Lancaster Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Old Town Lancaster is a compact residential neighborhood of thirty-nine principal buildings within about one and a half blocks of Penn Square in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Most are two-story red brick houses with gable roofs, built in common bond and set at or near the sidewalk, and they date mainly from about 1840 to 1910. Streets such as South Duke, East Vine and South Christian were among the original town streets laid out in 1730. Unlike most of the city centre, the area was not given over to stores or businesses in the century after 1830 and developed instead as a middle-class neighborhood. Its houses show limestone, frame, red brick and yellow brick construction side by side. The stone house at 130 East Vine Street was built as a stable before about 1802 and converted to two houses in 1838, and the paired houses at 40-42 East Vine Street, dating from about 1857 to 1858, have some of the most elaborate mid-nineteenth-century facades in Lancaster. The neighborhood is also linked visually and historically to the adjacent Historic Lancaster district.