Sixth Street Historic District

Nine houses along two sides of Sixth Street, just west of Court Street in Portsmouth's Boneyfiddle area, form a compact district built between about 1850 and 1910. The row shows the area's changing tastes, with transitional Greek Revival-Italianate brick houses, an Italianate frame house with large carved brackets, a Queen Anne residence, and early 20th century front-gabled homes, one in locally made yellow brick. A c. 1880 mansard-roofed house is described as unique in Boneyfiddle. The district matters because it is the only surviving grouping of houses on both sides of a street in the neighborhood, where other blocks have lost buildings or gained intrusions. Residents were upper middle class, including steamboat captain Enos Moore and county commissioner James Connelly, who built 534 Sixth Street about 1860. Three of the later houses stand on the site of the Grand Opera House, demolished about 1895. Five rear garages are considered non-contributing.