Have you lived in a rowhouse in your city?

[montréaliste]

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.

[C.]

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).

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by homebucket

Does this count?

https://goo.gl/maps/oKVqJtBQzmXRAeKv8

Or this?

https://goo.gl/maps/KKhFRU5fWCaXybi16

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

[montréaliste]

Originally Posted by JManc

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.

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...

[niwell]

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.

Originally Posted by JManc

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.

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.

[PhilliesPhan]

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!

[The North One]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

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

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

[pdxtex]

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.

[jmecklenborg]

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

[pdxtex]

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...

[cabasse]

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.

[pdxtex]

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

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

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.

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.

[xzmattzx]

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

[binjakob]

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

[Obadno]

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.

[jmecklenborg]

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:


Pretty basic worker housing from the 1850s or thereabouts...this is an example of what was usually torn down and replaced with something bigger:


A similar strip from the same era:


An apartment building from around 1880 with entrances for each unit:


From around 1880:



From around 1880:



These sorts of rows are from around 1900-1915, so the style is a bit different:


Brand new, built around 2015:


From around 1890:


An apartment from around 1890:


Another apartment from around 1890:


Wood:


From around 1890:


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!

[jtown,man]

Sweet tour man!

I love those small rowhomes if they have basements.

[dc_denizen]

I’ve lived in 4 different rowhouses in two cities

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

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.

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.