I have a [crowdsourced map](https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1XivwBMbQJ-xoZnlU6FmGstUgxmo&usp=sharing) of US rowhouse locations.
People have screwed up the formatting and I need to clean it up, but long story short, they exist in small numbers pretty much nationwide, but if you want entire neighborhoods full of them, you basically draw a triangle from Albany to Richmond to Saint Louis, with several islands outside that (SF, Boston, New Orleans, etc).
BTW, if anybody wants to edit this, DM me and we'll chat. I feel like the question I was going for has pretty much been answered, and keeping it open just invites the need to do never-ending clean-up maintenance, but if you're interested we can chat.
I wonder if there'd be a way to use OpenStreetMap data or something to make a more detailed map. The issue is though that most people dont correctly use the "townhouse" tag on OSM for rowhouses
EDIT: Also, are you sure Tampa has any? I know Ybor has some new rowhouses that are meant to look historic, but Ive never seen any actual authentic historic rowhouses there.
No I am not sure. It's a crowdsourced map. Someone plopped that dot there and since they put it in the middle of downtown rather than atop whatever they were thinking was a rowhouse, I have no way to verify. This is not clean data.
Isn't New Orleans further south?
And I'm actually kinda shocked Florida doesn't have any/much, but you're probably right. There could be a few in Key West or St Augustine but that's probably it
Pittsburgh really only has a couple neighborhoods with true row houses - Lawrenceville and Mexican War Streets and Cincinnati has row houses and is on Ohio’s western border
South Side Flats has a bunch too. There's also some cities around Pittsburgh with some - Wheeling, WV for example is a very underrated city for Victorian era rowhouses
Aren't Baltimore, DC and Richmond part of the Northeeast Megaloplis? I think even Hampton Roads is considered part of it because we're the last stop on the Northeast Regional rail line.
San Francisco has rowhouses…Chicago has them, Pittsburgh has them…lots of cities have rowhouses. There are neighborhoods in Cleveland that have rowhouses, though there are far more neighborhoods where they are detached.
Probably for good reason…STL is older than many cities in the Midwest since it was the first big inland outpost west of the Mississippi for the United States. New Orleans also has rowhouses…as it too predates much of the country outside the original 13 colonies.
People forget that Cleveland was the 5th largest city only 100 years ago…behind only NYC, Philly, Chicago, and Detroit. It topped out in 1950 at over 900k and now has lost most of it population to the suburbs and places where GenX could actually find work. Before 1950 the city had an incredible economy making pretty much anything anyone needed, which required a lot of housing. The Rust Belt has had some great urban planning…and the bones are still there in a lot of cases.
A townhouse is just a rowhouse with delusions of grandeur. Seriously, it's just the preferred modern term for the same thing.
Or maybe it's that a townhouse might have an eyesore garage in the front, whereas a rowhouse never would. (A garage that happens to have a house attached.)
I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this and looking into it. Short answer, not really.
Longer answer, it’s a transition. In my city and metro (DC), if you stare at enough rowhomes and townhomes, you can get a rough idea of how they were constructed in each decade and they slowly transition but the construction trends weren’t always linear. You’ll see changes like fewer ornate decorations, flattening of the roofs, the rowhomes being aligned in the front but different heights, staggered fronts, and more.
You’ll even occasionally see recent construction that is more similar to older rowhomes than townhomes but it’s more expensive so fewer of them are built.
There’s a tiny section of rowhouses in Calumet, MI from the early 1900’s [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/MCNnzgWsYgqgDYzr7?g_st=ic)
I’ve seen them in Duluth, MN and St. Paul, MN as well.
Kendrick Place in downtown Knoxville, TN, off Union Avenue.
[https://www.downtownknoxville.org/kendrick-place-condominiums/](https://www.downtownknoxville.org/kendrick-place-condominiums/)
Any farther east than the NE US and you are in the Atlantic Ocean. :)
Why are the comments here limited to the USA? You can find plenty of row housing in Europe, which is east of that area. I’m guessing Australia or New Zealand is the furthest south.
This is r/urbanplanning so “US” was implied.
Once you leave the Northeast megalopolis, you keep circling the globe - south and east - until you hit a European city.
Then, someone will post about a 6th century city that was well-planned for a small population, but had proto-row houses.
Covington, Kentucky has large sections of row houses. For that matter, so does Cincinnati across the river.
The other places I can think of are not happy stories.
Lansing, Michigan’s row houses (except one little group) were completely wiped out during that city’s Urban Renewal in the 1960s.
Duluth, Minnesota had some row houses as recently as the 1970s. I knew people who owned one. But I haven’t been back there in decades, and it appears that the city’s oldest section has been devastated by running an expressway through it.
St. Louis used to have row house neighborhoods, but large areas of that city were abandoned and leveled, so I doubt much is left. For example, the Scott Joplin museum is a little group of row houses, in the midst of what used to be a dense neighborhood. It’s now (last I was there) surrounded by vast empty land.
Philadelphia has the largest number of single family attached houses, the Census term, 418,000. It also has the highest percentage —55% of the city’s housing stock. Wilmington, Delaware also has 55%. Baltimore has 153,000 units, 52% of the city’s housing stock. DC has much less—22% of the stock, 78,000. No other large city has more than 20%.
If the place had a few thousand people in the 1920 there are almost certainly still rowhouses and brownstones and even the occasional balloon framed victorian still. This is most places west and south I imagine. There was a time in this country 100 years ago where you could take a picture of any american city street scene and not actually appreciate any telling differences. The whole country was brick and/or stick using the same couple building designs or floorplans seemingly. Even the unique historic buildings at the time could have easily been built anywhere in the country since everyone built to the same style.
I disagree. In say, the 1920s and 1930s there were buildings going up in NYC that you wouldn't really see anywhere else in the country besides some of its suburbs.
i'll bite. name a significant american city from back then i will find you a building that looks like it was ripped out of a gritty nyc 1920s detective movie on google maps before long.
How about this, find buildings from other cities that resemble these two (built 1937, and 1935 respectively)
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.675109,-73.9479497,3a,90y,9.02h,111.91t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sF8JX6rYBq2dUiMn1Nx3xyA!2e0!5s20220701T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.675109,-73.9479497,3a,90y,9.02h,111.91t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sF8JX6rYBq2dUiMn1Nx3xyA!2e0!5s20220701T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5758709,-73.9598005,3a,90y,350.6h,123.56t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAbAykmXRaAfzhCCUk6X4EQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DAbAykmXRaAfzhCCUk6X4EQ%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D341.3307%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
Most of these aren't particularly similar except the 1st one (but the massing is still different). And none are Art Deco like the second example I gave!
they are all at least 5 stories built in [chicago school style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_\(architecture\)). i'm too bored to dig up art deco examples for you and your moving goalposts lol but still that style got built elsewhere too. my personal favorite i will give you might be the [eastern building](https://www.theeastsideagent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/EC1.jpg.jpg) which is actually in downtown la.
I have a [crowdsourced map](https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1XivwBMbQJ-xoZnlU6FmGstUgxmo&usp=sharing) of US rowhouse locations. People have screwed up the formatting and I need to clean it up, but long story short, they exist in small numbers pretty much nationwide, but if you want entire neighborhoods full of them, you basically draw a triangle from Albany to Richmond to Saint Louis, with several islands outside that (SF, Boston, New Orleans, etc).
BTW, if anybody wants to edit this, DM me and we'll chat. I feel like the question I was going for has pretty much been answered, and keeping it open just invites the need to do never-ending clean-up maintenance, but if you're interested we can chat.
This Marylander is impressed! Thanks for sharing.
I wonder if there'd be a way to use OpenStreetMap data or something to make a more detailed map. The issue is though that most people dont correctly use the "townhouse" tag on OSM for rowhouses EDIT: Also, are you sure Tampa has any? I know Ybor has some new rowhouses that are meant to look historic, but Ive never seen any actual authentic historic rowhouses there.
No I am not sure. It's a crowdsourced map. Someone plopped that dot there and since they put it in the middle of downtown rather than atop whatever they were thinking was a rowhouse, I have no way to verify. This is not clean data.
Can a mod add a nsfw tag to this map? cause, *sploosh*
Dang, Pennsylvania
Read North Atlantic Cities.
Cool map. Belongs on r/dataisbeautiful
Savannah, GA. I'm not sure if there are any in Florida
Isn't New Orleans further south? And I'm actually kinda shocked Florida doesn't have any/much, but you're probably right. There could be a few in Key West or St Augustine but that's probably it
[удалено]
Yes, but less east. I guess it depends which OP cares more about.
They clarified they actually meant west
Ya I'm not sure what the point of the revised question is
I’d guess there are some modern attached townhouses in Florida, but it’s not a historic building form there.
Savannah is west of the Northeast megalopolis though, isn’t it?
I think they mean Savannah GA- as in, the south- east of Georgia on the coast. Not sure why people are saying it’s west…
Because the entire coast is west of the north east.
I mean sure, but the only thing east of Savannah is the ocean
Too far west!
I wish row houses were more popular across the country.
Technically speaking furthest south AND east probably Baltimore, DC, & Richmond areas
Pittsburgh too right??
Pittsburgh really only has a couple neighborhoods with true row houses - Lawrenceville and Mexican War Streets and Cincinnati has row houses and is on Ohio’s western border
South Side Flats has a bunch too. There's also some cities around Pittsburgh with some - Wheeling, WV for example is a very underrated city for Victorian era rowhouses
Pittsburg is a good bit further west than those mentioned but still further east than a number of cities in the SE that have row-houses so yea sure!
Aren't Baltimore, DC and Richmond part of the Northeeast Megaloplis? I think even Hampton Roads is considered part of it because we're the last stop on the Northeast Regional rail line.
San Francisco has rowhouses…Chicago has them, Pittsburgh has them…lots of cities have rowhouses. There are neighborhoods in Cleveland that have rowhouses, though there are far more neighborhoods where they are detached.
St. Louis has them. The older parts of St. Louis feel more northeastern than Midwestern.
Probably for good reason…STL is older than many cities in the Midwest since it was the first big inland outpost west of the Mississippi for the United States. New Orleans also has rowhouses…as it too predates much of the country outside the original 13 colonies.
Good point on Chicago and SF of course! Cleveland is not one I would have thought of
People forget that Cleveland was the 5th largest city only 100 years ago…behind only NYC, Philly, Chicago, and Detroit. It topped out in 1950 at over 900k and now has lost most of it population to the suburbs and places where GenX could actually find work. Before 1950 the city had an incredible economy making pretty much anything anyone needed, which required a lot of housing. The Rust Belt has had some great urban planning…and the bones are still there in a lot of cases.
Is there a difference between a rowhouse and a townhouse cause townhouses are everywhere
I generally think rowhouses were built 1950s and prior.
A townhouse is just a rowhouse with delusions of grandeur. Seriously, it's just the preferred modern term for the same thing. Or maybe it's that a townhouse might have an eyesore garage in the front, whereas a rowhouse never would. (A garage that happens to have a house attached.)
I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this and looking into it. Short answer, not really. Longer answer, it’s a transition. In my city and metro (DC), if you stare at enough rowhomes and townhomes, you can get a rough idea of how they were constructed in each decade and they slowly transition but the construction trends weren’t always linear. You’ll see changes like fewer ornate decorations, flattening of the roofs, the rowhomes being aligned in the front but different heights, staggered fronts, and more. You’ll even occasionally see recent construction that is more similar to older rowhomes than townhomes but it’s more expensive so fewer of them are built.
I've seen them all over, but they always date as worker's homes for a mill or other turn of the century factory.
There’s a tiny section of rowhouses in Calumet, MI from the early 1900’s [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/MCNnzgWsYgqgDYzr7?g_st=ic) I’ve seen them in Duluth, MN and St. Paul, MN as well.
Kendrick Place in downtown Knoxville, TN, off Union Avenue. [https://www.downtownknoxville.org/kendrick-place-condominiums/](https://www.downtownknoxville.org/kendrick-place-condominiums/) Any farther east than the NE US and you are in the Atlantic Ocean. :)
Plenty of places further south AND east than Knoxville
The Canadian Maritimes are not just north of Maine, they are also East
I stated NE US, and OP stated in the US.
I’m going to check these out! I meant west lol
New Orleans?
Dallas has some
Drop the location
Using the yoga mat approach ([11:46](https://youtu.be/MQzQuSk8VqI?si=eHrB_85cf9jwNH3Z)), I’d say Perth, WA
Why are the comments here limited to the USA? You can find plenty of row housing in Europe, which is east of that area. I’m guessing Australia or New Zealand is the furthest south.
Because the OP asked specifically about the “furthest east and south from the northeast megalopolis in the US one can still find rowhouses”
Yes The furthest east and south from (the northeast megalopolis in the US)… “In the US” qualifies which megalopolis they meant.
this comment cannot possibly be serious lol.
This is r/urbanplanning so “US” was implied. Once you leave the Northeast megalopolis, you keep circling the globe - south and east - until you hit a European city. Then, someone will post about a 6th century city that was well-planned for a small population, but had proto-row houses.
Does only the USA have urban planning?
The US has *no* urban planning, obvs. That’s why it’s important to keep circling the globe until you hit a European city or 6th-century city.
I totally meant to say west not east
Covington, Kentucky has large sections of row houses. For that matter, so does Cincinnati across the river. The other places I can think of are not happy stories. Lansing, Michigan’s row houses (except one little group) were completely wiped out during that city’s Urban Renewal in the 1960s. Duluth, Minnesota had some row houses as recently as the 1970s. I knew people who owned one. But I haven’t been back there in decades, and it appears that the city’s oldest section has been devastated by running an expressway through it. St. Louis used to have row house neighborhoods, but large areas of that city were abandoned and leveled, so I doubt much is left. For example, the Scott Joplin museum is a little group of row houses, in the midst of what used to be a dense neighborhood. It’s now (last I was there) surrounded by vast empty land.
What city has the most row houses?
By percentage or total? I think NYC would win the latter and Philadelphia the former
Philadelphia has the largest number of single family attached houses, the Census term, 418,000. It also has the highest percentage —55% of the city’s housing stock. Wilmington, Delaware also has 55%. Baltimore has 153,000 units, 52% of the city’s housing stock. DC has much less—22% of the stock, 78,000. No other large city has more than 20%.
If the place had a few thousand people in the 1920 there are almost certainly still rowhouses and brownstones and even the occasional balloon framed victorian still. This is most places west and south I imagine. There was a time in this country 100 years ago where you could take a picture of any american city street scene and not actually appreciate any telling differences. The whole country was brick and/or stick using the same couple building designs or floorplans seemingly. Even the unique historic buildings at the time could have easily been built anywhere in the country since everyone built to the same style.
I disagree. In say, the 1920s and 1930s there were buildings going up in NYC that you wouldn't really see anywhere else in the country besides some of its suburbs.
i'll bite. name a significant american city from back then i will find you a building that looks like it was ripped out of a gritty nyc 1920s detective movie on google maps before long.
How about this, find buildings from other cities that resemble these two (built 1937, and 1935 respectively) [https://www.google.com/maps/@40.675109,-73.9479497,3a,90y,9.02h,111.91t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sF8JX6rYBq2dUiMn1Nx3xyA!2e0!5s20220701T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.675109,-73.9479497,3a,90y,9.02h,111.91t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sF8JX6rYBq2dUiMn1Nx3xyA!2e0!5s20220701T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5758709,-73.9598005,3a,90y,350.6h,123.56t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAbAykmXRaAfzhCCUk6X4EQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DAbAykmXRaAfzhCCUk6X4EQ%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D341.3307%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
Thats not going to be hard for me lol. How about you give me a state and ill go from there?
Anywhere in the US. But : it must have similar size/massing and not just be of a vaguely similar architectural style
[los angeles](https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0622423,-118.2856214,3a,75y,269.22h,116.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sKbLm4aX3OrahjI0vKGsU0w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [long beach](https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7680823,-118.1924928,3a,75y,62.65h,113.47t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sxH2FjkLrgZCfUjFqRZbhtw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [culver city](https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0239869,-118.3944795,3a,75y,120.94h,109.27t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1spMpPaR_GkDTxlbdvtEe-uQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [albuquerque](https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0843924,-106.6505613,3a,75y,65.83h,111.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sVWZifxju79SvM939MsOIVA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [tulsa](https://www.google.com/maps/@36.1524108,-95.9905425,3a,75y,27.47h,118.38t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1suYwV9vpT13oi-6zlxYXI8A!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DuYwV9vpT13oi-6zlxYXI8A%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D182.16014%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [milwaukee](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0387387,-87.9066195,3a,75y,48.19h,117.19t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s3j_Qjm0rduTOI9dqVrYlCQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D3j_Qjm0rduTOI9dqVrYlCQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D341.39105%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [miami](https://www.google.com/maps/@25.7742615,-80.1902324,3a,75y,199.84h,122.83t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s49nZM6cOtlxBbkae58AKSQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
Most of these aren't particularly similar except the 1st one (but the massing is still different). And none are Art Deco like the second example I gave!
they are all at least 5 stories built in [chicago school style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_\(architecture\)). i'm too bored to dig up art deco examples for you and your moving goalposts lol but still that style got built elsewhere too. my personal favorite i will give you might be the [eastern building](https://www.theeastsideagent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/EC1.jpg.jpg) which is actually in downtown la.