Spring Grove Historic District

This small East Toledo neighborhood near Mason Street, Spring Grove Avenue and Greenwood Avenue contains 33 buildings: 19 single-family houses, 3 contributing outbuildings and 11 noncontributing outbuildings. All were built between 1910 and 1917 by the Toledo contracting firm Breyman & O'Neil, which specialized in railway, street and sewer work and also built homes on the East Side, often as speculative investments. Fourteen of the houses are made of cast-concrete block, including their Ionic-capped porch columns. No other part of Toledo has so many of them in one place, and the nomination calls them the best local examples of cast concrete used as masonry. The houses are one-and-a-half or two stories with full front porches and gabled or hipped roofs. The district was listed for architecture because it reflects the housing boom that followed industrial growth in East Toledo, when factories drew workers and builders put up homes for them. The four frame houses have been resided, but the block houses are largely unaltered.