101 Thurston Avenue

This Swiss Chalet-style house, with its jerkinhead, or clipped, gable and Swiss balustrade, was built in 1914 for W H. Austen, an assistant librarian at Cornell.

Austen lived there only briefly, and the house was vacant for much of the time between 1915 and 1925. From the 1930s through 1960s it was the home of Richard Baker, city forester and superintendent of city public buildings and grounds.

Chalets were a popular variant of the early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts movement.

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