House Love: for Fans and Lovers of Old Houses

Where We Live
We live in an 1897 three-story Victorian row-house on St. Paul Street, in Baltimore’s historic Charles Village. Ours was the “builder’s house,” the showcase model on the first block of the new development of Peabody Heights (renamed Charles Village in the 1960s).

Our simplified Queen Anne Victorian is made of pumpkin-colored brick and red sandstone (known as “Seneca stone” in these parts) and stood just one block from the horse-drawn trolley’s last stop. In 1897 the surrounding are was mostly pastureland and country estates. The roads were dirt (as were 99% of the roads in America). But the neighborhood was pretty fancy, designed for bankers, executives and business owners. The longest-lived resident of our house, for example, owned a prosperous fertilizer company.

The old cobblestone and brick roadway— and the old trolley tracks themselve s — remain under the asphalt of Saint Paul Street. The brick is visible at the curbs of many blocks and the trolley tracks rise to the surface here and there every summer.

If you’ve never heard of row-houses, that’s understandable. Most people are more familiar with the term “town houses.” The difference between the two is that row-houses were designed by the row, which could extend for the entire block. Townhouses were designed individually, giving a block an eclectic and sometimes messy look. Many of the new “townhouse communities” we see popping up all over America these days are actually developments of row-houses, distinguished by their uniform design.

baltimore victorian rowhouses houselove.org America’s first row-houses—built in Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore during the 1790s—were large and fashionable and sold exclusively to the well-to-do. Nowadays, in an age of diminishing resources, row-houses are comparatively eco-friendly because they take up less space and demand many fewer resources than a detached house. Row-houses can be as narrow as 8-10 feet and as wide as 30. Some go very deep. Some are no more than four small rooms, two up and two down. Some have back yards, some don’t. Few have front yards.

Our Queen Anne has 20 feet of grass in front of it. This was quite a novelty—and something of a luxury—for a city house in 1897. It was, in fact, an early flirtation with suburbia. Research tells us that nobody did much with their front yards. It was enough to have a swath of grass out front. We uprooted the hundred-year-old monster bush that sat in our front yard, then we planted roses and added an era-appropriate wrought iron fence. To see more of what we did to the front and back yards, go to the “front yard” and "back yard" links..

baltimore victorian rowhouses houselove.org What We Did
It’s a long story — I wrote a book about it — but here it is in a nutshell. We knew nothing about carpentry or plumbing or electricity. We knew only that we loved the house when we saw it. The place had been owned by a fraternity for ten years and the boys had nearly destroyed it. We bought it, then worked 14-hour days to fix it up, trying to make our rehab loan deadline. We didn’t make the deadline. We almost didn’t make it ourselves as a couple. Jill and I had been dating for only a few of months when we took on the job. The sidebar to your right will take you on a tour of our house. That will give you an idea of the task we faced as first-time old house rehabbers.

newspaper ad for victorian rowhouses houselove.org

Original 1897 newspaper ad for new row-houses in
our neighborhood. The one to the far right is ours.