Built in 1925 by the Reaume Company, Windsor’s pre-eminent developers of the pre World War II era… The showpiece of the the Pillette Road, Ford City sub-division… The Electric House!
The Reaume Company ran many ad’s for this subdivision in the Border Cities Star, including several full page ad’s like this one from September 1925…
I like how one of the selling points is the “new streetcar line definitely promised for this fall”. 🙂
After a bit of digging, I found that the house is still standing. After renumbering, 1434 Pillette became 1932 Pillette.
It was a nice surprise to find the house still there and in decent shape for being 83 years old…
nice!! and all for a whopping $5,500 lol. you know, until i started visiting this site i always assumed houses like this were old, but NEVER had i thought 83 years! makes me wonder how old the house i grew up in is. it’s interesting how many houses around the city still have that style of bannester on their porches too after all these years.
but why “the electric house” ? was electricity still a that big a thing at this point in time?
My favourite part of the ad: New streetcar lin definitely promised for this fall
What did they mean by electric house? Electric heating instead of steam radiators or just electric lighting instead of gas lights?
Nice post! The house is holding up well, too. I think we forget the luxuries that we take for granted now were something people dreamed of having in their homes.
I can’t get used to the spelling “busses” over “buses” though. It is correct though, but looks funny. When I see b-u-s-s I think of fuses (or is it fusses)?
The electric house could mean that there is no provision for gas lighting. Electricity at this time would be sufficient enough that gas was no longer being used at all for things that electricity could do.
New streetcar line definitely promised for this fall…Yep! Windsor (well Ford City) still promising things that tehy will never deliver on. Very typical. 🙂
I grew up on Arthur …which probably didn’t exist at this time judging by the photos of the open land surrounding the original photo! ;-))
Little typo there my comment. Very sorry.
It is truly a shame that the streetcar system was stunted when it was. Bruce Ave was also proposed to have a line built too, but never happened.
More shameful is that electric rail does not get discussed at greater levels in Windsor today. The system we once had, is the system we need again. And soon!
I live on Pillette, a few blocks away from this house. There are a lot of houses on this street that have this exact architectural style, including our neighbours. My house shares the same design as about 3 other houses on the entire street. I also noticed that there’s a lot of houses on Howard just south of Tecumseh that have the same architectural styling (but on smaller lots). Our house was built in the late 1920s. My wife’s great grandfather was the second owner, and he purchased it in the early 1930s. The houses keep up quite well, except our porch needs to be redone (that old bannister is starting to fall apart…LOL!) But from my wife’s family has told us, in the 1930s, this was the east side of Windsor, and there were just fields across the street… That seems to explain why the older houses are on the west side of the street.
As Scooter pointed out, there are quite a few versions of this house in the same area just West of Pilette. I had a friend that lived in one and this picture immediately reminded me of that area.
The Electric House address could also be 1980 Pillette Road, which still has the same porch railings. Another ad in the September 1925 Star gives the address as three doors north of Tecumseh. I live at 2040 Pillette built in 1925 which would have been the first house north of Tecumseh and the house right next door 2028 was built the same time. The next house north built in 1925 would be 1980 Pillette Road. $5500 was quite a lot of money in the twenties before the depression of 1929. These same houses would be worth about 20 times that amount today in Windsor’s depressed real estate economy. The average annual wage was around $1100 and a new car cost about $350 while a used model T cost about $10. $5500 was about 5 years wages. The average annual wage in Windsor according to the latest census is around $70,000, so the same house costs less than two years salary.