NEB&W Guide to Green Island, NY - House at 37 Paine Street

Last Update: 2009-07-05

Paine Street Houses Table of Contents
Green Island Table of Contents
Layout Photo Gallery Table of Contents

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Prototype

• The first house in the row, just across from Eagle Foundry. This don't seem to match the Sanborn. It seems to have been built on the site of the Victor Carriage Works, which means it was built after '51. The style, however, is 1920's, not '50's. Maybe I have the date of the Sanborn wrong and it is the 1901 map. However, I don't see the address listed in the '49 and '53 City Directories, which is really odd as I can't concieve a house like this being built in the '50's or later.
  • [Prototype view, c. 2004, showing the front and south walls.]
  • [Broadside view of this front, c. 1990.]
  • [Broadside view of this front, March '09.]
  • [Rear view, also showing the north wall. (It is the furthest house.) Photo c. '73 by Tony Steele.]
  We are modeling this house, which is why I'm giving this house its own full page.

Front

• Earliest views we have of the front are c. 1990's.
  • [Broadside view of this front, c. 1990.]
  • [Prototype view, c. 2004, showing the front and south walls.]
  • [Broadside view of this front, March '09.]
  • [Front and north wall, June '09.]

South Side

• Views
  • [Prototype broadside view, c. 1980's. (Wouldn't you know it - I came across this photo, which I took - after I had modeled this wall. And now I see all the windows are 2/2, and I had cut the 4/4 window castings down to 1/1 single pane sashes. Will I go back and add the vertical mullions? Not sure.)]
  • [Prototype view, c. 2004, showing the front and south walls.]

North Side

• Tony Steele took this panoramic photo in the 1970's. No. 37 is way in the distance.
  • [Rear view, c. 1973. Photo by Tony Steele.]
  • [Front and north wall, June '09.]
  • [North wall (toward the back), June '09.]

Rear

• Tony Steele took this panoramic photo in the 1970's. No. 37 is way in the distance.
  • [Rear view, c. 1973. Photo by Tony Steele.]

Model

• Since this house isn't shown on the Sanborn, I can't measure how big it is, but in the composite photo above, it surprisingly smaller than the other ones. It looks like it is roughly 20 to 22 feet wide.
  We probably will model this.
  • [Mockups of the four chosen buildings, all a tad condensed, as of May '09.]
  I took the satellite view of this block from Google Earth and superimposed it on the Sanborn map, which has a scale. If I did it right (and things didn't exactly line up perfectly), the main section of this house is about 55 feet long.
  However, on our layout from Paine Street to the tracks is 11 real inches, 80 scale feet. The prototype is 100 feet deep, so the house should be modeled as 44 feet long to keep in proportion.

• The crucial part of modeling this house is the enclosed two story front porch. I used several Atlas signal towers for the windows here. The top row is 7 windows across. The first floor has the door in the middle of the last two windows on the right. This was the trickiest part, to cut a door into this row.
  • [In progress model, May '09. In order to make sure the assembly stayed square through all the cutting and fitting, I let it dry in place overnight in the Atlas wall. (The trick is making sure it doesn't get glued to this part.)]
  • [The second floor row is shown here, May '09.]
  • [Two completed window sections, with a ceiling to hold everything square, and the front wall, June '09.]
  • [Back of the front wall, showing how solid I braced it, June '09.]
  • [Gluing the first floor window row to the front wall, June '09.]
  • [Adding a floor and starting to add the siding below (on the right), June '09. The siding on the porch section is flared out, making it real tricky. I proceeded very slowly, making sure the top lip where the siding would rest was a few scale inches inboard of the bottom lip. The clapboard segments were filed and test fitted, and filed again.]
  • [Completed front wall, June '09. (WHEW!)]

• I used Photoshop to take out the skewing caused by perspective in the photos of both walls and then printed it out in close to HO scale (using a compressed length of 44 feet) For the north wall, I had to use the two photos, neither of which showed the entire section. You can see that this technique is not perfect as the windows don't quite line up, but close enough for modeling - especially as this building will be up against another, and not even the same one as on the prototype.
  • [Broadside views of both walls, roughly HO scale. (Photoshop is a great modeling tool.)]

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