Painted ladies
in San Francisco, United StatesCategory: Attraction
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701-799 Steiner St, San Francisco, CA 94117, USA Print route »
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In American architecture, painted ladies are Victorian and Edwardian houses and buildings repainted, starting in the 1960s, in three or more colors that embellish or enhance their architectural details. The term was first used for San Francisco Victorian houses by writers Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen in their 1978 book Painted Ladies: San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians. Although polychrome decoration was common in the Victorian era, the colors used on these houses are not based on historical precedent:...the California literary agents Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen published Painted Ladies, a photo essay on the modern painting practices of San Francisco. Fantastically colorful and published in an inexpensive paperback, this often tongue-in-cheek record of a Bay Area phenomenon has subsequently been embraced by large numbers of well-meaning Americans thinking too often that they were following a historical precedent. Painted Ladies and its sequels say more about the taste of the 1970s and 1980s than they do about the 1870s and 1880s.
Since then the term has also been used to describe groups of colorfully repainted Victorian houses in other American cities, such as the Charles Village neighborhood in Baltimore, Lafayette Square in St. Louis, the greater San Francisco and New Orleans areas, Columbia-Tusculum in Cincinnati, the Old West End in Toledo, Ohio, the neighborhoods of McKnight and Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts and the city of Cape May, New Jersey.
