Guest Article: Rowhouses: Urban Living at its Best by Jackson Gilman-Forlini

[Editor’s Note: Hello, Friends! I am in Europe with limited internet access, but fortunately I prepared for this. My gifted colleague Jackson will be doing two installments of Looking Around about a subject he is an expert on: rowhouses - specifically in the mid-Atlantic region. I hope you all enjoy his wonderful contributions to this series!] 

Please excuse the formatting as I am typing this on a tablet and will edit the article to include links and additional formatting at a later date. 

ROWHOUSES: URBAN LIVING AT ITS BEST


By: Jackson Gilman-Forlini 

 In 1959, author Jane Jacobs visited Boston’s North End neighborhood while preparing to write “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. Prior to her arrival, the North End had been dismissed by urban planners as a slum; however, Jacobs discovered a neighborhood that was old but still vibrant with community life. She met with a young butcher who provided evidence of the neighborhood’s health by pointing out a rowhouse down the block that had been recently rehabbed. About its homeowner, the butcher remarked to Jacobs: “That man could live anywhere. Today, he could move into a high-class suburb if he wanted to. He wants to stay here. People who stay here don’t have to, you know. They like it.” [1] 

 What was it about that rowhouse that attracted this man and his family? In American culture, the 1950s are synonymous with suburban tract development (Think: Levittown and Leave it to Beaver.) By 1959, no one was building rowhouses–a style that was then seen by mainstream culture as hopelessly out of date and associated with poverty. Yet, in the midst of all this, why would a reasonable middle class family voluntarily chose to live in a rowhouse? 

Rowhouse Basics 

 The rowhouse, townhouse, or terraced house is a house that shares a wall on either side with another house. These houses are all based off of a fairly basic concept: the idea that people living in a densely populated urban environment want to live close to one another while maintaining some semblance of autonomy. In contrast to the apartment building or tenement, rowhouses are adjacent to one another but open onto the street independently. 

 There is some disagreement over what to call this kind of house. In the US, the most generic term for houses built as a single unit seems to be “townhouse.” For groups of townhouses built together that display serialized repetition of form, the preferred term seems to be “rowhouse,” particularly in the mid-Atlantic region where they are most prevalent. 

In the UK, “terraced houses” or simply “terraces” are used to describe rowhouses, while the term “townhouse” denotes a wealthy mansion located within a city. The rowhouse is amazingly adaptable to whatever period of architectural style it happens to be built in, because it follows a basic and easily replicated formula: take a rectangular box taller than it is wide, cover it with a roof, and repeat. 

Using variations in size, ornament, and shape, rowhouse builders are able to adapt the rowhouse for any style or circumstance. In the 20th century, as the middle class left urban center for the suburbs, the rowhouse fell out of favor for semi-detached and detached houses. However, the popularity of rowhouses has rebounded in recent years, proving that they are still a highly viable option for 21st century urban residencies. 

The housing stock produced by rowhouse builders shows a keen understanding of space efficiency, comfort, and elegant design. Origins and Stylistic Development The American rowhouse has its origins in the 18th century Georgian-style terraces of London, although earlier townhouses date back to the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Europe. Particularly in the Netherlands, townhouse development grew prior to the 18th century. Each of these Dutch townhouses was built independently and ornamented uniquely, exhibiting extravagance of great variety. [2]

Dutch townhouses in Amsterdam display great variety of ornament within a single block. Photo courtesy of Jeff Bessen. 

These 18th century Georgian style terraced houses in London are examples of the direct forerunner to the American rowhouse. The popularity of neoclassicism at the time of their construction resulted in a unified and mathematically proportioned edifice. Photo by author.

In contrast, the appearance of 18th century British terraced houses were coordinated so as to form a unified whole. Compared to the highly decorative houses of Amsterdam, Georgian-style facades were stripped of ornament. In the process, their dimensions and proportions took on a more important role in projecting a sense of scale, balance, and elegance. This shift was consistent with the aesthetic trends of the Age of Enlightenment, when architects sought to symbolically interpret the neoclassical principles of reason and logic into physical material. In many cases, the proportions of Georgian rowhouses were based on the golden mean and were intended to mimic the classical columns and orders. [3]

More than just an edifice, the coordinated rowhouse block achieves the aesthetic brilliance of horizontality through the repetition of an individual unit that is fundamentally vertical. The interplay and juxtaposition between the vertical and the horizontal is immensely intriguing to the human eye.

Affluent rowhouses on the 2900 block of N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD. Photo by author.

In addition, the rowhouse block creates a strong sense of linear receding perspective for the viewer. The horizontal lines of rowhouses reinforce a sense of perspective receding to a vanishing point–a form that mimicked the technique of mathematical linear perspective developed for the visual arts during the renaissance. These features combined into a form that appealed to middle class sensibility in 18th and 19th century Great Britain, and ensured the successful importation of the rowhouse to North America. [4]  

Working class rowhouses circa 1915, 400 Block of Ilchester Ave, Baltimore, MD. Photo by author.

Philadelphia most readily adopted the form and intent of the English originals, and then later adapted this style to suit the tastes of the Federal period after the Revolutionary War. In Philadelphia today, the city displays some of the best preserved 18th and early 19th century rowhouses. [5]

From Philadelphia, the style was exported to Baltimore, the next closest city. Baltimore and Philadelphia became most strongly associated with the rowhouse during the 19th century, when this housing type became the predominant housing stock and took on distinctive features such as red brick and marble steps. [6]

During the 19th century, rowhouse construction continued to spread throughout American cities. In each city, the style changed slightly to conform to regional tastes and availability of materials. In New York, rowhouses covered in brown sandstone, colloquially known as “brownstones,” continued the same tradition. In Chicago, a form of limestone known as “greystone” was more frequently employed. By the 1870s, rowhouses reached San Francisco, where they can be seen today in the famous “painted ladies.” [7]

Still, the rowhouse remains most closely associated with Philadelphia and Baltimore, where it was adapted to suit all members of society from the working classes to the very wealthy. The predominance of the rowhouse was the direct cause for a high level of homeownership in these cities, compared to cities where tenements were more common. In the 19th century, rowhouse builders aggressively marketed their homes to a population anxious to speculate on the increasing value of land in these growing industrial cities. 

Builders incentivized rowhouse purchases through creative financing mechanisms such as ground rents, building and loan associations, and developer-guaranteed secondary mortgages. By the end of the 19th century, the relatively low price of a rowhouse meant that a working class family could own their own home by mortgaging close to 100% of the purchase price, with little to no money down. While this lending practice sounds predatory by modern standards, the records show that foreclosures were surprisingly rare. [8]

Why were rowhouses so popular and so successful?

The genius of the rowhouse is three-fold:

1) The basic plan and structure of the rowhouse is so simple that it’s highly adaptable to changes in style and size. It can be adapted to suit different groups of people across time and socio-economic class. Designs were formed and reformed depending on the taste and wealth of the occupants.

2) The design is practical. It allows for a maximization of land use while maintaining the autonomy the occupants. Rowhouses are also physically durable. By shielding over 50% of the house’s outer walls with two other houses, the rowhouse design protects surfaces from exposure to weather, thus lengthening the lifespan of the building materials while reducing the maintenance requirements.

3) The rowhouse can serve as a building block for larger compositions and landscapes–achieving variety within constraints. The rowhouse achieves aesthetic harmony by building an overall horizontality through the repetition of vertical units. This is a useful tool for enhancing the visual appeal of streets, making cities more desirable places to live overall.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the proliferation of new homes coupled with creative financing models resulted in an uptick in homeownership for middle and working class white families in Baltimore and other cities with large numbers of rowhouses. [9] 

While the low cost of rowhouses at this time enabled many black Americans to achieve homeownership, they were at a tremendous disadvantage due to the proliferation of discriminatory housing policies such as redlining, restrictive deed covenants, and legislated segregation. The effect of Jim Crow laws on the shape of American cities is too long to relate here, but is tremendously important to understanding urban history. A well-researched account can be found in Antero Pietila’s book, Not in My Neighborhood. [10]

Rowhouses for the rich and poor

Journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken, was born, lived and died in a Baltimore rowhouse that he once called “as much a part of me as my own two hands.” [11] Mencken’s father purchased the house new in 1883, and his son lived there until his death in 1956. The Mencken family was rightfully proud of their elegant home overlooking Union Square park. In an interview for the Library of Congress in 1948, Mencken sternly corrected the interviewer when it was suggested that he lived in a two-story rowhouse. Mencken proudly pointed out that he had always lived in three-story rowhouse–an emblem of his father’s financial success. [12]

Former rowhome of H.L. Mencken at 1524 Hollins Street, Baltimore, MD. Photo courtesy of Baltimore Heritage

Mencken’s interview reveals that the number of stories on a rowhouse was its own cultural symbolic language that communicated the wealth and status of the occupants. It was a mark of success when a family could improve its station by moving from a two-story house into a three-story house. [13] 

Rowhouse builders were able to tailor the design of rowhouses to denote different income levels. The structural design of a rowhouse easily allowed a builder to do this by adding or subtracting a story. By creating a literal tiered system of wealth through architectural symbolism, rowhouses enabled the working class to visualize a path up the socioeconomic ladder. Not only symbolic, the hierarchy of rowhouse design gave working class families the opportunity to build equity in a smaller asset before graduating to a larger one and improving their living conditions.

Late Romantic era rowhouses often assume extravagant and fanciful ornament such as this group of Picturesque style houses on the 2800 Block of St. Paul Street, Baltimore and built around 1905. Note the mismatch of elements such as Flemish gable roofs, Spanish tile, and Greek porticos. Photo by author.

The 19th century “starter home”–the most humble of rowhouses–were “alley houses,” so called because they were built along alleys.  Beginning in the late 18th century, alley houses were constructed by developers who attempted to maximize profit by maximizing the number of houses they could fit within a block. 

While large three-story houses were constructed along the main boulevards, the small alleys behind these streets were also utilized for two-story homes. The smaller size of these lots necessitated the construction of smaller houses, usually only eleven to twelve feet wide and two rooms deep. Available for half the price of a house on the main streets, alley houses provided an early form of affordable housing for working class immigrants and urban tradesmen, both black and white. Alley houses allowed these groups of people the dignity of owning their own home at a fraction of the cost of larger houses. [14]

Architectural historian Mary Ellen Hayward has done extensive research on the Baltimore alley house as both an architectural and sociological phenomenon. Her analysis has shown that, due to the close proximity between alley houses and larger rowhouses, early 19th century Baltimore neighborhoods were marked by a relatively high level of economic and racial diversity, especially compared to the makeup of Baltimore neighborhoods after Jim Crow. [15]

Many people today think that alley houses were only built for the domestic servants of the larger adjacent homes. In fact, most alley house occupants were skilled craftsmen and tended to group themselves by common industry rather than by other demographics. In a time before public transportation and cars, American cities were organized to allow for easy walking distances between home and work. It made sense that both boss and employee should live near their work, and therefore live near one another. In this way, rowhouses and alley houses built a city marked by geographic, if not social, integration of the classes.  This pattern of urban living changed only with the advent of trolleys, when the wealthy could afford to commute and consequently removed themselves from older neighborhoods and the working class. [16]

Typical early 19th century alley houses in Fells Point, Baltimore. Earlier alley houses in the background are identified by the pitched roof and gabled dormer. After about 1830, the Italianate style cornice and flat roof, such as the house in the foreground, became more common. Photo by author.

The need to live near one’s work appears to have transcended racial as well as economic lines. From about 1780 to 1840, blocks of alley houses in Baltimore were racially diverse and provided affordable housing for Baltimore’s large population of free black workers prior to Emancipation. This was particularly true among maritime tradesmen who worked and lived in the shipbuilding district of Fells Point–the same neighborhood where Frederick Douglass worked as an enslaved ship’s caulker from about 1836 to 1838. Alley houses continued to be built throughout the 19th century; however, the 1909 Baltimore City Building Code outlawed the construction of alley houses, thereby ending the era of their construction and limiting the availability of this type of working class housing. [17]

Decline and Rebirth of the Rowhouse

Starting around 1915, the increasing popularity of suburban detached houses with yards and garages threatened the economic viability of the rowhouse design. In response, rowhouse builders instituted a new design known as the “daylight rowhouse,” which reconfigured the standard rowhouse floorplan of one room wide by three rooms deep. 

By widening the typical house from eighteen feet to twenty three feet, the daylight rowhouse expanded the narrow front hall and placed it parallel to the front parlor and adjacent to the kitchen. This created a square floor plan two rooms wide and two rooms deep. The new design eliminated the poorly lit center rooms and allowed each room an equal distribution of natural light and ventilation. Skylights–strategically placed over the central hallways, stairs, and water closets–completed the effect. [18]

Although this new layout reduced the number of houses that a builder could fit on one block (and thus reduced profits), the main motivation for the improvement came from a desire to compete in the market with outer suburban developers.This strategy worked for a period, and daylight rowhouses were popular among the lower middle and working classes through the 1930s. Despite these efforts to keep up with current trends, however, the increasing popularity of the automobile continued to push urban dwellers further into the outer suburbs and all but halted new rowhouse construction by mid-century. [19]

Although new construction of rowhouses largely stopped after World War II, many people still found them to be functional–if not fashionable–places to live. A few modernist rowhouses were built such as this row of four houses  designed by architect Harry Weese in the mid- 1970s, but these are the exception. [20] 

Even though most middle and upper class Americans had dismissed rowhouses, the family that Jane Jacobs encountered in 1959 were pioneers in a small but growing number of middle class families willing to return to them. Eventually, city governments took notice of these people and incentivised “homesteading” programs in the 1970s and early 1980s as attempts at urban renewal. These policies, coupled with a newly created federal historic preservation policies, resulted in the rehabilitation of thousands of rowhouses. [21]

By the 1990s, urban populations began to rebound and new rowhouse construction picked up. This new generation of houses, termed “townhouses,” were built as much for their practical space utilization as for their livability. The urban planning theories of smart growth, new urbanism, and sustainable development continue to encourage the construction of townhouses as a means to reduce sprawl. A product of postmodernism, these new homes borrow the architectural language of 19th century rowhouses.

Today, new rowhouses and townhouses continue to be constructed while older historic rowhouses continue to be rehabbed. Their sturdy, practical design ensures that they will be an ongoing part of the urban landscape for the future. Ultimately, their appeal is the same today as it was two hundred years ago: We all want to live close to one another, just not too close.

About the Author:

Jackson Gilman-Forlini is a historic preservationist for the Baltimore City Department of General Services, where he coordinates the Historic Properties Program. He is a Masters candidate in Historic Preservation at Goucher College and can be reached at jgilmanforlini@gmail.com

Notes

1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) 284.
2. Marcus Binney, Town Houses: Urban Houses from 1200 to the Present Day (New York: Whitney Library of Design 1998) 15-63.
3. Natalie W. Shivers, Those Old Placid Rows: The Aesthetic Development of the Baltimore Rowhouse (Baltimore: Maclay and Associates, 1981) 6-8.
4. Ibid.
5. Binney, Town Houses, 86.
6. Shivers, Placid Rows, 8-9.
7. Binney, Town Houses, 106; 118-121.
8. Shivers, Placid Rows, 17; Mary Ellen Hayward and Charles Belfoure, The Baltimore Rowhouse (New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1999) 122-125.
9. Hayward and Belfoure, The Baltimore Rowhouse, 114.
10. Antero Pietila, Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010).
11. Qtd.  “H.L. Mencken House,” Explore Baltimore Heritage, accessed July 22, 2017, https://explore.baltimoreheritage.org/items/show/12.
12. Arnold Jacobsen, and H. L Mencken. Interview with H. L. Mencken. [Unknown] Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000006/. (Accessed July 22, 2017.)
13. Ibid.
14. Mary Ellen Hayward, “Baltimore’s Alley Houses: Homes for Working People Since the 1780s,” in From Mobtown to Charm City: New Perspectives on Baltimore’s Past, ed. Jessica Elfenbein, et. al. (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2002) 33-46.
15. Ibid.; See also: Mary Ellen Hayward, Baltimore’s Alley Houses: Homes for Working People Since the 1780s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Hayward and Belfoure, The Baltimore Rowhouse, 138-141.
19. Ibid. 155-166; also: Shivers, Placid Rows, 38-39.
20. Binney, Town Houses, 144-145.
21. Hayward and Belfoure, The Baltimore Rowhouse, 176-180.