Editing Victorian Architecture (section)

== Italianate Style ==

Italianate architecture, popular from the 1840s through 1880s, introduced romantic Italian villa forms to Philadelphia's streetscape. The style featured low-pitched roofs with wide overhanging eaves supported by decorative brackets, tall narrow windows often with elaborate hoods or pediments, and asymmetrical compositions that broke from classical formality. Italianate rowhouses lined the developing neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, and South Philadelphia, their bracketed cornices and pedimented windows adding visual interest to the streetwall.<ref name="tatum"/>

Commercial Italianate buildings transformed Philadelphia's downtown, with cast-iron facades enabling large windows for retail display. The style's emphasis on surface ornament—quoins, pilasters, and decorative window surrounds—could be economically produced in cast iron and applied to buildings of various sizes. Banks, offices, and stores adopted Italianate dress, their facades creating commercial streets of unprecedented richness. While many commercial Italianate buildings have been demolished or altered, residential examples survive throughout Philadelphia's Victorian neighborhoods.<ref name="moss"/>