601 N Queen Street

Year Built: ~1920s

Owner: James Marvin Bradford

Around the corner from 502 and 504 Roxboro (which I wrote about several posts ago) on Queen Street are these great small Craftsman houses.

601 North Queen St.

Unfortunately, they have the same owner as 502 and 504 North Roxboro. Together with those damaged houses, and other parcels owned by Mr. Bradford, they form a chunk of property that takes up about 2/3 of the block.

Per the National Register nomination for the house, 2009: (not checked for accuracy)

 

This one-story, Craftsman-style bungalow is three bays wide and quadruple-pile. The house has a stuccoed brick foundation, wood weatherboards, an asphalt-shingled, front-gabled roof and two interior brick chimneys. The full-width engaged front porch is supported by stuccoed brick posts on stuccoed brick piers with concrete caps and has a pointed arch span and a replacement wood rail. The house has a pair of small casement windows in the front gable and brackets lining the front gable and two low gables, one on each side of the house. The house is vacant and all of the windows have been boarded save for the two small windows in the front gable. It stands on an overgrown lot on the northwest corner of N. Queen Street and Elliott Street and is accessed by concrete stairs bordered by stuccoed brick kneewalls with concrete caps. Little is known of the early history of the house, but its first known resident was Clement V. Schrader in 1934.

This entire neighborhood is severely threatened by neglect, those who are amassing parcels as an investment, institutions looking for surface parking, and a city that 'fixes' such problems by knocking down houses. No non-profit, city agency, or downtown booster organization is fighting for the integrity of this neighborhood.

It is a common tactic by absentee landlords (another top 5 winner in the anti-preservation sweepstakes) to milk historic properties for all they can get out of them, investing nothing in them. Once the properties become truly uninhabitable (because they push it way past what should be the definition of habitable), they wait for the city to tear it down. If the city doesn't move quickly enough, they push people to complain about the property. If that doesn't work, sometimes there is a fire, which can always be ascribed to the homeless folks who were squatting in the house.

James Marvin Bradford's abandoned property, outlined in red, including 502 and 504 N Roxboro (see my earlier post) and 601 and 603 N Queen.

Update: Four years have passed, and this mess is still going on. Bradford thinks he is going to sell these houses to someone to move for him, saving him the demolition costs - all for a development pipe dream that will never come to pass. Meanwhile, two houses that could be part of the rejuvenation of Cleveland-Holloway continue to rot and bring down the neighborhood. This should be criminal.

601 Queen, 10.22.10

On 04.04.12, this house was moved to 513 Gurley Street.

At its new home on Gurley Street, 04.04.12
 

The former site at 601 N. Queen.

Bradford and Galifinakis will continue to plow ahead with their grand plan to build an apartment complex on this block. I honestly don't think they have the experience or capital to get it done, or they would have by now. Apartments simply aren't that hard to build.  And given the quality of Bradford's other projects (and I use that word intentionally,) I would expect plastic fantasticness if it does.