Edwin Forrest House
- Architect
- Stephen Decatur Button
- Year
- 1854
- Style
- Italianate
- City
- Philadelphia, PA
- Collection
- victorian philadelphia
The Edwin Forrest House at 1346 North Broad Street was built in 1853-54 in the Italianate style by architect Stephen Decatur Button. From 1880 until 1960 it housed the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, at one point one of the largest art schools for women in the country, and it was named a National Historic Landmark in 1993.
the building
Built in three parts. The building grew in stages: an original townhouse, a theater addition to its south, and a classroom wing at the rear, reflecting its later life as a working art school in the decades after Edwin Forrest's era.
Windows that step down. The three-story brick and brownstone townhouse has windows that shrink in height from the first floor to the third, with bracketed hoods over the lower two floors and a projecting, similarly bracketed window above the paired-bracket entrance at the center of the five-bay facade.
the style
The Italianate styling shows in the bracketed window hoods and the diminishing window heights climbing the facade, both hallmarks of the style as applied to Philadelphia townhouses in the 1850s.
More on Italianatesignificance
The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
nearby
- The Met Philadelphia
- Divine Lorraine Hotel
- Spring Garden School No. 2
- Congregation Rodeph Shalom
- Guild House
- Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site