Row houses are the essential form of housing in Washington, lining the city's broad avenues, grid-plan streets, and crowded alleys, helping to define the street plan as much as the monuments and parks for which the city is so famous. Through more than two centuries, they have housed the broad middle class of the nation's capital: government clerks, tradesmen, artisans, teachers, lawyers, laborers, and so forth. Bounded on their sides by their neighbors, row houses have economical floor plans, repetitive facades, and a low scale.

Why are row houses so successful as a building type? This presentation will examine what row houses are, how they work, where they are located, and why they are the way they are. Specific examples in DuPont Circle and Woodley Park will help us understand how row houses worked for a variety of occupants (families, servants, boarders, renters, homeowners), for a variety of uses (home, income-producer), and as an expression of ideas about health and comfort.

Alison K. Hoagland is an architectural historian whose latest book is The Row House in Washington, DC: A History (University of Virginia Press, 2023). She is a professor emerita at Michigan Technological University, where she taught for fifteen years; before that, she worked for the National Park Service in Washington for fifteen years. She has published on a variety of topics concerning American architecture and lives on Capitol Hill.