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BUILDING FORM ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION ❑see continuation sheet Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community. 55 Hancock St. is one of the most elaborate of the relatively few Shingle Style houses in Lexington. It is essentially rectangular in plan with a canted rear ell, 2'/z stories, and side-gabled with a ridge chimney and a large exterior pilastered chimney in the reentrant angle. The house is set on a fieldstone foundation, clad with wood shingles, and roofed with asphalt shingles. A side- gabled addition at the east end is partly on a concrete foundation. The main entry is located under an off-center projecting gable; windows are 1/1 double hung sash. The house has many period details: hip-roofed dormers with flared eaves, curved shingles in the gables, a second-story wall that flares outward at the base, curved shingled brackets under the overhanging second-story in the front gable end, curved brackets under the entry hood, an enclosed porch to the left of the entry, and a series of rectangular- semicircular-rectangular open porches at the rear. The three-car garage on the property has an irregular contemporary second- story residence/studio sheathed with plywood that was added by a former architect-owner. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE ❑see continuation sheet Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local(or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. This house was built in 1900 by George O. Whiting,who lived in a house at what is now 8 Adams St. (MHC#697), for his daughter Emma and her husband Charles B. Davis, a General Electric Co. manager. It replaced an earlier house on this site, which Whiting had moved across Hancock St. in 1899 and is now at 56 Hancock St. (MHC#733). The 1849 deed for that house, i.e., for the lot on which 55 Hancock St. is now located, specified that no other house was to be erected between the house and Hancock St. or that would impair the view from the house now at 53 Hancock St. (MHC#730) and a similar restriction is in the deeds for 53 Hancock St. While the present house at 55 Hancock St. was under construction, the Minute-man commented, "The house is rather unusual in design, yet is so arranged as to give a fine view, and has a quaint rambling effect, somewhat after the Elizabethan style of building." BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES ❑see continuation sheet Hudson, Charles. History of the Town of Lexington. Revised and continued to 1912 by the Lexington Historical Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. 2: 163. Lexington Minute-man, 1900. Middlesex Registry of Deeds. Deeds. Cambridge, MA. 638: 279. S. Lawrence Whipple. Notes on significant houses outside the historic districts. In possession of S. Lawrence Whipple, Lexington, MA. Worthen, Edwin B. to Mrs. Bruce Currie, 16 February 1951. Worthen Collection. Cary Library, Lexington, MA. ❑ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked,you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.