Alpheus Gay House

Alpheus Gay House
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
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Location	184 Myrtle St., Manchester, New Hampshire
Coordinates	42°59′53″N 71°27′25″W / 42.99806°N 71.45694°W / 42.99806; -71.45694
Area	0.3 acres (0.12 ha)
Built	1870 (1870)
Built by	Gay, Alpheus
Architectural style	Italian Villa
NRHP reference No.	82001682[1]
Added to NRHP	March 9, 1982

The Alpheus Gay House is a historic house at 184 Myrtle Street in Manchester, New Hampshire. Built c. 1870 by Alpheus Gay, a local building contractor, it is one of the state's most elaborate Italianate houses. The house was owned for a time by the nearby Currier Gallery of Art, but is now in private hands. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.^[1]

The Alpheus Gay House is located in a predominantly residential area northeast of downtown Manchester, at the northwest corner of Myrtle and Beach streets. It is a 2½-story wood-frame structure, with gabled roof section and a flushboarded exterior. It has complex massing, a roofline studded with paired brackets on the main block and modillions on the servants' wing, and a three-story tower above its main entry. The main entrance is sheltered by a porch with square posts and decorative arches below the cornice. Windows have a variety of surrounding treatments, including rounded arches, peaked lintels, and bracketed flat lintels with projecting cornices. A carriage house is attached to the house's eastern servants' wing, with vertical board siding and simpler but similar styling to that on the house.^[2]

The house was built about 1870 by Alpheus Gay, a prominent local contractor, as his personal residence. It appears to have borrowed heavily from design patterns published by Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux. It is a late but particularly well-executed example of the Italian villa style promoted by those architects, and has undergone only modest alterations since its construction.^[2]

• National Register of Historic Places listings in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire