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Old Posted Jul 24, 2021, 3:09 AM
eschaton eschaton is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2013
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Quote:
Originally Posted by softee View Post
Ah, right, but it's still funny that the homes were built attached to one another in a row in the first place. You don't really see that too much in other cities.
There is a term for this - its a townhouse.

Essentially, the term townhouse originally meant homes which were built in the style of British "towns" (meaning cities) - attached housing. These could have been built one at a time or in groups of a few at once.

The term "rowhouse" came about later - and is distinctly North American, with the brits using terraced housing instead. This came to the fore in the era of industrialized construction, and is meant to refer to a group of homes built at once as part of a row - sometimes in stands as small as 2-3, but often encompassing entire blocks.

The thing is, the terms drifted over time. Townhouse has been so corrupted by its use to describe newer homes that terming something 100+ years old a townhouse seems odd. So the term rowhouse has drifted to describe any attached housing which is older - and is sometimes even used for semi-attached housing as well, depending upon the style.
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