Help me map the boundaries of US rowhouse country

[Cirrus]

Hi everyone. I want to make a simple map that shows which US cities contain rowhouses. Will you help me?

If you are interested in helping, PLEASE follow these instructions:

1. Open this editable GOOGLE MAP.

2. If you know of a city with rowhouses, add it as a dot on the map.

3. When you add a dot, type either "lots" or "few" in the dot's "description" field, to indicate whether that city has entire neighborhoods full of rowhouses ("lots"), or only sporadic ones ("few"). This will be a judgement call on your part. The map will automatically color your dot based on what you type.

4. DO NOT DELETE OR MODIFY ANYTHING ANYBODY ELSE HAS ADDED. If someone has already added a city, please do not delete it or change the description (even if you disagree with their decision on lots vs few). Seriously I cannot stress this enough. The last time we tried to crowdsource a map on SSP, there was so much deleting of other people's additions that it was completely unworkable. I'll look at the results and we can discuss them in this thread if necessary, but please do not delete or change anything someone else has added.

Thank you!

[Centropolis]

done. generally speaking st. louis is a western outlier. kansas city has a few units, as im sure indy and memphis probably does but certainly no neighborhoods, or even full blocks. the rows that i have seen in kansas city are built as entire units almost like apartments i believe, not like a bunch of zero lot line houses smashed together. i imagine memphis and indy are similar. i've seen similar housing in st. paul as well.

[Centropolis]

louisville is a possibility, along with lexington, ky. pretty sure ive seen real-deal zero lot line rows in lexington. they are more hodge podge, less like the industrialized fashion of say the newer rows in baltimore.

[Centropolis]

i confirmed lexington. they are scattered but there, with mid-atlantic or old virginia feeling streets like this. https://goo.gl/maps/ioLrfhc2Jw72

[Centropolis]

added louisville and cincinnati.

my cut-off point bewween few and lots is if you can easily find rowhouses within 30 seconds of looking at an aerial. louisville is in a higher category than say kansas city but took a bit.

memphis and indy are on thin ice...couldnt find any...

edit: indy confirmed. https://goo.gl/maps/EUxnfBJVZoL2

[photoLith]

Trying to do it from phone, not in front of a computer right now. Kinda hard to do. I'll add tons of towns I know of that have them. For now I added Wheeling, WV that has some left and Erie which has like 6 row houses left. What about cities like Detroit? Or Houston? I mean there's a couple of row houses in Houston dating form the 1920s and I was just in Detroit and there was like 2 row houses I saw. I mean should that count for this map? What should the cut off be? I'm fairly certain even Denver has a couple row houses but that's hardly a dense row house city.

[CherryCreek]

Denver has some!...

There's this near downtown:



And this on 17th Street east of downtown:



This in Highlands west of downtown:




These in Uptown:



Still not a common type of construction, but will find samples of it spread through Capitol Hill, Uptown, Five Points, and Highlands.

[Centropolis]

yeah, i was going to mention denver. also think i have seen some in salt lake city, where i've seen a type of rowhouse sometimes called a "railroad house." very low slung, austere one story rowhouses...denver also has these, along with st. louis.

[BG918]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

yeah, i was going to mention denver. also think i have seen some in salt lake city, where i've seen a type of rowhouse sometimes called a "railroad house." very low slung, austere one story rowhouses...denver also has these, along with st. louis.

These types of homes are all over older parts of Denver and are generally from the late 1800's to early 1900's. Some are brick like this one but lots of other ones are stone. The duplex is the most common type but I've seen some that are single family and a few scattered around that are more than 2 units all connected. They are also almost entirely 1 story and as such are targets for scrapes in certain neighborhoods.


http://www.realtor.com/realestateand...row-home-co-op

[photoLith]

So basically every major city in America has row houses of some sort.

[CherryCreek]

Originally Posted by photoLith

So basically every major city in America has row houses of some sort.

Probably right, lol. Though to the point of the original post, certainly many of the Eastern parts of the US have areas with many, many square blocks or more of exclusively row houses (D.C. is prime example). In Denver (and I suspect in many older mid-west and western cities), they are isolated construction types, not entire neighborhoods. I'm not aware of single block in Denver with ONLY rowhouses on both sides (though I'm excluding new construction since we are building lots of row houses now in areas of development).

[emathias]

Originally Posted by CherryCreek

Probably right, lol. Though to the point of the original post, certainly many of the Eastern parts of the US have areas with many, many square blocks or more of exclusively row houses (D.C. is prime example). In Denver (and I suspect in many older mid-west and western cities), they are isolated construction types, not entire neighborhoods. I'm not aware of single block in Denver with ONLY rowhouses on both sides (though I'm excluding new construction since we are building lots of row houses now in areas of development).

Yeah, even Chicago has *some* rowhouses, but they're not super-common. The areas where they were most common, like Bronzeville, have become so blighted that there are very few intact blocks of them remaining.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by photoLith

So basically every major city in America has row houses of some sort.

This is the problem with this exercise. Every U.S. city probably has some.

But where are rowhouses dominant? Not too many places outside of Baltimore, Philly, and a number of PA towns.

[ChargerCarl]

Originally Posted by photoLith

So basically every major city in America has row houses of some sort.

Not in LA.

[Centropolis]

theres really three tiers, at least. places where they are dominant city-wide (say mid atlantic), then a middle tier of cities that have rowhouse dominant neighborhoods or complete streets of rowhouses (pittsburgh to stl), then cities with slim-to-none where they are scattered to non-existant. theres certainly a difference in the feel of cities that have complete streets of rows to those that have scattered remnants. usually cities with complete streets of rows also have even more blocks/neighborhoods of brick townhomes that nearly function like rows but are seperated by 2-3 ft wide gangways.

[initiald]

Richmond VA is really the southern limit from what I've seen.

Unless you mean those McMansion-style "townhomes" they build everywhere around here:

[eschaton]

I can't edit the map, but I'll say the following.

New England: Only prevalent on the neighborhood level in the core of Boston. Isolated stands in Cambridge, New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, Springfield, Northampton, and Holyoke. All of these cities likely had more in the past, but if they had a rowhouse neighborhood, it was small and limited to areas now covered by downtown.

New York: Common in NYC and the mid Hudson Valley. Totally dominates some neighborhoods in Albany and Troy, but oddly not in nearby Schenectady in any real numbers. Not really found to any large level further into Upstate.

New Jersey: Present both in some areas directly across from NYC (Hoboken, parts of Jersey City) and Philadelphia (Camden). Not super common in much of the rest of New Jersey, even in the old urban cities, where detached wood-framed buildings (either SFH or multi-family) are more common.

Pennsylvania: Completely ubiquitous everywhere the eastern part of the state south of the Scranton/Wilkes Barre area, where they are absent. But otherwise, every single city/borough which had a notable population in 1900 will have them. In the western half of the state, they're mostly limited to Pittsburgh and the immediate surrounding area.

Delaware: Wilmington's got them in spades, and New Castle has a small amount. Absent further south.

Maryland: Everyone knows about Baltimore, but all of the smaller urban cores (Frederick, Annapolis, Hagerstown, Cumberland) have them as well. Not found on the eastern shore.

South: Obviously DC and old town Alexandria are known for them. Richmond has rowhouse dominated neighborhoods. Some stands survive in parts of Hampton Roads, along with smaller northern Virginia cities like Winchester and Petersburg. After that, you don't really find them till Savannah. Some parts of New Orleans (like the French Quarter) are rowhouse dominated.

Midwest: Generally speaking, rowhouses were not built in large numbers anywhere in the northern portions of the Midwest but Chicago, as elsewhere detached wood-framed vernacular styles were more common. They were reasonably common in the lower Midwest however. Cincinnati and Saint Louis still have neighborhoods dominated by a rowhouse or rowhouse like vernacular. Indianapolis and Columbus used to have a lot of rowhouses, but lost much to urban renewal and the expansion of their CBD. Small stands can be found in odd places like Galena, IL, and even eastern Iowa.

West: Basically just San Francisco.

The bottom line is the central "rowhouse belt" of the country runs from Albany to northern Virginia. Picking where it ends in the west is a bit harder, because it jumped around a lot. One could argue it stops at the Appalachians, and Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Saint Louis exist as islands. Or one could argue the "belt" continued to travel westward along the Ohio until it died out around the Mississippi.

[dave8721]

They are pretty common in the old core of Savannah, Ga.
Savannah row homes:
https://goo.gl/maps/1C9Wxor8kU32

[brickell]

Florida was more fond of the shotgun, as was other parts of the south I imagine. More airflow for sea breezes and ventilation in the time before AC.

[Chef]

Duluth has a fair amount, especially compared to the Twin Cities where they are relatively rare.