Art Gallery / Auditorium
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Hoyt Sherman Place (Art Gallery / Auditorium)
1873–1877, 1907. 1922, addition, Vorse, Kraetsch and Kraetsch. 1501 Woodland Ave.
Since 1907 the Hoyt Sherman house has been the home of the Des Moines Women's Club. The style of the 1873–1877 house was Italianate, with a central three-story hipped roof tower, round-arched windows, a richly detailed entablature and bracketed cornice, and a number of wooden porches and verandas. The architect/historian William Wagner has speculated that the house may have been designed by William Foster, who designed many buildings in Des Moines. The house now sits to the side of a large art gallery added in 1907 and an auditorium built in 1922. The somewhat eighteenth-century image of the auditorium/art gallery seems to suggest that the house is a mere leftover. The porches and other elaborate stone-and-wood detailing of the house have been removed, and a stone surround, sympathetic to the auditorium/art gallery, provides entrance to the building.
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