2024 Cummings Award

The Row House in Washington, DC: A History

Alison K. Hoagland 

Alison Hoagland has crafted an exemplary domestic and cultural history of Washington, DC by focusing on the city’s dominant housing type—the row house. The book begins with a detailed typological analysis of six of the city’s most common, and yet diverse, row house plans. 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. As much as the city’s identity as a capital city has shaped its built environment, sheargues effectively for the need to understand it fundamentally as a city of homes. She vividly shows how the row house was shaped by Washington’s complex regulatory framework, the pace of domestic technological change, the complexities of federal city planning and real estate development practices, and  the physical character of the city. From this broader context she  continually brings the reader back to the residential scale of individual row houses; here, the complexities of domestic usage in terms of social class, race, and the evolving patterns of daily domestic life play out in the rooms of recognizable house plans. In one of her most compelling neighborhood case studies, she documents the social and economic history of a black working-class neighborhood, called “Snow’s Court” --a mid-block “square” with alley dwellings. It is a model study of the changing dynamics of a working-class neighborhood brought to life by centering the domestic conditions of its changing row house users, enriched by reference to row house plans. 

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.