Row House

The row house is an attached single-family dwelling, extending the full width of its lot, and abutting other similar houses at common sidewalls. Typically, the individual units share a uniform front building line so that the overall impression is of a single, linear composition—even if the units are built separately or distinguished in other ways. The row house is one of the most common residential types found in older U.S. cities, especially in the East and Northeast. Though resident ownership has been common, many occupants have rented as well. Drawing upon British tradition, North Americans built these houses in great numbers, as early as the late 1600s. Thousands upon thousands were constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries, most notably in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, Washington, D.C., and somewhat later in San Francisco.

In the United States, row houses run the gamut from humble two-room, two-story structures without a yard (often called “bandbox” houses) to elaborate, attached mansions of several floors with rear gardens and stables (sometimes called “town houses”). Most fall somewhere between these two extremes. Row houses can range from 10 to 30 feet in width, depending upon original land costs, resulting subdivision patterns, and builders' visions for a target market. Width not only determines floor plans but, of course, relative spaciousness and luxury. Generally, the wider a house is, the higher its “class.”

Row dwellings date back centuries and span continents. The linear building along a public street, composed of (or divided into) repetitive units side by side, is one of the most basic urban architectural types. Both efficient and flexible, this form existed long before domestic space became specialized as sets of functionally differentiated rooms. The earliest row dwellings were simple, all-purpose spaces used for any combination of residence, commerce, storage, and manufacture. These could be found in [Page 690]Europe and Asia as far back as the 13th century or earlier.

The success and popularity of the row house in the United States has long been a function of overlapping social and economic factors: rising population density, property values, and bias toward private dwellings. Before widely available transit facilitated large-scale metropolitan decentralization, more and more people were forced to occupy the same amount of land as cities grew in population. Living and working tightly packed together was the urban norm. The familiar pattern of city blocks divided into narrow lots, affording each one crucial access to the public way, persisted. Often, older parcels were further subdivided into even smaller lots to allow for more houses. Detached dwellings became less and less feasible, and multi-family housing was generally resisted by all but the poor until the late 1800s.

The case of Philadelphia is illustrative. First laid out in the 1680s with spacious lots intended for impressive single-family dwellings set in gardens, its core ended up a close-knit city of row houses. This had more to do with immigration, trade, and custom than the architectural tastes of the citizenry. William Penn's ideal city plan had failed to take into account people's preference for proximity and the economic need of businesses to agglomerate. Philadelphians, even wealthy ones, were more interested in convenience and efficiency than domestic opulence for its own sake. Penn's original large blocks of large lots were subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels, as people poured into town with little interest in maintaining inconvenient distances in the name of domestic tranquility. The tradition of row housing was familiar to all classes, many of whom hailed from Britain. Few worried about having abundant yards around their houses when nearness to the city center was all-important for economic and social contacts. The row house type proved flexible enough to accommodate a full range of residential qualities, tastes, and scales for a stratified society.

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