Elizabeth Apartments

Built around 1920, this masonry veneered two-story apartment building sits facing south at the corner of North Long Street and Elizabeth Avenue.  While the apartment building's site is relatively level, Elizabeth Avenue and the surrounding terrain slope to the east toward Sugar Creek. Elizabeth Apartments sits near the border between First and Second Wards, and when the apartment building was built the neighborhood was distinctly residential, with the large East Avenue Tabernacle A. R. P. Church across Elizabeth Avenue being the

only significant exception. To the south of the apartment building, single houses and duplexes lined East Trade.  To the north of the apartment building, the now truncated North Long Street and North Morrow Street contained dozens of nearby houses.   By the middle of the 20th-century the nature of the area around Elizabeth Apartment began to change.  Houses along Elizabeth Avenue and East Trade Street were replaced or converted to commercial use, but a strong residential component still remained along the lesser streets.  Radical changes came to the area with the construction of the Brookshire and John Belk freeways in the 1970's.  Because of the wide swath of the freeway and the expansive interchanges, all of the buildings between Elizabeth Apartments and Sugar Creek were demolished.  Morrow Street disappeared, and Long street became little more than a short alley.  The Elizabeth Apartments lacks architectural details associated with popular styles, but the low pitched hipped roof and the asymmetrical form of the building were typical of the Mediterranean Style.  The building is significant as a representative example small apartment buildings that once dotted the city's four wards. 

The Elizabeth Apartments is a hybrid building.  Different from a traditional quadplex, the building appears to have consisted of four two-story units.  Unlike larger apartment buildings which typically feature load-bearing masonry construction, Elizabeth Apartments is a frame building, with a deep veneer of concrete bricks.  The three-bay-wide facade features a recessed center bay containing the one of the building's four entrances.  It appears that all of the doors and windows have been replaced.  The nine bays wide west elevation fronts on North Long Street and contains three of the apartment entrances.  This very public elevation features a series of shallow projections.  The bay adjacent to the facade contains another of the building's entrances, containing a replacement door.  A brick porch with a brick half-wall is topped with a plain cap that is integrated into a brick band on the second bay, which projects and defines the north end of the small porch.  This second bay contains a round-arch window with the sill integrated into the brick band, and paired narrow windows on the second floor.  A prominent two-bay wide shallow projection is located on the northern end of the west elevation.  Two porches with shallow hipped roofs, brick posts and half walls, utilize the nooks formed by the projection.  Porch steps extend to the sidewalk.   Original board ceilings and glazing around the door frames survive on the two porches.   The east elevation is divided into a front and rear section.  The most notable feature is a recesses bay in the center of the front section.