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.

In Chicago, yes absolutely. My kitchen has windows looking directly at my neighbors dining room.

Whoa, these buildings are almost 90 years old? They look very mid century.

@ niwell/ others, thanks for info on fire/ design.

I grew up in the neighborhood where MonkeyRonin posted the google streetview snapshot from. From my experience directly facing windows are rare but in a neighborhood like this even though most lots are the same size, building sizes are very seldom uniform so sometimes you would have a combination of a shorter three flat building with a coach house and no yard next to a two flat with no coach house and longer yard next to a 3 flat that extended all the way back to the alley. Ive definitely accidentally seen people doing it or changing or getting out of the shower.

Rowhomes come in all shapes and sizes. Some are two story buildings - and can be as small as 600sf. I lived on a block like this about 10 years ago - most of these homes are under 1000sf: https://goo.gl/maps/ap4TsygidtVU9BGx9

There's also Philly's historic Trinity - which is a 3 story rowhome that's effectively 3 boxes stacked on top of each other. Pretty awesome starter home for a couple - as you can get wedged into some great neighborhoods and alleyways. https://www.trulia.com/p/pa/philadel...03--1005292017

And there's also mansions - with elevators. This "rowhome" around the corner from me is 7,000sf:
https://www.trulia.com/p/pa/philadel...03--1005292017

To the OP - Philly also has Brownstone rowhomes. Spruce Street is a good example: https://goo.gl/maps/XWJV4sEEoF7a5mFx9

sometimes.

for our home, only one of the windows in our kitchen kinda lines up with our neighbor's kitchen window, but it's a high sill window over the sink, so it's never bothered us.

our bedroom windows along the gangway don't directly line up with any windows on our neighbor's building, but we still have the translucent privacy shades down >95% of the time. when we first moved in, i would draw them open every morning, only to close them later that afternoon. i eventually got out of that habit so now they just stay down the vast majority of the time. we're on the 1st floor of a 3-story building and our gangway is only about 5' wide at that point, so there's not a ton of light that comes through them anyway.

I don't even live in a "pseudo rowhouse" any longer, but the houses on my street are close together - about eight feet, IIRC.

There are virtually no windows on the sides of my house. Part of this is because the stairway is on the left side of my home, and part of this is because there are four different chimneys - one for each of the main rooms on each floor (my home is foursquare style).

On my left wall - the stairwell wall - there is a nice stained-glass window right off the grand stair, and a smaller window you can see through on the way to the third floor. On the right wall, the only rooms on the second and third floor which have windows are the bathrooms - and one of those is stained glass and thus not really see through anyway.

The houses on either side of me are basically an identical plan to my house. Thus even though the windows are centered on the midpoint of the house, we cannot look into each others windows. Because on my right wall, the windows are on the 2nd/3rd floors, whereas on my neighbor's left wall, they're on the stairs between the 1st/2nd and 2nd/3rd.

Actually they are from the 20s.

Right now basically a row house. attached one side and narrow gangway on the other side. Three unit condo in wicker park, Chi . It's great. Late 90s construction... we are a "duplex down" with first floor walkup and half-underground lower level with extra bedroom and bath.

wouldn't trade it! I can walk to anything

most of my local streets filled with same kind of thing.

I used to live in this building in the Mt. Adams neighborhood of Cincy:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/12...992!4d-84.4992

The two (maybe 3?) buildings have been dramatically altered over the years, so I'm not sure how the building was originally intended to be split up. The building on the right was originally built as row-housing (I think), but had been converted into apartments, with the garden level and sunken level on the backside being separate units than the upper stories, which are served by the street facing staircases. The building on the left is an OTR tenement type of building that has about 8 apartments. This is the closest I've lived to a row-house.

I just moved from one rowhouse (built 1890, row of 9 houses) to another one! (Built 2019, row of 4 houses)

Here in the UK something like 25% of all homes are rowhouses, plus another 30% are semi detached houses attached to just one other. Then the rest is something like 25% detached houses, 20% apartments.

Fire doesn't seem to be an issue with rowhomes here, you very rarely hear of any problems, house fires are much less common generally than they were in the past when more people used solid fuel fires for heating and also has deep fat fryers which nobody seems to have these days. The major fire in the UK in recent years was the Grenfell Tower disaster a couple of years ago in a block of apartments.

Some of the old Victorian rows of houses were built with a common roof void along the whole row which wouldn't be up to code if built now. Many will have had block walls retrofitted for fire safety reasons and also security reasons if people are worried their neighbours might go up through their roof hatch and then down into the neighbouring houses through their hatches. But I think there will still be a lot of those type houses that haven't had the roof voids partitioned properly.