In the one-time swank residential development of Syracuse, Genesee Street at Fayette Park, this home was built by Duncan Hillis during the birth year of the first village water supply system with its crude wooden pipes; the streets were mud, the disease problem worse, but the culture showing marked improvement. Hillis was a lawyer who moved here from Camillus in 1837 and promptly became Surrogate of the County. His home, along with others on the Park, became a social haven.

Here typical Greek details predominate - four-columned portico with pediment, flush clapboards, geometric door panels, a fine wrought iron balcony, and precise proportions that aspire directly to Lafever or Benjamin. An innovation and indicative of the growing perfection of the style and in a manner too, foreboding future developments, are the small door and window pediments capping Greek frames again traceable to the north door of the Freetheum, illustrated in both Stuart and Revett, and Lafever. Of interest is the comparison of this squat and therefore more accurately Greek roof pitch, with that of the Harvey Baldwin house on page 83, an early interpretation.

The wing has acquired two full stories but is skillfully submerged to the main facade. This wing is unusual, however, not only for its height and location but because of its flat pilaster strips, a feature unobserved since the early transitional structures and comparatively rare in Syracuse. They are not of course, out of place in this period of the Greek Revival, and the entire house is one of the finer extant examples.