File:Frederick J. Gottfredsen House 2013.jpg

Camera location	42° 34′ 45.5″ N, 87° 49′ 08.82″ W	View this and other nearby images on: OpenStreetMap	42.579306; -87.819117

Additional information:
The present address of the house is 711 61st Street.^[1]
This house was built by Orson Welles's grandmother Mary Head Wells after her second marriage in 1885, to Frederick Gottfredsen, the son of a prosperous brewing family.
Biographer Charles Higham wrote, "With her husband's beer money she built a house that was even more opulent and grandiose than the Head mansion; typically, she built this splendid Italianate folly in the height of contemporary architectural style only a few steps away from the Head house on the exclusive commons itself."

Now her uncles, looking from their windows at the spreading elms of what was soon to be known as Library Park, must also take in the obtrusively ornate facade that Mary had selected. She even allowed herself the supremely vulgar touch of setting multicolored beer bottles into the front of her house to remind everyone that she had married a brewer. And within the great mansion she commissioned the architect to design elaborate motifs of hops and hop leaves in the woodwork, the heavy African mahogany sconces, imported at vast expense, that frowned over the handsome folding doors that led from the living room to the library. Her eccentricities increased. With a rich husband and a baby on the way (Jacob Rudolph, for whom she named her house Rudolphsheim), Mary would now have to act the role of great lady. She must entertain; she must give society balls. But everyone in Kenosha would be made to suffer as they attended these obligatory occasions. … According to the survivors of the Head family the Gottfredsens finally lived in isolation. Frederick attended to a general store that he owned and to the business of the brewery and the malt works; because of mismanagement the business fell on hard times, and by the 1890s the Goffredsens were reduced to being franchised agents for the Pabst Brewery of Germany and were no longer in charge of their own formulas.^[2]:28–29

Higham noted the similarities between Rudolphsheim and the Amberson mansion in Orson Welles's masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).^[2]:5

References[edit]

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This image was originally posted to Flickr by Teemu008 at https://www.flickr.com/photos/43943756@N07/9069864585. It was reviewed on 2 September 2014 by FlickreviewR and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0.

2 September 2014