Black and orange are the predominant colors of the season but I was looking for pink this weekend. Pink houses, large and small, can be found all over Salem but primarily in the outlying neighborhoods away from the center historic districts. While colonial houses can look lovely in pink, this custom seems to apply more to Charleston and Savannah than it does to New England:  pink is just not a Puritan color!  So most of Salem’s pink houses are Victorians, with the exception of a very bright Greek Revival on Winter Street just off the Common, and a little Georgian house in dusty salmon pink right off Derby Street.

And on the other side of Derby Street, overlooking Derby Wharf, the Friendship, and the Custom House, a pink triple-decker, another iconic New England architectural style.

I kept walking east:  downtown was full of tourists and motorcycles, the weather was beautiful, and I knew that I’d find some pink house in the Willows. Salem Willows is a late Victorian park with an adjacent residential neighborhood of structures that were built as seasonal cottages in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All of these houses have been transformed into year-round residences, and it’s a colorful neighborhood with few preservation encumbrances. There was a full spectrum of pink here, from shocking Schiaparelli to the very pale color of the Gothic Revival cottage overlooking Juniper Point Beach.

Back in town, I turned left and walked down Lafayette Street, which was a grand boulevard of painted ladies before the great Salem Fire of 1914.  Some survived, and Colonial Revival residences replaced those that did not:  one has a conspicuous pink and light gray color scheme that you cannot fail to notice.  On a side street Lafayette, there’s a lovely late 19th century pink house, with an adjacent three-car garage, also in pink.  And way down the road, almost on the Marblehead line, is a “Scooby Doo” eclectic Victorian overlooking Salem Harbor dressed in faded pink.  I was losing the light by this time, as you can see.

These are all great houses, but I must admit that my two favorite pink houses are not in Salem. One is the Justin Morrill homestead in Strafford, Vermont, which I’ve already featured in a post, and the other is the Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, Connecticut, which is owned and operated by Historic New England. Both are assertively Gothic Revival structures–“Gothic” and pink are two descriptive terms which are seldom linked together, but in these two cases we have notable exceptions!

Roseland Cottage, Woodstock, Connecticut, 1846.  Historic New England.

Thankfully, I really do believe that Salem is nearly as well-known for its Federal architecture as its witch trials, but Salem is not just a Federal city. There are a vast variety of architectural styles in evidence around town, and some of the later (post 1870) styles get short shrift, I think. Even for a layman such as myself, Colonial, Federal , Greek Revival, and Gothic Revival structures are fairly easy to identify, but once you get into the myriad Victorian styles, it gets a bit more confusing, and then the amorphous Colonial Revival provides even more confusion. What is “Victorian Eclectic” (all Victorian houses seem rather eclectic to me)?  Are Stick and Shingle houses Victorian or Colonial Revival? Do Craftsman and Arts & Crafts houses fall under the umbrella of Colonial Revival or are they completely different styles?  Or are they the same style?  And where does the Cottage style fit in–there seem to be so many different types of cottages!  I could go on and on with the questions, but until I figure out all the later nineteenth and early twentieth-century styles I just go with my own labels and classifications based on impressions.

That said, there are several houses in Salem which I always think of as English. They have a certain detail, or presence, or situation, that just conjures up England for me, even though they are all (for the most part) wooden, American houses.  I’m really not sure precisely when these houses were built, or for whom:  while downtown pre-1850 houses are quite well-documented in Salem, later houses in more outlying neighborhoods (where most of my English houses are located) do not seem to have (written) histories.  I welcome all estimates of dates and proper styles:  to my untrained eye, they look like a little bit Cottage, a bit Tudor Revival (another easily identifiable style), a bit Shingle, and a bit Arts & Crafts.  Hence my confusion!

South Salem, on the side streets off Lafayette:  a really cute English cottage very near Salem State with lots of neat details, a twin-gabled house, a sprawling two-story Tudor Revival, and two houses, wooden and stucco, that were built on land devastated by the great Salem Fire of 1914 that read “English” to me.

Off the Common:  a very English craftsman cottage, and a house that has a very distinguished, English presence.

All of these houses could probably be labelled Shingle, or perhaps Colonial Revival, and none of them rise to the level of the more strident English country houses built in America after the turn of the last century found in the pages of periodicals like The American Architect and Building News, but I still think of them as old “English” houses in New England.

English-American houses in the American Architect and Building News (1917) and The Pageant of America, Volume 13:  The American Spirit of Architecture (1926).