Talk:McElroy Octagon House

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third octagon house in SF

I've corrected the statement that the McElroy was one of only two surviving octagon houses in SF. The third is the old Point Lobos Marine Exchange Lookout Station in Lincoln Park, just above the USS San Francisco Memorial. There had been lookout buildings on that site since 1850; the present one is the third, built in 1927. While its primary function was a lookout station for shipping, the lookout and his family lived in the building and, after it was decommissioned in 1966, it remained the private residence of the final lookout's daughter until 2002. It is now empty and awaiting restoration by the National Park Service. Bricology (talk) 21:09, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What about 21 Cascade Walk? It seems that there are at least 4 in the city. 24.6.187.181 (talk) 22:44, 3 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Unknown as an explicit parameter

Jooojay, exactly which source states that the architect is "Unknown" in the positive sense? The NRHP nomination makes no mention of an architect. Neither do sources 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, or the NSCDA. Sources 4, 7, 8, and 10 do not mention the house at all. The NRIS landing page says "Unknown", but that page is only a summary of the nomination form. It lists "Unknown" because it is a default value which means that the authors of the nomination form did not list an architect; it is simply not known from the perspective of whichever transcriber had to fill the summary fields.

It is absurd to explicitly list "Unknown" as a parameter instead of leaving it blank. Is the building cost known? Is the square footage known? Is the building height known? Is the yearly visitation for this house known? (this template parameter has been left blank.) These are all presumably unknown, but nobody has felt the need to describe them as such in the article (because it's nonsensical). kennethaw88 • talk 02:56, 12 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Kennethaw88: I understand your point - what was confusing me was removing it from only the infobox and it had a citation in the body of the article. I downloaded the citation that was used and there is no mention of this architecture issue, so I removed it. If the citation had made a point about the architects name being unknown, perhaps I would have done it differently. It is on the NRHP specifically for the architecture. Jooojay (talk) 03:09, 12 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I get a bit frustrated seeing lots of articles like this, where the infobox has just been copied and pasted, without looking at the source, and often not even checking for basic spelling errors (which are surprisingly common in the NRIS). kennethaw88 • talk 06:07, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]