In the Philadelphia region, a new type of rowhome came into being during the interwar period: the airlite. As this
Inky article on the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mayfair puts it:
Quote:
Mayfair's houses are primarily airlites.
Simply put, an airlite is a rowhouse with its kitchen and dining room side by side at the rear of the first floor - as opposed to a "straight-through" rowhouse, in which one (typically the kitchen) is behind the other.
|
A second key feature of the airlite, which Mr. Heavens ignores and probably informs the demonstrably wrong paragraph following, is that airlites were the first rowhome style to have
garages come standard. Early airlites date to the early- to mid-1920s and were often decorated in an ornate Tudor style,
like this or
this.
By the 1930s, though, consumer tastes had changed, and airlites became much simpler and less ornate. The bulk of Philadelphia's airlites date to this era, with
Oxford Circle and
Mayfair (the two major interwar neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia) and
Cedarbrook -- as well as some suburbs like
Upper Darby -- got built out in this style.
Interestingly, semi- and fully-detached housing of the period tended to be confined to railroad suburbs, of which the Northeast's
Burholme neighborhood is perhaps the best example.
Airlite construction continued after WWII -- into the 1960s, in fact -- with some interesting modernist takes on the style, like these 1950s examples from
Wynnefield Heights. But, by this time, national trends in housing had begun to overtake the local industry and the airlite style, which constitutes a not insignificant percentage of the Philadelphia region's rowhome stock, died off in favor of the kinds of suburban subdivisions found nearly everywhere else.