaunty hat like the ones worn by the Kaiser's soldiers in the Great War...
Now let's journey to the Northside of Oil City--the less posh side of town. This house sits just across the street from the one my family used to own. As a kid, it always made me think of that Gothic children's novel, The House with the Clock in Its Walls. All my life, it was lovingly maintained. Today, someone still mows the lawn and leaves a light on inside, but it's pretty clearly not lived in anymore, and deferred maintenance is piling up.
This was our house, a big old place with six bedrooms, but far from mansionesque. The front porch used to wrap around the side. As you can see, it's rotted off. I lived alone here when I first got back from five years in Africa. It was still in the family, but no one wanted to live in Oil City...much less in this decaying place. My father bought it in the mid-60s from the wife of the man who built it in the year 1900. He owned a tavern downtown, and so there's a wine cellar beneath the basement. I sometimes drive past just to see if there's anyone living here again, and there's typically not.
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