Have you lived in a rowhouse in your city?
 

It seems a majority of us on this forum love the urban aesthetic of rowhouse neighborhoods. Having a significant chunk of its built environment populated by rowhouses gives a city a certain credibility as a "real city"... making it "more urban" and making its neighborhoods "cooler".

Though I wonder how many of us on here have actually lived in a rowhouse (???)... and I'd like to hear experiences of rowhouse lyfe. I'm not talking about living in some brownstone or townhouse or duplex or flat or some other semi-detached home. I'm talking about a rowhouse, like you would find in South Philly, for example.

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9278...7i16384!8i8192

I've lived in 3 of them (first in Philly, then Pittsburgh, and finally DC) and I think living in a rowhouse mostly sucks. To me, they're cramped, dark, loud, and hot. Not sure why I chose to live in one the 2nd and 3rd times. :haha:

Yep, but it still had a front lawn space though.

due in large part to the great fire of 1871, chicago isn't a row house city, so the answer is no.

It's not from a lack of wanting to experience life in a row house, we just don't have many of them at all, but we do have ~8 billion flat buildings.

I have lived in 6 different flat buildings in neighborhoods all across the city over the past 2 decades, including our current home.

It's highly unlikely that the opportunity to live in a row house will ever present itself to me for the rest of my life.

Why are brownstones excluded?

I lived in an apartment that was located in a row house in Brooklyn, about 10 years ago. It wasn't a brownstone, but the house was subdivided into 3 apartments. The house was terribly maintained, even though the owner occupied one of the apartments. I ended up moving out of the place early because it was such a disaster. I wouldn't mind living in a row house again, though.

I lived on the below block for a year - while I lived in Manhattan most of my life, this was the only rowhouse I ever lived in:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7348...7i16384!8i8192

You're excluding something like 95% of the US with this question?

For the US, yes, I imagine that I am. But I also wonder if that excluded percentage significantly decreases when only considering this forum’s users...

No, but I've been in some.

There are no rowhouses in my state I dont think. not in any significant number.

I lived in a very rowlike Townhome for 4 years in Scottsdale though.

Technically no, but close (not my actual block but the same neighborhood):

http://Https://goo.gl/maps/kFb4vTyV3PeVMwp4A

Despite its old bones, St. Louis didn’t do many true rowhome neighborhoods like what’s depicted in your link.

according to the 2017 ACS, only 5.8% of all housing units nationwide are 1-unit, attached.

and of those, i have to imagine the lion's share of them are of the more contemporary townhouse style of attached single family housing.

i wouldn't be surprised if classic old-school row houses like those found in south philly only make up 1 - 2% of all housing units nationwide.

Yes, I lived in a row house on Capitol Hill in DC for a few years in the mid 1980s. It was just a few blocks from Eastern Market, and the area was rapidly gentrifying but still a bit run down and dicey. It was a corner house that had a small front yard behind a low fence and a deck overlooking the back and the side street (10th St SE). Across the alley behind my place was a corner store with a large flat above that was rented out by the room. During my time there, the rooming house became a kind of crack house. This was during the period when DC turned into a real wild-west show, but just before I moved out, the building behind me was sold and converted into an architect's office! The house next door to me on D St. SE was occupied for a while by a Roma family who had a used car business elsewhere in DC. They were evicted after a year or so for non payment of rent. It also turned out that they had been stealing electricity from the house on the other side of their house. It amounted to several thousand dollars in free electricity over an almost two year period before the theft was discovered. I guess I dodged a bullet. My electrical service was located on the 10th Street side of the property. Overall, I liked living in a row house, and I liked living on Capitol Hill during this period of transition. I was still young enough that the situations I described above were more a source of amusement and amazement than a source of aggravation. I loved being three blocks from the Metro and also loved being able to hop on my bike and ride on the Capitol grounds (before all the security) and down on the Mall. I guess nowadays that location at 10th and D Streets SE is an urban paradise. It wasn't so bad back then either, just as long as you didn't get shot or mugged. I often stood my ground with the crackheads and dealers and probably was in more danger than I realized at the time.

Never lived in one. Those types of homes were expensive in Brooklyn and Queens even back in the day ( 90s-00s). I've lived in apartments, duplexes, and townhouses.

Rowhomes on this forum are highly overrated and most detached homes without front facing garages in a tight urban setting provide the same benefits, lifestyle and look great.

Yes, I have, for a seven-year period here in Pittsburgh (in Lawrenceville). Arguably for a year when I lived in Bloomfield as well, though that was a semi-attached frame home, so arguably not a true rowhouse.

I honestly liked it a great deal. Heating costs were very minor once we insulated the attic, given party walls on either side and the non-party walls being pretty insubstantial in terms of surface area. It was a pain installing/uninstalling the window unit AC each year, but I didn't want to ruin the house with ductwork, so it was good enough.

I didn't really hear my neighbors that much - a foot of solid brick as a party wall muffles a lot of noise. Honestly I hear my neighbors more frequently in my current detached home because people around here spend more time on their porch and/or backyard. Didn't mind the relative lack of light in the "middle rooms" on the first/second floor. One window is enough for a room, IMHO.

The absolute worst part about it wasn't so much that it was a rowhouse, but that the backyard was covered by an easement for "ingress, egress, and drying of clothes." It was also at one point covered in concrete, and had subsided. We discovered over the course of years that we couldn't fence off any part of it for a private yard. We could have ripped out the subsided concrete on our property and fixed it, but we'd still have to look at the neighbors cracked, weed-infested yards, since we couldn't obstruct. Besides that my only major concern was things like when we needed a common chimney repointed and my neighbor was too broke so we had to pay for the whole thing ourselves.

When we moved out in 2014, my preference was strongly to live in another rowhouse - just a larger one with a private yard. But all of the Pittsburgh neighborhoods with nice larger rowhouses had already appreciated in price to the point my wife was unwilling to take the plunge, so we ended up in a detached home.

I agree, but I don't think rowhomes are overrated, they provide, by far, the best urban experience in my opinion.

For example, below is the rowhouse I lived in in NYC vs. my current block in Chicago, they are both great, but the NYC block is by far more visually appealing to me, and the Chicago block is beautiful!

Row Home Block:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7348...7i16384!8i8192

Detached Home Block:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/37...!4d-87.6613642

^ I agree that rowhomes provide a higher look of traditional urbanism but IDK I think I'd rather live on that Chicago street. There's much more foliage and room to plant things (urbanists like to have plants too), more natural light and I'd imagine it has less issues with flooding with there being more ground for water to travel into.

Also not all rowhomes are of such high quality like what your NYC streetview shows. Philly's teeny tiny box rowhomes with basically no space and no room for trees are terrible and I would not want to live in one.

My issue is with row-houses or any attached buildings is fire. At least with the Chicago housing, they're detached so if one house goes up, the neighbors are less at risk. In New York, if your neighbor ten doors down passes out drinking a fifth of scotch while grilling steaks he could burn the entire block down. Some cow a few years ago got people in Chicago skittish over fires....for good reason.

Does this count?

https://goo.gl/maps/oKVqJtBQzmXRAeKv8

Or this?

https://goo.gl/maps/KKhFRU5fWCaXybi16

I like both but I'd prefer the Chicago block because you can get to the backyard from the street without having to go through the house. It would be much easier for landscaping, other maintenance, and hosting parties in the yard.

A big part of Montreal comprises row houses. If you lived in the inner city over a lifetime, you couldn't avoid living in a row house at one point.

I've lived in a row house and loved it! Risk of fire is a real issue if there are no fire walls, but no higher than living in a multi-family complex.

Come to think of it, I lived in a 3-story multi-family building where significant portions of the complex burnt to the group. Many families were homeless and the American Red Cross was there to offer assistance. I was lucky that my unit was undamaged.

The row house I lived in had a fire wall. Best place I've ever lived! To this day, a town home remains my dream home.

I'm not a green thumb so I gladly eschew the green space in favor of a small backyard patio for a BBQ. Large amount of green grass is a big negative for me when I choose a property (my unique personal preference).

i would imagine that most purists would say "no" due to the street-fronting garages on the ground level.

In the seventies, in Montreal, the fire department finally got the city to pass a ruling in favor of demolishing sheds that extended to the back of rowhouses sometimes all the way to the alley. They would pay homeowners 3000$ on average to have them taken apart. I can only imagine how difficult it was for firefighters to navigate alleyways in the.middle of a block in January...

Nothing like the Philly typology, but I have lived in fully attached houses that have been further split up into several apartments:

Like this: https://goo.gl/maps/oodhz821i417EQbS8

It was generally fine and not that much different than the average semi-detached in central Toronto. It is nice to have an exterior passageway to the backyard, though the one in our current place isn't wide enough to let much light in. I probably wouldn't want to live in the Philly example though - I like having a bit of a yard, though back is more important.

If there's a proper masonry firebreak in between houses it's not as bad, though smoke / water damage can still cause a total loss. Not on the level of losing the block, though. Generally rows in Toronto are either semi-detached that are just... attached on the other side, or a set of 3 in an attached row. For all intents and purposes most are independent structures that are just built up to each other though.

Here's an example of a small row of 3 that caught fire in Toronto a few years ago which resulted in the outright destruction of one, with the subsequent demolition of the others.

Before: https://goo.gl/maps/QV88ajm6uuWSJp9W6

After: https://goo.gl/maps/V6SkBsazJEPGx6fw6

Replacement: https://goo.gl/maps/TKEvxPawbVZ4aaU58

You can see that the attached house on the right of the 3 set row was more or less fine as it was structurally separate. There was significant smoke damage to the detached house on the left, too. The fire was somewhat exacerbated because these were woodframe as opposed to brick masonry houses.

Yep! I grew up in a rowhouse in West Philly, spent a lot of time at my grandma's former rowhome in Chester, PA, and I currently live on the third floor of a rowhome in Philly's Francisville neighborhood. My life has been dominated by rowhomes, and I love them immensely!

I feel like carriage home would be most accurate except they front the street instead of an alley.

I live in one right now. Portland doesnt have blocks and blocks of proper townhomes but we have lots of urban infill townhouses. Mine is smack in the middle of a commercial district and even zoned mixed use commercial. Since it's new construction, its subject to pretty stringent fire codes. Walls between units are separated by an air gap and two firewalls. It's quiet too except for the drunky bar goers and 3am garbage trucks.

I own a detached row house in Cincinnati built in 1914. The house sits on a 25x90 block between two narrow appartment buildings. The house itself is 20x35 feet, with 60" between it and the buildings to either side. It has several full-size windows on the sides, facing the pair of alleys, which let some light in and noise from the commotion that happens in the neighboring apartment buildings.

I am friends with two people who own true row homes nearby in the same strip. One owns 323 and the other 327, so there is one house between them. The houses are 15 feet wide, meaning the interiors are about 13.5 feet wide. There are no side windows, obviously, but it actually makes the rooms more usable since you have more options with furniture arrangements. It also keeps alley noise out since there aren't any alleys.

The big disadvantage of a true row house is that you need to bring tools through the house to get to the back yard or courtyard. You often have to sit your garbage cans in front of your house, too, since there is no good place to store them during the week.

Here is a video of my house from 2013, on the day it was inspected, about a month before I moved in. The house had been vacant for at least a year prior during the recession. There were several other vacant houses on the block at the time, so parking wasn't a problem. Everything filled up by 2015 and now prices are accellerating and you can't park anywhere close most of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muQ3CCeYWX8

i think id just call your house a house. yer close to your neighbors but they need to be connected to meet OPs requirements. its a cool house though! cinncinatti and pititsburgh have the most unique urban neighborhoods in the midwest i think...

what separates a rowhouse from a townhouse, the age? i think i live in something pretty close to a rowhouse right now (no front facing garage, a small strip of grass between the front of the house and the sidewalk) but it is a new build, in a city not known for having historic rowhomes.

townhouse and rowhouse mean the same thing in my book. multiple units, side by side with no practical gap.

It's interesting to hear you call the narrow exterior passageways on either side of your house "alleys". Because of the great fire, Chicago has hundreds of thousands of such narrow exterior passageways between buildings and they are always referred to as "gangways" here. Our building, like most flat buildings in the city, has a 3' wide gangway on one side, the other side directly abuts our neighboring flat building. In Chicago vocabulary, an "alley" is exclusively a secondary service street that bisects the middle of a city block.

No, but I lived in a twin house for a time.

https://goo.gl/maps/1XD8zztwqEzaMGi58

Grew up on Stockholms west side. These row houses are kind of famous in Sweden since one of our most famous prime ministers lived in one. They are built in the 1930’s in the typical Swedish “funkis”-style.

https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ålstensgatan

So I "grew up" in suburban Arizona *GHASP SCREAMS HORROR*

BUT My family is from this (link below) area of Chicago and they were there from sometime in the 1940's to -Present, before that most of my Grandparents and Great grand Parents were from what I guess is "Roscoe Village" area (though I never heard that name until I was an adult) or Poland

But anyway lots of childhood time spent in this kind of situation:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9523...7i16384!8i8192

As another person said, not a row-house but they are close together enough to kind of achieve the same feeling. A slightly less dense but still pretty urban neighborhood. About as urban you can get with still single family homes.

More from Cincinnati...

Most of the original 1830s-1850s row houses in Cincinnati's basin were torn down and replaced with 3-5 story NYC-style buildings like this in the 1860s-1880s. They often go all the way to the rear lot line, meaning there were often at least 2 units per floor. So a 4-story building on a 20x90 lot might have 8 ore more units:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...ps8155b3eb.jpg

Pretty basic worker housing from the 1850s or thereabouts...this is an example of what was usually torn down and replaced with something bigger:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psr7o1s24f.jpg

A similar strip from the same era:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psvhlagatf.jpg

An apartment building from around 1880 with entrances for each unit:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psb2ztj4jm.jpg

From around 1880:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psdkqq9m6b.jpg


From around 1880:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psczl3oqtm.jpg


These sorts of rows are from around 1900-1915, so the style is a bit different:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psjamjegdz.jpg

Brand new, built around 2015:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psw4opdpsj.jpg

From around 1890:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...pswmhzdrxv.jpg

An apartment from around 1890:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psey7doqix.jpg

Another apartment from around 1890:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...ps8qnd1oyl.jpg

Wood:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...pslzsoo7c9.jpg

From around 1890:
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...ps7o8iii8a.jpg

My house is in this photo...as you can see everything here was built from around 1890 to 1920, except for the all-brick 20-unit at center-right that might date from 1930. The rock cuts you see at left and bottom right were where all of the stone foundations for the downtown came from. Most of the "new" houses in this area, including mine, ironically have concrete foundations despite being located on the site of the foundation rock quarry!
https://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j...psynqb7sot.jpg

Sweet tour man!

I love those small rowhomes if they have basements.

I’ve lived in 4 different rowhouses in two cities

In Pittsburgh, these are known as "breezeways." Sometimes there are breezeways between rowhouses, where the second story is connected but there is an arched passageway on the ground floor (or occasionally, one with steps downward where the breezeway is actually close to basement level.

Alleys in Pittsburgh almost invariably are named, and have the term "Way" added to the end of them. Some of them have delightfully odd names (Asteroid Way, Hyena Way, Samoa Way, etc.) The reason the alleys have names is because in a lot of the older neighborhoods there's actually a ton of houses which front directly on the alley, meaning you need to have mail delivery and the like.

From your description I was expecting something more like this: https://goo.gl/maps/X9jj2Sji2qcnQmSz9

That's about as rowhouse-y as you can get without actually being attached.

I spent quite a bit of time at my grandparents' in a similar house in Queens as a kid in the 80s/early 90s. Technically separate but long with a small space between.

Fire spreading to neighouring houses is not an issue in Montreal, even in neibourhoods like this (which make up a sizable proportion of the city). We have fire proof walls between each house - usually cement blocks.

interesting, so for narrow exterior passageways between buidlings we have:

chicago - "gangways"
cincy - "alleys"
pittsburgh - "breeezeways"


what about others? does your city have a specific name for these odd little passageways in between tightly packed urban buildings?

and for the record, i'm not talking about "side yards", but narrow little exterior passageways only several feet wide like the one picture below.



https://live.staticflickr.com/1369/1...624b7780_c.jpg
gangway chicago by crowbert, on Flickr




also interesting. chicago doesn't name its uniquitous alleys, but for mail and fire dept. address purposes for coach houses and the like, the suffix "R" for "rear" is applied to the main address of the property.

Steely's pic looks more or less identical to the gap between our place and the semi-detached next to us! There isn't a specific name for it in Toronto as far as I know, even though it's the norm in most parts of the central city between semis and small rows. Just wide enough to fit a large garbage/recycling bin and a massive pain in the ass to keep clear during a heavy snow winter, or after an ice storm. Makes accessing the backyard much easier in summer though.

Alley's are referred to as "laneways" in Toronto, and a small percentage are named - mostly the ones that laneway housing facing them with a separate address.

Are those generally considered attractive or desirable?

Lived here for a while. Does it count?
https://earth.app.goo.gl/9MiZEb

Yes. 1970s infill townhouse. Plenty around Toronto.

So in the case where you have a detached but very closely spaced houses (like Chicago, for example), are there side windows that face each other? So basically you look out your side window and stare right into another window a foot or two away?

If this is true, do situations happen a lot like in the movie "Big" where two friends that live next to each other and have rooms and windows facing each other talk through the windows or have string can "telephones"? I thought that was so cool as a kid.

Or did they used to design and build houses so your windows don't exactly face each other?

I think there are like 3 remaining true historic row houses in Phoenix, which were very few and far between to begin with, so i've never lived in one. Although, some suburban homes are so closely spaced the joke is you can jump between them via rooftops.

No. Usually it's just a top sliver sort of window and it doesn't directly face a neighboring window or you have a bay window set up and only the flanking walls facing the front and back will have large windows.