Guest Post: How to Date a Rowhouse (Other Than Swiping Right)

By Jackson Gilman-Forlini 

Let’s say you’re looking to buy a house and you’re searching through a certain real estate website (ahem). You see a beautiful rowhouse for sale and it’s exactly what you’re looking for. You ask the seller for more information but she doesn’t really know anything about its history.

Of course, that’s not a problem because you read McMansion Hell and so you already know the house’s age and what kind of people used to live there.

In Part I of this series, we looked at the development of rowhouses from the exterior and why they are so successful. This week, we’ll examine interiors and how you can identify the different types of rowhouses when observing them in their natural environment. Your friends will be amazed!

What kind of rowhouse is it?

Because of the immense adaptability of rowhouse design, several parallel modes of categorization and identification could be employed. The most common system is to identify the rowhouse based on the architectural style of its ornament. This has some advantages because style is relatively easy to identify and helps to approximate the age of the house.

Common 19th century architectural styles and decades of construction. [Drawing by the author based on an original by The Old House Journal]

However, architectural style alone is somewhat limiting as an identifier because rowhouses are defined by certain structural elements such as size and roof type. Facade material is also very important when categorizing rowhouses. This is particularly true for rowhouses covered with brown sandstone or “brownstone.” 

This type of facade is so common that the term “brownstone” has become yet another synonymous word for rowhouse- even those without brownstone on the facade. Finally, regional variations on the rowhouse have meant that individual cities display rowhouses with characteristics specific to that city, thus creating yet another potential system of taxonomy.

Taking all this together, I’ve arrived at a handy chart to combine these 4 systems of categorization. When describing and identifying a rowhouse, each column in the chart could be used independently or together with one or more of the other columns:

For the purposes of this article,  we will focus on the interiors of rowhouses by looking at what floor plans can tell us about the age of rowhouses and the people who lived in them.

Floor Plans

As has been discussed in an earlier edition of “Looking Around,” floor plans are often a better way of categorizing vernacular architecture than trying to identify the style of the ornament.

When it comes to rowhouses built before 1915, there are essentially two different basic types of floor plans- those with a front hall and those without a front hall. Within these two types, there exist dozens of variations but they all come back to the hall as a distinguishing characteristic.

Front hall at 4 Grove Street, New York, NY (Built circa 1829) [Source: Historic American Buildings Survey, Survey No. NY-449, Public Domain]

A seemingly simple and narrow space, the hall serves multiple roles. Architecturally, it provides a passage so that inhabitants do not need to cross through intermediary rooms while moving to different parts of the house. Due to the narrowness of rowhouses, horizontal space is at a premium and lateral movement is a luxury. The hall allows for lateral movement with maximum efficiency of space. It also allows for a straight staircase, thus allowing for more visually appealing stairs that are also physically safer to use than those that wrap around.

In the 19th century, the hall additionally served the very important social function of intermediary space between the outside world and the domestic interior. The hall was the first thing that visitors would see upon entering the house and so it was often impressively decorated with architectural features and furniture. The hall was the place where visitors could be kept while waiting to be admitted to the inner portions of the home. This provided privacy for the inhabitants and later reinforced conservative Victorian ideas about formality and familiarity.  

Therefore, the hall represents a division between sophisticated designs and more basic ones. Not surprisingly then, the presence of a hall (and its size) signifies the relative wealth of the rowhouse’s original inhabitants. You know what they say about people with big halls, right?

Exterior of 4-10 Grove Street, New York, NY, built c. 1829, as it appeared in 1936 [Source: Historic American Buildings Survey, Survey No. NY-449, Public Domain]

A good example of a rowhouse hall can be found at 4 Grove Street in Manhattan, built circa 1829. Typical of rowhouses of this period, the first floor is divided between a “front parlor” and a “back parlor” with the hall running along both. During the Victorian period, both parlors were used for entertaining guests. The front parlor later became what we call today the living room while the back parlor later assumed the role of dining room. Bedrooms on the second floor follow a similar layout.

Interior of 4 Grove Street. [Source: Historic American Buildings Survey, Survey No. NY-449, Public Domain]

In the floorplan above, note the placement of the hall in relation to the other rooms. It allows someone to move front to back and side to side within the house while maintaining a reasonable width for the main living spaces. You’ll notice that the kitchen and dining room were placed in the basement for maximum space efficiency. Fans of “Downton Abbey” know that among wealthier households, putting the kitchen in the basement was also a convenient way of hiding servants and their workspace out of sight. In many upper class homes, a second, smaller staircase known as a “servant’s stair” allowed for the discrete movement of servants between floors.

Naturally, rowhouses for the working class were smaller than their more affluent counterparts. Among these smaller rowhouses, the reduced size of the overall plan necessitated reducing the size of the hall or eliminating it altogether. Without domestic servants, working class homes also moved the kitchen out of the basement and into an extension on the rear. This new location on the back of the house was as much for convenience as it was for fire safety. Keeping flames segregated to the back of the house made fires easier to contain should they break out.  

Early 19th Century Working Class Rowhouses and Floor Plans [Source: Historic American Buildings Survey, No. MD-932, Public Domain]

The example on the left depicts a very common floor plan for a working class rowhouse. The front entrance opens directly into the front parlor (or living room) which then had to be crossed to enter into the back parlor, or dining room. A small winding staircase is tucked into a closet and the kitchen sits in an extension on the rear.

The rowhouse on the right demonstrates an intermediary design. The exterior has three stories, thus signifying a more affluent original owner, but is not as wide as upper class homes like 4 Grove Street. The middling character of the exterior also extends to the floor plan on the interior. By the addition of a wall through the front parlor, the front door opens into a “quasi-hall.” This sort of half hall does not extend far enough to accommodate a straight staircase, but does provide some additional privacy. As with the example on the left, a third room in the rear of the house accommodates the kitchen resulting in a floor plan that is 1 room wide by 3 rooms deep.

By the late 19th century, almost all rowhouses followed this “1 x 3” pattern in some form. Therefore, other than size, the distinguishing feature between wealthier homes and modest ones was the presence or absence of a hall.

This floor plan of a Baltimore rowhouse is very typical of most working class rowhouses built from the end of the Civil War up to about 1915. This example was located at the end of the row so it was better lit than its neighbors, and therefore more expensive. The center room on the first floor was commonly used as a dining room. Porches, like the one seen here, began to appear in the 1870s and became increasingly common by 1900. In lieu of a hall, they took the role of intermediary space between indoors and outdoors. [Source: Historic American Buildings Survey, No. MD-1005, Public Domain]

The big problem with the “1 x 3” design is that it creates a “center room” in between the living room and the kitchen. This room is relatively dark and poorly ventilated compared to the other rooms in the house. After about 1915, this design was improved by rowhouse builders in response to growing market competition from outer suburban detached houses. By widening the house and creating a “2 x 2” floor plan where the kitchen was brought parallel with the center room, all rooms received an equal distribution of light and fresh air. The new floorplan also allowed for equal lateral and longitudinal movement throughout the house. This style of rowhouse became known as the “daylight rowhouse” and was a popular middle class housing type up until about 1930.

Built from 1915 up until the Great Depression, the “Daylight Rowhouse” represents a major advancement in rowhouse design. The addition of skylights over the stairway added additional natural light. Drawing by the author.

House construction pretty much ceased during the Great Depression, and rowhouses had fallen out of style once building picked up again after World War II. Consequently, there aren’t very many examples of rowhouses constructed between 1930 and 1990. Today, new rowhouses or townhouses are similar to older models in their appearance. Contemporary rowhouses tend to be a little bigger and a little taller to accommodate a garage on the ground level.  The one major change to the rowhouse floor plan has been the introduction of the “open floor plan” where most interior walls on the first floor have been removed entirely. The living room bleeds into the dining room, which bleeds into the kitchen.

The popularity of the open floor plan has resulted in the removal of interior walls from many older rowhouses. If you find yourself in an old rowhouse with an open floor plan, then that means someone removed the original walls fairly recently. But if you are in a rowhouse with walls, then pay attention to how they are arranged because they can tell you a lot about the house’s history and who was there before you.

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

[Editor’s Note: That’s it for this installation of Looking Around! Next week: a New Hampshire McMansion and a primer on common architectural details. Special round of applause for Jackson for sharing his expertise on rowhouses, something I admittedly know much, much less about. Have a great week, everyone!]