Acoustics, broadly, is the science of sound. Some would argue that the term applies solely to the physical properties of sound, but there are many fields within the discipline that focus not on the sound itself, but how it can be perceived, shaped, and applied.
Sub-disciplines such as electroacoustics (the study of electrical applications of sound, such as recording, processing, and reproduction) and architectural acoustics (the focus of this article) inform not only our understanding of how sound works, but also play a key part in shaping the role sound plays in our daily lives. Both have design methodologies every part as rich and nuanced as their sister fields industrial design, interior design, and architecture.
An Inseparable Art
While there are many resources available describing how sound works in rooms, these sources rarely discuss the role acoustics play in the places we live and work.
Architectural acoustics is inseparable from architecture, in that every building has its own unique acoustical profile, hence why many architectural descriptors have a sonic connotation, such as “airy” or “intimate.” Regardless of whether or not a building is designed for sound, its acoustics are shaped by its external environment, intended use, and the architect or builder’s choice of materials, technology, geometry, interior design, and construction.
Most of us understand and expect how sound works in rooms without ever cracking a book on the subject. We know by empirical observation that rooms with many hard surfaces such as stone or wood are much more reverberant (”echoey”) than rooms filled with carpets and heavy drapes. Similarly, we know that a large room with high ceilings is more likely to be reverberant than a small room with low ceilings, and that an empty house is more likely to be reverberant than a house filled with furniture and people.
Public Domain.
This empirical knowledge was the basis of designing for sound from the Greek and Roman amphitheaters up until the late 19th-century. Performance spaces were a result of architectural trial-and-error – successful spaces were imitated or improved, and the unsuccessful spaces often lost to history. Many are surprised that some of the world’s most beloved concert halls and opera houses, such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or Milan’s Teatro alla Scala were constructed before the field of acoustics itself. However, outside of sacred or performance spaces, sound played a minor role in architectural design until the field of architectural acoustics was established by the Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine.
(Sabine was also cute as hell, let’s be real here.)
While trying to solve the acoustical problems of the Fogg Museum lecture hall at Harvard, Sabine discovered a relationship between a space’s volume, the surface areas of the room’s different materials, and how long it took for sounds (of a certain frequency) to fade away within the room (reverberation time). He devised a mathematical equation to explain this relationship. In doing this, Sabine not only quantified the degree to which certain materials absorb certain frequencies, he devised a scientific method that could be used to anticipate certain acoustical qualities of a room prior to its construction. (He later used this knowledge to design Boston Symphony Hall, which is a total banger.)
However, even with today’s technological advancements, architectural acoustics still relies, to some extent, on historical success, trial-and-error, and a pinch of design magic. It’s one of those rare fields that is equally an art and a science.
The Acoustics of Everyday Rooms
It’s not just noise problems that make up our everyday acoustical environments, it’s our architecture, too. During the time when industrialization first made homebuilding affordable for more and more people, common houses had a markedly different sonic profile than they do today, by means of architectural, furnishing and material choices.Socioeconomic factors also played an ancillary role in everyday architectural acoustics, as changes in family makeup and economy drastically shaped the sizes and shapes of everyday housing.
Four Houses
The soundscape of the everyday single family house has changed radically since the time mass housing became common after the growth of the railroad. As plans evolved, so, too, did their sonic qualities. These houses, from 1893, 1915, 1936, and 1963, exemplify how changes in technology, economy, and architecture bring with them changes in the architectural acoustics of our lives.
1893
This Queen Anne plan from 1893 is typical of the period. At this time, neither the indoor bathroom nor electricity were affordable or widespread.Furnaces were becoming more common, but were considered to be upgrades rather than established features in middle income homes such as this one, which was heated by fireplaces and wood-burning stoves.
As we are well aware, privacy and prudence were very important to 19th century society. This is reflected in the home’s closed floor plan, which takes great lengths to separate “public” (e.g. formal parlors & dining rooms) and private (e.g. kitchen, storage, bedrooms) spaces:
The home’s ceilings were 9 feet 6 inches on the first floor, shrinking down to 8 feet on the second floor. The floors were most likely wood, and the walls, plaster. The rooms are modestly sized - the largest room being the parlor, which is 14x14 feet wide.
Acoustically, the home was likely very quiet. These types of homes were commonly built outside the city limits in early suburbs connected either by rail or by streetcar, which made them less susceptible to environmental noise than their urban counterparts, despite the large number of windows. Additionally, because the home lacked electricity, plumbing, or a furnace, internal noise levels were likely low as well.
Despite the home’s tall ceilings and reflective surfaces, the rooms, with the exception of the hallways, probably weren’t very reverberant due to 19th century interiors being heavily upholstered and densely furnished, as explained in great detail by this 1887 promotional handbook on furnishing. Interestingly, the guide insists on “noiseless” carpets for the hall and stairs, which suggests that some design decisions in the 19th century home were acoustically-minded.
If you are able, take a moment - 30 seconds or so - and simply listen.
What do you hear?
If you, like me, are sitting in a quiet part of the house, you probably hear the wind rustling outside, the hum of electronic appliances, an airplane, or perhaps the faint rumble of distant cars.
If you are reading this in a coffeeshop or in an office, you probably hear footsteps; several simultaneous conversations; espresso machines or copiers; laughter; traffic.
Regardless of where you are or what you are doing, when you listen to your environment, what becomes immediately apparent is the total ubiquity of noise.
There are few moments of sustained quiet in our lives. After all, to reach a place without much noise requires traveling a great deal of distance from any urban or suburban setting, often where there are little to no amenities (which are the source of a great deal of noise themselves.) And so, over the centuries, we simply learned to live with noise.
A Brief History of Noise (not the genre of music, sorry)
Before modern industrialization, there was relatively little noise pollution, just as there was relatively little light pollution. Every evolution in human infrastructure has brought about more and more noise. I’m sure there were a nostalgic few in the distant past who longed for the days before cobblestone streets and the endless fractious clacking of horse-drawn carriages.
We don’t have much documentation on pre-technology noise, but it is posited by some that regular, consistent noise originated with two developments: the keeping of time and urbanization. The Medieval church bell (and later the public mechanical clock) is posited by sound scholar R Murray Schafer in one of the first texts to be written on the subject, The Soundscape, as being one of the first consistent, documented sources of urban noise.
According to Schafer, as cities and towns consolidated around industries present in early capitalist (or feudalist) societies, several different types of noise were introduced, such as the noises of infrastructure like water-powered mills, the labor of tradesmen (think a blacksmith’s anvil), the opening and closing of businesses, the public advertisement of wares via town criers - and each of these soundscapes - the word given to sonic profiles of specific places and times - were unique depending on their geography and the customs of the people who lived there.
An old water mill, the heavy industry of yore. Public Domain.
However, it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries that the noise level in urban areas began to amplify with the invention of heavy machinery such as the steam engine, the hydraulic press, and of course, the railroad. Even previously quiet activities began to make noise - such as sewing with the invention of the sewing machine or writing with the typewriter. With the development of modern capitalism, this noise only proliferated more and more, as the railways expanded and brought noise to even the most rural areas, continued by the invention of the internal combustion engine and the inescapable sound of rubber tires on tarmac. The more a city produced, the more powerful it was, and the noisier it became.
The next big shift in noise was electricity, which ended the cycle of work according to the rising and setting of the sun, and therefore expanded noise deep into the night. The hum of electronics at 50 or 60 Hz, a hum you’re probably hearing somewhere right now, became ubiquitous.
Importantly, for the first time, through electronic sound reproduction, sonic content was divorced from its event. Before sound reproduction, a sonic event was finite - restricted to a specific source, in a specific place and a specific time. With the telegraph, (and later, radio) a sound source was no longer relegated to a specific place - it could travel long distances and be received by distant ears - though it was still often restricted by time. It wasn’t until the invention of recording that sound became completely separated from its event for the first time in human history - a severing of both time and the human senses.
For all of the good broadcast and recording has done for us, namely giving us the ability to reach larger numbers of people and to preserve sound instead of only images, it has a rather sinister side effect, which is turning the previously respected sound-making practices of music and speech into at best, background noise, and at worse, a nuisance. After all, when was the last time you went shopping or out to dinner in a place without background music?
In fact, in 1969, the General Assembly of the International Music Council of UNESCO passed a resolution denouncing “the intolerable infringement of individual freedom and the right of everyone to silence, because of the abusive use, in private and public places, of recorded or broadcast music.” (Schafer, 97)
But - you might say - “I like when they play jazz at the coffeeshop. It helps me work. I don’t think it’s noise at all!”
This brings some interesting questions into play: what is noise anyway, how do people relate to noise, and is it inherently bad?
What is Noise?
What is noise? The definition of noise has been shaped by both culture and technology, but Schafer posits a variety of qualities that have been used to define noise.
The first, earliest, and perhaps most practical definition of noise is simply unwanted sound. This definition is useful because it is subjective - some sound can be perfectly desirable by some and not for others.
The second definition of noise is unmusical sound. “Unmusical” is used here not as a subjective pejorative, but describing the physical qualities of sound composed of non-periodic vibrations (such as wind or leaves) as opposed to the periodic vibrations produced by most musical instruments. To clarify, when people refer to “white noise” they are using this definition of noise.
The third definition consists of noise as any loud sound. This is the second most used definition of noise today and the one used by legal statues on noise.
The fourth definition of noise is noise as a disturbance in any signaling system. This is the type of noise referred to in electrical, broadcast, and recording engineering (Schafer 184). I would expand this definition to include mechanical systems that are either in disrepair or inefficient, such as a poorly executed air conditioning/ventilation system or a sputtering muffler.
Noise and the Law
Of course there is a so-called “objective” definition of noise, that is the legal definition of a specific sound exceeding a specific decibel limit. But, as Schafer points out, it is rather silly that a car producing 86 decibels of sound is noise but a car producing 85 decibels is not.
Some of these noise laws can be beneficial, specifically those limiting industrial or environmental noise pollution from highways and factories, or those that exist to protect the hearing of workers, such as the 1981 hearing protection and noise exposure standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
However, many garden variety noise ordinances are often more societally harmful than they are sonically helpful, for they require a greater police presence, discourage reasonable neighbor-to-neighbor conflict resolution, are often racialized, and disproportionately punish both young and poor people who cannot afford to pay expensive fines.
Above all, these laws are really unenforceable. Properly calibrated scientific environmental noise measuring equipment is very expensive, and there is a significant difference in data between professional and amateur equipment. And really, the ordinances aren’t about policing noise - they’re about policing behavior.
Noise and Society
While Schafer’s book (which was written in 1977 and is steeped in all kinds of “return to nature” sentiments that have not aged well) was without a doubt groundbreaking in that it was one of the first examinations of the role sound has played both historically and environmentally, there is an underlying assumption that I fundamentally disagree with: the supremacy of silence over sound.
An RF anechoic chamber. Photo by adamantios (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Schafer posits that the mechanical noise of the modern era is inherently unnatural, but ignores the fact that true silence is also unnatural. The only truly silent place is an artificial one: an anechoic chamber. As a student of acoustics, I’ve had the displeasure of being in an anechoic chamber and experiencing the suffocating terror that is total silence, a silence so strong you can hear every sound made by your internal organs, a silence so strong people can only stand being in an anechoic chamber for mere minutes.
There is a reason silence is described as “eerie” or “foreboding”: it’s because the act of making sound is inescapable, it’s a function of physics - there’s only a matter of time before the silence is lapsed. And yet there is a recurring societal notion that silence is somehow virtuous - an idea that manifests itself in several ways, such as the ideas that a well-behaved child is quiet, or that “proper” women are seen and not heard, or - on a more lighthearted note - the stereotype that musicians have inherently lax morals and will run off with your teenage daughter.
The idea that life was better when it was quieter is also rather silly, because with noise also came great improvements in our quality of life. However, disputing the idea that silence is superior to sound does not mean that noise should be defended, because many types of mechanically-based environmental noise from industry and infrastructure is deeply harmful to our health and well-being.
One term Schafer uses is much more powerful and insightful in describing the role noise plays in our world: sound imperialism. It is true that environmental, mechanical noise, like an invading empire, has conquered and occupied our lives against our will. We did not ask for noise, and we did not have a say in the matter. (Personally, if it were up to me, my pharmacy would stop playing breakup songs from 2004.) Also, we are biologically defenseless against noise - our ears and brains developed for a very different sounding world, one with much less noise.
The effect this ceaseless barrage of noise has on our ears and brains is an environmental health hazard - both for us, and for the natural world, where it disrupts plant and animal life. Talk to any acoustician (hi!) or audiologist, and the health results of escalating environmental noise is grim, whether it’s ear fatigue, tinnitus, or permanent hearing loss at younger and younger ages. We often cite earbud use as being particularly traumatic to our hearing, but ignore the primary reason most people use earbuds: because they are more effective than conventional headphones at blocking out external noise.
Environmental noise is not individualized - it can’t be resolved by calling your neighbor and asking them to stop playing the drums at 12:30 AM, or by politely letting your roommates know that you will be having friends over and that it might get loud. Environmental noise, like all forms of pollution, takes place on a large scale - it is systemic, and it is mired in power.
Industrial giants, energy lobbyists, and HVAC people who always seem to end up working on concert halls all have a vested interest in keeping things noisy, because it is time consuming and expensive to make things that are quiet (and energy efficient). It’s not shocking that things that are bad for the regular environment are also bad for the sonic environment - car dependency, nonrenewable resource extraction, factories, the list goes on. And, like other types of pollution, the people who are most exposed to noise pollution are working people (occupational noise), poor people and people of color.
If you think that you’re not effected by noise pollution because you don’t go to, like, 50 metal shows a day or whatever: you know that immediate feeling of lethargic relief you get when you enter a quiet building after a busy day of work, a walk in the city, or a long car ride? That’s auditory fatigue.
You know that feeling of being in a busy place and feeling like you can’t concentrate anymore even though you’ve spent the day doing relatively little? Your brain is tired because your ears have no choice but to receive sound waves all the time, regardless of how actively you are listening. Studies have emerged showing that environmental noise is also harmful to those who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing. It’s a problem for everyone.
Quiet the Source
Ultimately, when UNESCO claims people have a “right to silence,” what they really mean is that people have the right to live in a world without being subjected to the violence of auditory trauma. We shouldn’t have to carry earplugs everywhere we go, or keep building noise barriers on the side of roads.
In the field of noise control, the first line of defense and often the most effective strategy for solving a noise problem is to simply quiet the source. That means both making mechanical objects that are quieter and more efficient, more sound regulations for manufacturers and realizing and changing our toxic cultural norms about sound like “music is supposed to be painfully loud”, or “actually bars and restaurants are supposed to be painfully loud”, or “no matter what retail store you go in, it’s good and productive somehow to hear the same fifteen songs from 2000-2008 [also usually too loud]”.
These changes are societal, large scale, and will stretch years into the future. As for more immediate solutions, theres… acoustics! Which is what our next (less depressing) installment (and my Master’s degree lol) will be about.
If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content on Patreon!
Not into recurring donations or bonus content? Consider the tip jar! Or, Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store go to charity!
Author’s Note: This article consisted of two weeks of intense research, involving scouring over fire insurance maps, tables of wages, census records, Sears catalogs, and atlases. Before I begin, I owe some mad thanks to those who helped provide their resources and advice: preservationist Jackson Gilman-Forlini, furniture history guru Susannah Wagner, the nice folks from the Maryland Historical Society, and the research library staff at the Johns Hopkins University.
Anyone who has made copious trips to U-Haul, rendered their fingertips numb after stringing along line after line of packing tape, or spent hours intimately acquainting ones lower back with an ice pack, knows – and loathes – moving.
Moving is stressful. It is a form of migration, itself an immense change. Despite the momentous effect moving has on us, there is little to be found regarding the history of, well, moving. Plenty has been said about techniques of migration, by boat, by horse and buggy, by rail, and by car.
In novels and movies, from Harry Potter to Doctor Zhivago, there are scenes of train stations, carts with ornamented trunks, and porters donning funny cylindrical hats to haul them. In photographs of Ellis Island complete with their visual narratives of the American Dream, we see thousands of hopeful newcomers cheering gleefully, suitcases in hand.
As time goes by, the railway porters are replaced with truck drivers; the journey implied by the ocean liner morphs into bucolic images of a smiling suburban family on the island-lawn of their poorly-shuttered idyll.
Family Moving to their New Home. Washington State, 1935. via Library of Congress.
Why am I writing about moving? Over the last two weeks or so, I, myself, moved. I moved from a dingy (yet immensely charming) self-constructed room in what used to be a Cork and Seal Factory, to a little 812 square-foot Baltimore rowhouse.
Each of the times I’ve moved from apartment to apartment (and finally, on this move, to an actual, full-sized house), there have been great difficulties loading and unloading all of my crap – difficulties innate to the houses themselves. These were usually small hardships, involving the clever rotation of a sofa or armchair in order to wrestle it out the door.
This time, however, I came to a horrifying revelation: None of my existing furniture would be able to A.) fit within the cramped dimensions of the narrow staircase or B.) make it around the corner in the shallow hallway to my room.
I solved my problem the same way as any reasonable millennial:
Yet, as I loaded up my cart with brown box after brown box, I couldn’t help but wonder: What did people do before Ikea? Why were the stairs so narrow, and more so, what went up them before my trendy flat-packed furniture?
The Little Rowhouse
According to two days of scouring archival newspapers and other primary sources, I could gleam a few interesting things about the little brown rowhouse into which I’m currently schlepping my stuff.
The Little Brown Rowhouse (center). Via Google Maps.
The rowhouse was built sometime between 1900 and 1902. A Baltimore Sun record from 1898 shows the auction of parcels of land where the house would soon be built:
EDIT: My colleague, Jackson, has found out that the house was built by a pair of builders named John S. Kidd & William A. Davidson.
However, the first mention of any of the houses on the row (that is to say, even-numbered houses, as the houses on the opposite side of the street are of a different design), comes later, in 1902, in a divorce notice:
In 1905, the house next door to mine was for lease:
Unfortunately, no searches for C.W. Webb pulled up anything of note.
I learned some other interesting things during my newspaper dig, (most notably that the folks who once lived a block south from me got busted during Prohibition) - but ultimately, came to a dead end on my original topic: what kind of person moved into my rowhouse first, and how they did it.
The Process
In order to glean how working people moved back in the early 1900s, I decided to focus on a few key areas of research:
What kind of wages the family would make, what they would spend it on and what kind of local industry they might have participated in.
What kind of stuff was being moved; (AKA what kind of furniture these folks bought and how much it cost)
What the costs were of moving services during this time, and whether they were affordable for the family in question.
Potential Jobs, Wages, and Expenditures
The best way to look for what kind of industry existed in a certain area at a certain time is through a series of maps by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Co. These maps were used for evaluating fire risk (and therefore how high the premiums should be for fire insurance.)
In the index of a Sanborn Map, there are two parts. First is the list of streets, with a number, corresponding to a plate number. The second is a list of industries along with larger businesses, schools, orphanages, and churches, along with their plate numbers. To find out what kind of industry was near the street you’re looking for, simply look for industries relatively close to the plate number of your street.
It’s likely that the folks who lived in my house worked in one of two places: as a railworker (at the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad, The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; The United Railroad & Electric Company) or in the stone quarry (Sisson Marble Works, not shown in screenshot). Working class women often worked as well, most likely in the nearby textile mills lining the Jones Falls River.
There are a few smaller industries these folks could have worked in as well, such as the Columbia Motor & Manufacturing Co., The American Can Factory, J. Stack & Sons Lumber, or the Schier & Bros. Dairy. However, it’s most likely that the person who first lived in my house was a stone or rail worker, as the house used to be mere blocks from both the quarry and a massive rail yard:
Image from a 1905 Map. House is in top-right corner, in red.
Okay, so we know where the head of the household likely worked. How much did they make doing it?
Were the head of household a worker in the nearby marble quarry,he (women did not work in the quarry in 1900) would have made around $813 a year.
Were they a railworker of some sort (the average workweek of railway workers in nearby Pennsylvania was around 62 hours/week in 1901) they would have made somewhere between $420/year as a day laborer and $1350/year as a senior engineer.Source.
What would these folks spend these wages on? Here are some more statistics (average expenditures) from Pennsylvania (a neighboring state with similar industries.)
Now that we know what these folks might have made (on average), let’s see what kind of goods they possibly purchased.
Furniture
It’s difficult to know what kind of furniture most working class folks had in their houses. According to my sister (Hi Suz!), who studies furniture history at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, it’s possible that a family working in 1900 bought some pieces of mass-produced furniture, like that sold by Sears Roebuck & Co.
Page from a Sears catalog c. 1900.
The truth is more difficult, because much of the mass-produced, inexpensive furniture of the time was made out of cheap materials such as basswood and has not survived. It’s also possible that the family had some pieces passed down from generation to generation, which wouldn’t be accounted for in primary sources from the time. What is true, is that there is a certain amount of furniture most folks need for their homes.
Fortunately for us, there are photographs in the Library of Congress of tenement and other working class interiors, enabling us to get a better picture of what folks had in their homes:
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!]
