Birch Avenue is a well-maintained two-block street that shows the variety of accommodations available to Wheeling's early suburbanites. Each of the eighteen houses in the block between Elm and South Park streets is individually designed, but all are similar in size and have ample front porches, rendolent of pleasant summer evenings in pre-air-conditioned suburbia. Most are attributed to the same architect and developer, George Petticord, who lived at 18 Birch Avenue in the 1920s. In the second block are the Metz Terrace Apartments, also by Petticord, which pretend to be separate houses. The apartments have half-timbered gables and full-width, individual front porches, features also found in his 1920s Petticord Row Apartments, nearby at 1093–1103 National Road.