Baltimore Row houses of the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

baltimore row houses of the early nineteenth century robert I. alexander "This Town," wrote a traveler in 1793 of Baltimore, "is built chiefly of brick.Its Houses are 3-Story-join [ed] together-are wide, 8c the Town appears to be better and more handsomely built than Philadelphia." 1 Despite a New Yorker's condescension toward Philadelphia, he was perceptive enough to bracket the brick architecture of Baltimore with that of the next large coastal city to the north.The material, brick, was not only common and traditional in both places, but its use was reinforced by regulations against fire hazards.He grasped also the importance of the row house as a feature of the cityscape, an observation to be repeated often by later travelers.Although row housing has antecedents as old as pharaonic Egypt, it acquired a predominant if much ignored importance in the rapid growth of cities during the early industrial age.Baltimore is still characterized as the city of brick rows of the early nineteenth century, with white marble steps scrubbed daily by industrious housewives.For the historian of American culture the rows of the middle decades and the third quarter of the century have another significance.While often retaining the marble stoop in Baltimore, the uniform brownstone front prevailed up and down the coast and far inland.This row housing gave rise to the term "brown decades" that not only names the period, but intimates a whole culture and life style.By the end of the century the row house designer was seeking individuality through stylistic novelty and even differentiation of the units within a block.But with the rising costs of urban land and construction, only the affluent real estate speculator could afford to build row houses, and the upper middle class and wealthy to live in them, while the poor and lower middle class had to be satisfied with tenements.Rather than a sequential history of the type, however, this study is cross-sectional, concentrating on a number of rows built during a period of less than fifteen years, and is concerned with some features relating the row house

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