Row homes were created to suit various tastes and budgets, ranging from single-room bandbox layouts to large townhouses. The row home was simple to build on small lots and inexpensive to acquire, and its popularity led in Philadelphia becoming known as the "City of Homes" by the end of the nineteenth century.
It is estimated that there are still between 20,000 and 25,000 row houses in Philadelphia today. They're found in every part of the city, but they're especially common in Center City, University City, and West Philly.
The row house is defined by its uniformity. There's a front door, usually with transom window above it; typically there's also a side or back entrance. The walls are generally about four feet high, made of brick or stone, with a flat roof. The interior usually has one room and a kitchen in a separate area. There might be a basement, but it would be used only for storage at this time. A row house could have more than one floor if desired, but they'd be very low to fit under street lamps and avoid flooding. The first floor is the most important because it contains the main entry door and any other rooms that you may need to access during the day. The second floor is where many people put their bedrooms because it's safe and easy to climb up or down the stairs. The third floor is where we would store things like clothes or books that don't need to be accessed regularly.
Simply put, a rowhouse in Philadelphia is a one- to four-story house with a small street frontage that is joined to nearby houses on both sides. It arose early in the history of the city. Before the advent of fireproof construction codes, every house in the city was built with wood and straw walls. A fire would spread rapidly from house to house, but there were few ways to fight it; the only way to save your home was to flee before the flames reached you.
In order to prevent this, builders erected signs banning certain types of buildings from being constructed within a specified distance of each other. For example, a sign might state that no row houses over three stories high could be built within a half mile radius of one another. This protection gave rise to the term "row house" - referring to the rows of these same sizes and shapes connected to each other.
These days, most people think of row houses as living quarters for teachers or priests. But this use became popular only in the 19th century. The first row houses in America was built in 1693 in Boston's North End. They were used by fishermen and traders.
When city organizers built a basic brick row home advertised as a "model Philadelphia house" at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, they welcomed this classification. A structure of this type would cost around $2,500.
Built during the 18th and 19th centuries, Baltimore's brick row homes are famed for both their well-kept white marble stairs and the indignities of 20th-century Formstone cladding. There are ones in Washington, D.C., Charleston, and Savannah. Row homes (both wood-framed and masonry) became much more common during the Victorian era.
The cornice, belt courses, windows, and front door all give clues about the style and, by extension, the year of construction. Row homes erected in the twentieth century, as early as 1910, have a Colonial Revival feel to them, often replicating existing brick Federals. Later examples, built after 1960, tend to be more generic.
During the first part of the twentieth century, row housing was becoming increasingly popular across the United States. It was affordable for most people who could afford only one or two rooms upstairs in a house. A row home had a defined, measured lot line, which made it easy to sell when you moved to another city or state. In fact, that's how many early row homes were actually duplicated in different locations because people liked them so much!
The typical row home has three floors: the ground floor, which usually consists of a living room and a kitchen; the first floor, which includes a bedroom and a bathroom; and the attic, which is used for storage. There are sometimes also small holes between the roof lines on the sides of the house where you could see into other apartments if they had any. These are called hoppers and were common in New York City before modern fire codes prohibited their use.
Row homes are unique in that each apartment has a fixed location within the house based on the number of feet from the street.
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