Throwback to a 400 Year Old Cityscape and a Legendary Dreamer of Pretty Places
By Pauline Masson –
Candlewick Lane, off South Hwy N, has been in the news lately as a neighborhood whose residents are pestered by big trucks skirting through their residential street to reach industrial plants to the east.
But to architecture buffs and hometown image aficionados there is brighter side to this pretty place.
This one-block long neighborhood of eighteen distinctly different homes is not a cookie-cutter subdivision where all the houses have the same facade, but is a one-of-a-kind parade of pretty brick houses that would make historic architect Sir Christopher Wren smile.
I always think of Wren when I drive on Candlewick for two reason.
First, the name itself, which sounds like the title of a fairy tale but actually denotes the woven wicks that make candles burn. It also identifies a dozen or more historic narrow lanes, with different versions of the name, near Old St. Paul’s Cathedral in London before the great fire of 1666. These were the streets where candle makers set up their shops and the street name told shoppers that they can buy candles here.
Second, the rebuilt St. Paul’s was Wren’s masterpiece, a wedding cake celebration of different architectural elements. That was Wren’s genius. He had a penchant for combining architectural accoutrements – arches, domes, dormers, lattice railings, pillars, pediments, and round windows. And he put them all on one building.
If the famed dreamer could visit Pacific today, he would find a lot of those elements on the houses on Candlewick Lane – all except the domes. I didn’t see any domes there. But there are columns and lattice enclosed porches to spare.A magnificent sculpted pediment over a massive front door. Rounded arched windows. And a handful of the small round windows that Wren set between stories or tucked under arched roof lines.
As an unreconstructed hometown booster, I just wanted to give a thumbs up the the people who built these houses and created one of our town’s treasures.
