Overview

With The Row House in Washington, DC, the architectural historian and preservationist Alison Hoagland turns the lucid prose style and keen analytical skill that characterize all her scholarship to the subject of the Washington row house. Row houses have long been an important component of the housing stock of many major American cities, predominantly sheltering the middle classes comprising clerks, tradespeople, and artisans. In Washington, with its plethora of government workers, they are the dominant typology of the historical city. Hoagland identifies six principal row house types—two-room, L-shaped, three-room, English-basement, quadrant, and kitchen-forward—and documents their wide-ranging impact, as sources of income and statements of attainment as well as domiciles for nuclear families or boarders, homeowners or renters, long tenancy or short stays. Through restrictive covenants on some house sales, they also illustrate the pervasive racism that has haunted the city. This topical study demonstrates at once the distinctive character of the Washington row house and the many similarities it shares with row houses in other mid-Atlantic cities. In a broader sense, it also shows how urban dwellers responded to a challenging concatenation of spatial, regulatory, financial, and demographic limitations, providing a historical model for new, innovative designs. Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

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9780813954479

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Reviews

""An entirely original contribution to the field, both specifically to Washington, DC, and to the larger investigation of row houses in American cities. Hoagland has succeeded in outlining the history and development of the Washington row house and placing it within a social framework. This book opens up avenues of research, specifically dealing with architects, builders, and the social evolution of row houses that have not been well trod previously in any city. - Andrew S. Dolkart, Columbia University, author of The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City, 1908-1929 ""An innovative, engaging, and insightful study that fills a conspicuous void. Hoagland has much to tell us about the economy, regulatory framework, physical character, complexions of class and race, building trades, real estate climate, and daily life in Washington, DC"". - Richard Longstreth, George Washington University, author of Looking Beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism (Virginia) ""Hoagland has crafted an exemplary domestic and cultural history of Washington, DC . . . In Hoagland's skillful hands, house-type analysis becomes a vehicle for weaving an impressively comprehensive, yet always human-scaled historical-social analysis of Washington's complex domestic history . . . The Row House in Washington, DC: A History is the work of a scholar who has woven together a deep understanding of Washington's historical development with a thorough knowledge of its dominant row house typology to produce a book that extends the framework for analyzing urban housing and its social life. Hoagland has thereby illuminated, in new ways, the physical, social, and cultural development of Washington, DC."" - 2024 VAF Cummings Award Jury

Author Information

Alison K. Hoagland, Professor Emerita in History and Historic Preservation at Michigan Technological University, is the author of The Log Cabin: An American Icon (Virginia).

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