Colonial, The

Standing at the southeast corner of Park Avenue West and Benton Street in Mansfield, Ohio, The Colonial is a three-story brick apartment building dating to about 1900. Its Neo-Classical design centers on a large two-story portico carried by four pairs of modified Ionic columns, with a balustraded second-floor porch and a small upper porch on stubby Tuscan columns. A Doric entablature crowns the flat-roofed structure, which rests on a sandstone foundation and has wood trim. The building matters as Mansfield's finest surviving example of turn-of-the-century apartment housing and as one of very few apartment buildings from that period still standing in the city. Early residents were young professionals and their families. Because most of the avenue was developed with single-family houses, the building's architectural distinction appears to have been an attempt to blend into that setting. It forms the end of the view from North Benton Street and has served as a mix of offices and apartments for many years.