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Location: East Central Pennsylvania/ Chicago for 6yrs.
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I live in East Central PA. Small towns here have plenty of wood framed Row homes but also what I see as a variety of Row housing. They are 2 houses 1/2 and 1/2 called Half-Doubles. Does it to be called a row home, need 3 or more residences side by side attached only? Most of these Half-Doubles were not separately built units that were merely attached as they got built. But were built that way appearing as one home many times but seeing two doors on front you know it is 2 homes. Many rows and these half-doubles shared common attics or top floor rooms.
I believe on the intro to the old Sitcom ...All in the Family.... shows half-double examples? One older home I own is semi-attached to a neighboring building. There is just a few inches separation with the roofs attached and a narrow front separation covered. It is still classified as a single home. No one here calls older Rows up to the sidewalks or half-double, Townhouses.
But newer ones as subsidized low income housing with front lawns or suburban varieties are called townhouses.
Hopefully this isn't seen as off topic since I do not address San Francisco Rows. I have had post deleted as off topic lately if I didn't specifically address enough of it.
Then they lost popularity in the late streetcar to early auto era before becoming more widespread in the 60s and 70s in certain suburbs (mostly W & NW suburbs) https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.75031...JWqUbgvZNg!2e0
Actually town house and row house mean the same thing. Your two links were just the difference between suburban and made for cars compared to urban and made for walking.
Today, in many cities they still build Row Houses, only now they call them Condos. Same principal, just look different.
Yeah there are some rowhome-like apartment buildings in my neighborhood. Definitely not true row homes but from the street it's hard to tell they are not.
If those are row homes then LA definitely has them too. Lots of neighborhoods like that throughout the city, and sometimes the "rows" are actually made up of 4-8 unit apartments as opposed to SFHs, explaining why LA is usually denser than other Western cities.
Actually town house and row house mean the same thing. Your two links were just the difference between suburban and made for cars compared to urban and made for walking.
Not necessarily. In the Philly area, there is a clear distinguish between a townhouse and a rowhouse.
These are rowhouses with garages but they are not considered townhouses.
Row houses in one part of the country don't necessarily match those in other parts of the country. In Sacramento, there are row houses (and used to be more of them) but they were very different from those found on the east coast. Eastern cities had cold winters and construction used a lot of brick and stone, the row houses were often attached to conserve heat (you lose heat from the exterior walls, this is reduced if you have neighbors on two sides.) In hot climates with mild winters, having space between houses lets breezes pass between the houses, and gives enough room to plant shade trees. Before electricity, this sort of passive cooling helped make 19th century row houses more livable.
Narrow lots were useful in the walking city. Lots were also narrow because many cities collected taxes based on the width of a lot--not its total area. So a narrow house kept money out of the tax man's pocket.
As to horse-drawn streetcars vs. electrics, horse-drawn cars had a pretty long run--from the 1830s on the east coast until the 1890s in some places. The first practical cable car systems appeared in about 1870, but they required a lot of power and infrastructure, so a lot of cities stayed with horse-drawn cars until the trolley pole was invented in the mid-1880s. So horse-drawn systems had 50 or so years of dominance, while one could argue that the electric streetcar's era didn't last much longer--from maybe 1890 until maybe 1940, extended temporarily by World War II gas shortages, but in many cities, especially smaller ones, streetcars went out of service by the Great Depression. Sam Bass Warner's "Streetcar Suburbs," one of the seminal works on the subject, is about the influence of horse-drawn streetcar systems, with electrics only coming into play late in the book, and the house form that resulted were row houses and the similar but vertically stacked form, the triple-decker.
Electric streetcars helped cities spread out horizontally--and architecture shifted to match. A growing body of advocacy called for more open space and room to stretch in the suburbs--and styles like Prairie and Craftsman bungalows reflected that horizontality, as did Spanish Colonial Revival, Mission Revival and Pueblo Revival styles. Those led to even more expansive and horizontal Ranch styles and residential Art Deco homes in the 1930s, and postwar "mid-century modern" homes that spread out even farther.
Eastern cities had cold winters and construction used a lot of brick and stone, the row houses were often attached to conserve heat (you lose heat from the exterior walls, this is reduced if you have neighbors on two sides.) In hot climates with mild winters, having space between houses lets breezes pass between the houses, and gives enough room to plant shade trees. Before electricity, this sort of passive cooling helped make 19th century row houses more livable.
As I said before, Boston used more wood than brick or stone for residential construction. As for hot climates, while I'm sure it's a factor but cities with similar climates out of the US build very differently. Here's the oldest part of Cordoba, Spain. Very similar climate to Merced, California especially by afternoon temperatures.
Newer parts of the city are different, but little of the city has detached housing; it's not common there. Note the white walls, which reflect sunlight. The narrow streets also block some sun from hitting the street. Hillside of Granada, similar temperature-wise to Sacramento
attached, again. Sure, these were built when walking was the main mode of transportation. Except going further out in both those cities, most later neighborhoods built when there was ample mass transit are as dense or denser.
But yes, I get your point. There's no benefit of attaching homes as opposed to say having a 5 foot gap in a hot climate.
If those are row homes then LA definitely has them too. Lots of neighborhoods like that throughout the city, and sometimes the "rows" are actually made up of 4-8 unit apartments as opposed to SFHs, explaining why LA is usually denser than other Western cities.
Well, I didn't mean all the houses in that picture were rowhouses, in fact, I said they're close together, and in some cases, attached. But yeah, I hear you!
Actually town house and row house mean the same thing. Your two links were just the difference between suburban and made for cars compared to urban and made for walking.
Urban one is made for cars too. That's why they have garages and off-street parking. Difference is the urban ones don't have backyards (or in that case tiny patios) for the caretakers of the cars to do things in.
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