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Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Chapter 1
Urban Settings: Houses and Housing in the Early American City

This is a study about urban dwellings and the people who built and lived in them, from roughly 1780 to 1830. As a story of buildings and people, this book combines questions and approaches gleaned from the practice of architectural and social history. Writing architectural history, I narrate the experience of city houses and emphasize the ways people anchored their lives in the material world, rather than the design, construction, and style of buildings (although these elements are central to this text). Writing social history, I am mindful that "events take place" and happen in real time and space. Place clearly matters, and occasion always affects experience. Thus, I pursue a material culture approach that draws on both the artifact and its representation in written sources. The goal is to use objects to better understand how and why people acted in particular ways and to assess the larger cultural significances of their actions. Through a material culture approach to history, objects are not relegated to the status of simple illustrations but move to the fore as key elements for deciphering and writing the past.

Each of the chapters in this work begins with an event or vignette and raises questions about its architectural significance. For example, Billy Robinson, on trial for his life in the aftermath of Denmark Vesey's aborted slave insurrection of 1822, in Charleston, South Carolina, mounted an architectural defense in a desperate bid to gain acquittal. Robinson acted on his understanding of how buildings circumscribed his life, and sought to exploit white masters' presumptions of control. Similarly, when Hannah Rand's neighbors came to her Portsmouth, New Hampshire, home to lay out her widow's "third" in the house, she drew on a profound knowledge of the symbolic qualities of domestic space as she negotiated the rooms that would be hers. Houses and housing contained and signified different aspects of city life. They were the physical objects that composed the largest portion of early American urban settings. They are also artifacts that contained and defined the enactment of everyday relationships. In both capacities houses are signifiers that communicate the order (and conflicts) of urban life. Billy Robinson, Hannah Rand, and all the other individuals in these pages knew the signifying power of buildings and the ways in which houses were agents in the business of everyday urban experience. One of our goals is to recover some of what they knew.

I do not retell the stories of the founding of towns and cities of the North Atlantic rim or revisit the histories of economic development, race, and class formation in them. Those investigations have been undertaken with considerable insight and success by others. The same is true for studies of urban form and city plans. Although this book relies on that collected knowledge, its aim is something different. These chapters mount a series of explorations into the ways people employed town houses as symbolic representations of self and community. To begin those explorations requires knowledge of a few words and concepts that provide a working framework for the narration of urban housing as social experience. This introductory chapter defines and illustrates the application of such terms as presence of place, situation, comportment, and circumstance.[1]

The evocative power of early American urban landscapes arises from a sense that architecture and setting affect our comprehension of city society in particular and immediate ways. As a medium for the assertion of social identity, as settings for the display of gentility and its applications, as sites of power and its negotiation, town houses matter. Architectural settings, however, are employed most often by historians as illustrations for arguments derived from other, typically documentary, sources. Yet, taken together, the physical and documentary evidence of town houses can generate new questions and reframe old ones about urban life and society. Key to this approach is an archaeology of the city that interrogates its very materiality, in this instance through houses and housing. The evidence of urban dwellings provides a social and symbolic sense of the flow and texture of everyday city life and yields what is best understood as the presence of place.[2]

Presence of place describes the combination of artifacts and behaviors that lend a locale its distinctive visual and cultural identity. Presence of place is relational; it relies on associations found within the rooms and furnishings of buildings and, in telescopic fashion, on the associations between buildings and their settings on a larger geographical scale. Presence of place recognizes that each late-eighteenth-century American city displayed its own architectural personas—visible identities conveyed in the confluence of regional preference, civic ambition, social customs, economic organization, and individual action and expressed in the details of house plans, construction techniques, siting, and decorative finishes. Presence of place impressed travelers through their perceptions of visual differences between cities. When Charleston resident William Drayton made a northward journey in 1786, he noted the peculiarities of Philadelphia's town houses: The buildings "are chiefly of Brick, of two, three, and a few four stories high; very neatly finished; tho' with some Peculiarity of Style, which I think marks every Country in their Houses." Drayton continued: "These [houses] are generally very narrow, and long; with a Penthouse, wch projects about 2 feet over the first or second Story, and a Deep Cornice over the upper, which has almost the same effect. As they are closely built, and have very little yard-Room, the roofs in general are constructed so flat, as to afford Convenience for drying the Family Linen." To illustrate his point Drayton sketched a Philadelphia town house and labeled it in the "General Style" of the city (see Figure 1.1). Drayton defined the architectural distinctiveness of Philadelphia relative to the town houses that lined the streets of his own Charleston. But Charleston's urban residences excited their own commentary from visitors.[3]

New England traveler Edward Hooker marveled over the city's distinctive appearance: "So many things different from what I had been accustomed to—So many, different from what I expected to find." Hooker continued, describing the appearance of the dwellings in the older, more densely built section of town: "Most of the houses in the city are brick: and a great number of them are covered with a dull looking brownish plaster and chequered, as to resemble stone. Most of them are three stories high." Still, the style of living he saw in these same houses related them to the larger traditions of provincial seaports on both sides of the Atlantic: "It is common custom for those who are in trade to live in the second story, while the lower story is used to trade in." Hooker discovered a measure of familiarity in this vertical organization of the house, but, like Drayton a generation earlier, he was ultimately drawn to the appearances of difference.[4]

Town houses are markers of social identity, but the symbolic content of any one dwelling is understood only in light of its relationships to its larger environments. Taken together, town houses created urban settings where events happened and objects accrued social meaning through usage and experience. Situation, a term employed by eighteenth-century town house builders, best captures this relational and experiential quality. Situation referred in its limited and most specific sense to the location, suitability, and liabilities of a building lot but also carried larger social implications about how individuals should appropriately present themselves in the world. Situation in this expanded sense embraced the relationships between people and their environments and the ways others perceived and valued those relationships. Thus, the interpretation of urban houses and housing needs to address two points: first, the physical nature of the object in terms of design, construction, ornament, and setting; second, the experience of the artifact in terms of use, perception, imagination, and symbol.

Buildings sculpted the contours of urban experience. Eighteenth-century descriptions of early American seaports stressed perceived tensions between urban disorder and regularity. Cities were constant objects of idealization, seen as the outward manifestations of organized, civil society. They were also disparaged as vulnerable to disruptive forces ranging from street demonstrations to the antics of rebellious tenants. Visitors and residents alike assayed the chaotic aspect of cities through the world of the senses: the viscous, clinging muck of muddy streets, the searing stench of rot and sewage, the clattering din of tavern and market, and awkward-looking town houses reflecting shoddy and often flammable construction. In contrast, the regular face of the city celebrated public buildings and civil citizens, the brisk unimpeded flow of trade, and the productivity of craft and industry as well as the fashionable, well-built town houses designed and occupied by people engaged in the material conversations of cosmopolitan tastes that permeated polite society in the North Atlantic rim. Town houses, intimate settings for urban life and action, rendered personal and private experience sensible in the larger situation of urban life; town houses exerted presence of place, communicating and enacting the experiences and meanings of the early American city.[5]

Comportment and circumstance help define the ways in which people assessed situation and expressed presence of place. Comportment denotes the visual, spatial, and mental relationships that people perceive, construct, and experience between buildings, settings, objects, and selves. Comportment treats the ways in which people stand in relationship to one another and the worlds they inhabit; it is an evocation of the etiquette of everyday life. The lens of comportment scrutinizes both the exterior and interior domains of the town house. The ways in which the house visually addresses the street or its rooms and bodily relates to them (in placement, importance, architectural decoration, and furnishings) provide material signposts that people use to establish themselves in relationship both to household spaces and to one another. Circumstance, similarly, denotes specific individual and community associations invested in buildings and their settings. Comportment defines a general process centered on the balance of everyday social relationships; circumstance is about how the visible and material world reflects that balance (or imbalance, depending on your perspective). Circumstance refers to the individual design and construction of houses or groups of houses and their subsequent use. Circumstance is where the discovery of context begins.[6]

Artifacts and their settings function as sites for the exchange of symbolic actions, the content of which, reflected in the material world, remains open to negotiation and multiple, intersecting interpretive possibilities. Three brief and very different examples illustrate the layering of circumstance and comportment. North Square in Boston, Massachusetts, provides insight into contexts for individual buildings, their neighborhood and locale, and the place they occupy in the wider topographical and chronological contexts of urban housing and domestic life in the eighteenth-century North Atlantic rim. A portfolio of house plans compiled by New Castle, Delaware, attorney Kensey Johns in the late 1780s, coupled with the house he built on the town's courthouse square, reveals his thought process in architectural design and personal choice. Johns, an affluent and politically connected member of the elite, could afford choices open to few of his fellow citizens. But the range of design options available to him and his family and the ways in which those spaces and appearances architecturally reinforced their public personas were broadly understood in his local community and in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world of sociability and gentility. Finally, Caroline Burgwin's memoir of her childhood residence in Bristol, England, introduces the possibilities of an architectural history based on the ways people used and experienced buildings. It is this last framework, an experiential approach to the study of city houses, that guides this book.

North Square in Boston illustrates the ways we can construct multiple contexts or embedded landscapes through the lenses of presence of place, situation, comportment, and circumstance. Although two of the city's oldest extant houses endure as house museums, the physical remains of North Square's colonial and early national housing stock have been swept away. Still, linking buildings to documents is one component of this study; how that practice works can be seen in a reading of North Square.

North Square (formerly Clark's Square) stands in one of the city's oldest and most heavily rebuilt neighborhoods, located a few blocks to the north of the Massachusetts colonial State House. The irregular layout of North Square and the North End at the close of the eighteenth century followed older topographical imperatives based on natural landscape features and property lines dating to the earliest phase of colonial settlement. Formed by the intersection of a spur from Fish Street (the North End's principal wharfside thoroughfare) and Moon and Garden Court Streets (two block-long lanes opening off Fleet Street), the eighteenth-century streetscape of North Square centered on a spacious, sloping open triangle of ground situated one street in from the city waterfront. The location of a former market, home to a royal governor, and the scene of colonial riots, North Square emerged at the close of the eighteenth century as a neighborhood in transition. Home to artisan, shopkeeper, and merchant families and Boston notables like Paul Revere and the Reverend John Lathrop, North Square and its surrounding streets presented a diverse array of town house designs.[7]

A tax list enumerating the size and appearance of buildings at the close of the eighteenth century presents a first snapshot of North Square, its North End environs, and a sense of the circumstance of the Revere and Pierce-Hichborn Houses. The majority of dwellings were of wood construction, a mode of urban building widely shared with other New England seaport cities, such as Salem and Newburyport, but frowned upon in more distant cities, like Philadelphia, where wood was equated with fire. More than two-thirds of the town houses in the North End were of timber construction; the rest included an equal mix of houses noted as either brick or "wood and brick," the latter likely referring to the practice of building town houses with frame street and backyard elevations and brick walls facing neighboring buildings on either side. The assessors recorded the application of "roughcast," or stucco, to four of the enumerated wooden houses, a finish that could be scored or pebbled to suggest a higher quality of construction or simply mask the scars of additions and alterations. North End town houses were nearly all either two or three stories tall. Although the numbers of two- and three-story houses were nearly equal, sharp differences emerge in the relationship between building height and material. Only one in three of the frame houses stood three stories high, compared to the three-in-five ratio for brick dwellings. Brick houses, similarly, tended to be larger in area than frame dwellings, averaging 764 square feet on a floor, compared to the 690 square feet of wood and wood-and-brick residences.[8]

Notations on building material, elevation, and area, however, do not fully convey the architectural relationships visible in the North End at the close of the eighteenth century. Although heavily redeveloped in the nineteenth century, the North End retains a handful of the town houses recorded in the 1798 tax. Two of these, the Paul Revere House and the Pierce-Hichborn House, both in North Square, provide a powerful visual sense of the architectural contrasts and tensions found in the North End's oldest extant housing. The task is to understand the two dwellings individually, then relative to each other and, finally, to the larger building traditions that shaped them.

Erected circa 1681, the L-shaped Revere House (acquired only at the end of the eighteenth century by the Revere family) replaced an earlier dwelling destroyed by fire in 1679 (see Figure 1.2). Following regional framing traditions identified with early Massachusetts Bay timber construction, the main block of the two-story dwelling consisted of four structural bays demarcated by heavy framing posts that jutted into the room. Overhead, heavy summer beams emphasized the physical structure that defined the single ground-floor room dominated by its chimney bay and adjoining lobby entrance. These and other architectural features ally the Revere House with other colonial New England frame houses documented in a variety of rural and village settings. Other details reveal the building's urban character. Lot limitations and the desire to present the most impressive elevation to the street left the builders with little alternative for service spaces other than behind the house. Although some later-seventeenth-century Boston town houses reportedly made use of separate kitchen buildings, common practice favored service ells like the two-story extension behind the Revere House. The setting of the Revere House also contributed to the installation of double casement windows in the rear elevation; the proximity of the neighbor's dwelling discouraged their more usual placement in the gable.[9]

The overall appearance of the Revere House underscores an almost ambivalent regard for the building's urban identity. Erected in wood as a freestanding structure, the house squandered street frontage with its double-fronted elevation and harked back to the provincial building practices of the Massachusetts Bay region. Timber-frame and lobby-entry-plan houses were the mainstay of Marblehead's early colonial streetscapes. Similar buildings continued to be erected in nearby Salem and Newburyport into the mid-eighteenth century. The colonial architectural context for judging the Revere House was founded in the buildings of other Massachusetts Bay port towns like Ipswich; here, the streets remain populated with seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century town houses—each built of wood, each standing alone on its lot, each drawing on and reinforcing the decorative vocabulary of its provincial circumstance. Thus, the Revere House was urban by virtue of its setting in Massachusetts's principal colonial seaport, but the use of molded-edge clapboard, front jetty with carved pendants, and interior plastered ceilings did not render the appearance of the house so much urban as regionally fashionable in a provincial British-American townscape.[10]

Three stories tall, the brick Pierce-Hichborn House, built about 1711, stood three doors down the square from the Revere House and offered a very different image (see Figure 1.3). The original house plan consisted of a central passage with a single heated room on either side. In this arrangement, the ground-floor front room might have been occupied variously as a shop room, a separate tenant's lodging, or a widow's apartment. With its narrow elevation to the street, facade fronting on a compact private passageway, neat but plain common-bond brickwork, decorative belt courses, and large sash windows, the Pierce-Hichborn House reflected early stirrings of the "provincial renaissance" architecture of colonial Boston. "Provincial renaissance" recognizes both the presence of house-building artisans as carriers of innovative ideas (drawn from a combination of academic and vernacular Anglo-Netherlandish and New England design sources) and the desires of clients, a nascent petite bourgeoisie ranging from government officials to well-to-do shopkeepers with the resources to commission and acquire stylish dwellings.[11]

The architectural language of classicism was readily appropriated into vernacular building strategies through the incorporation of balance and symmetry into the design of street elevations and the installation of decorative trim surrounding doors and windows or elaborating fireplace walls. More problematic were the kinds of spaces that lay behind fashionable appearances. In this context, the Pierce-Hichborn House represents one of many competing architectural alternatives—all centered on dwellings intended for the swelling ranks of an eighteenth-century "middling sort."[12]

A distillation of the larger debate surrounding eighteenth-century urban dwelling choices and informing the design of the Pierce-Hichborn House can be found in the range and variety of modest London residences being erected at the same time. A set of assumptions posited by architectural historian John Summerson continues to shape the interpretation of architectural possibilities for housing London's middling sort from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Summerson grounded the development of Georgian London in the speculative ventures of post-1666 Great Fire entrepreneurs like Nicholas Barbon, whose engagement with the architectural expression of standardization and regularity translated into a conceit for eighteenth-century English society. The house form popularly associated with these concerns was a residence two rooms deep with a side stair passage and chimneys placed against the lateral walls. Often a third room, or "closet," extended from the rear elevation of the house. Although the precise origins for this dwelling type remain clouded, Netherlandish influences are one likely source for these "Barbon" houses.[13]

In plan, the middling range of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Netherlandish town houses paralleled and anticipated the internal organization of this particular design of English town house even as their exterior appearances expressed a markedly different sense of the urban landscape (see Figure 1.4). Houses one room in width and two or more rooms in depth were a common fixture on the streets of Amsterdam and other Netherlandish cities. Number 13 Rapensburg, Amsterdam, built in 1614 and modified through the eighteenth century, incorporated two rooms placed back-to-back with a side passage extending the full depth of the house. The entry portion of the passage claimed nearly one-half of the area of the front of the house before it met a stairwell and then narrowed dramatically into a corridor leading past the back room to the yard. The house as first built also contained features that would remain foreign to English urban settings. Jambless fireplaces heated the rooms, exposed joists with deeply carved braces jutted from the ceiling, a hoist projected from the attic gable, and enclosed alcoves for beds claimed space in nearly every room. By the eighteenth century the house at 13 Rapenburg had been remodeled with a new emphasis on the creation of more highly ornamented interior spaces. Room uses were more precisely defined and their ornamentation made more elaborate in keeping with their relative importance within the house. Stairs were brought into the open and finished with fine plasterwork, and the back parlor (or achterhuis) emerged as a dining room and one of the most beautifully finished rooms in the house. These changes articulated a culture of sociability, accumulation, and display that anticipated and subsequently paralleled urban housing developments across the English Channel.[14]

About the same time London town houses combining Netherlandish and classical design elements were making their debut in the city and its suburbs, hydrographer and chronicler of trades Joseph Moxon published an alternative plan—one that similarly emphasized regularity and standardization in external appearance and fittings but suggested a significantly different internal arrangement, with a central chimney stack dividing the body of the house, a stair placed adjacent to the stack, and a narrow entry running through the house to the back lot (see Figure 1.5). Although the Moxon plan has been deemed a relic of postmedieval London building practices and held in counterpoint to the Barbon house, surviving buildings suggest that these houses remained popular through the eighteenth century. London town house plans recorded from the 1690s through the 1720s show the presence and variety of these center-chimney houses as they stood throughout the city (see Figure 1.6).[15]

London builders also drew on other design options. Two of these alternatives, which probably enjoyed only modest use in London, gained broader circulation in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American urban settings. The first of these options included dwellings that placed the stair between the partition wall dividing the rooms and the jamb of the back chimney (see Figure 1.7). This compact arrangement appears to have been favored in circumstances where flexibility in the use of ground-floor spaces was an important consideration. Several of these houses stand in Deptford High Street on the south side of the Thames, east of the city center. In each example, the house suggests a pattern of use that included a ground-floor shop and upper-story living quarters. Although the influence of this arrangement on the town houses of Boston and other northern New England seaport towns appears minimal, it did emerge as one of the dominant house forms of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other mid-Atlantic cities.[16]

More immediate to understanding the Pierce-Hichborn House is a second family of dwellings located throughout greater London that placed the stair in the center of the house between the front and rear rooms (see Figure 1.8). In the majority of recorded examples, an interior passage extended past the front room to the stair in the middle of the house. The stair hall itself took one of two forms; it either reached all the way back to the party wall or was brought forward to create space for an unheated room or closet behind the stair. Although the most commonly recorded variants of this arrangement incorporated an internal entry, others made use of external passages or walkways that extend from the street. The builders of the Pierce-Hichborn House clearly embraced a version of this option, as did designers and clients in other eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American towns, including not only those of northern New England but also those of Charleston, South Carolina.[17]

The four alternatives exhibit strikingly different modes of access between interior and exterior spaces. The Moxon plans reveal a much more segmented quality that clearly divided the front and back of the house. One advantage in this segmented division was the possibility of dividing the Moxon house into front and back tenements. The Barbon plan, on the other hand, offered the option of using the rooms on a single floor en suite, an arrangement that facilitated acting out the increasingly popular rituals of polite sociability. The flow of space in houses where the stair was tucked into the back room was more open and public and was part of an arrangement that simplified movement between rooms on each floor but rendered access between stories more awkward. Finally, central-stair plans of the type exemplified by the Pierce-Hichborn House offered a house where front and back spaces were divided by an entry, such that the front room could lend itself for use as a shop or private parlor.[18]

The builders of the Pierce-Hichborn House took the same approach as many of their London contemporaries and erected a house that looked to a variety of possibilities and then drew on the one that best answered the demands of situation and circumstance. Their solution endures, not as an example of a house "type," but as artifactual evidence documenting a dynamic process of architectural design. The theme of circumstance complicates the interior of the Pierce-Hichborn House and its visual relationship to the Revere House. In their comportment, the two dwellings exhibit very different building sensibilities that describe two divergent worldviews forced into convergence by circumstance. While the Revere House draws on traditions of timber-frame construction, siting, and house plan closely identified with seventeenth-century New England villages and rural settlements, the Pierce-Hichborn House responds to building patterns associated with eighteenth-century English cities and towns and, specifically, the rise of a well-to-do merchant and artisan society.

If the Revere House cued itself to the visual culture of the provincial hinterlands of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the Pierce-Hichborn House was connected to a community defined, not by locality, but by "middling" urban sensibilities caught up in the exchange relations of the North Atlantic rim. Both houses, however, stood in contrast to their neighbors just up Garden Court Street. The Foster-Hutchinson and Clark-Frankland Houses presented classically inspired symmetrical elevations to the street, and to their neighbors and passersby in North Square (see Figure 1.9). The double-pile Foster-Hutchinson House, with its massive pilasters capped with Ionic capitals, included a balustraded cornice and second-floor balcony centered on an arched opening leading into either an upper-story salon or a drawing room. The Clark-Frankland House asserted its stylish identity through devices such as plat bands separating the stories, a scrolled pediment entry, chimney closets with windows, and a row of alternating pedimented and segmentally arched dormer windows. Like the Foster-Hutchinson House, the Clark-Frankland mansion announced its double-pile, center-passage plan to the street. Self-assuredly stylish and aggressively elite, these houses found their singular counterparts in every eighteenth-century English provincial seaport and market town on both sides of the Atlantic, from the shipbuilding center of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast to the lowcountry entrepöt of Charleston, South Carolina.[19]

The Pierce-Hichborn and Revere Houses paled in scale and finish compared to the great mansions that stood at the top of North Square and extended up Garden Court Street just as they dominated the two small frame town houses that separated them. Similarly, the architectural vista on the opposite side of the square from the perspective of the Revere House, Pierce-Hichborn House, and their neighbors comprehended backyards, work yards, and tenements associated with commercial premises lining Fish Street and fronting the city's wharves. Thus, the visual juxtapositions that defined North Square in the late 1700s were vivid. At one end of the scale stood the Reverend John Lathrop's three-story, 2,000-square-foot, brick-and-frame house. Occupying the site of the old "church of the Mathers," it overlooked the square and Eliza Phillis's modest two-story, 294-square-foot dwelling sandwiched between the Revere and Pierce-Hichborn Houses. By the 1820s, however, the impact of those distinctions diminished; North Square town houses grew more uniform through alterations and changing uses such as increasingly down-scale and subdivided shops and tenements. The Revere House was raised a full story, and its interior arrangements were updated; the Pierce-Hichborn House received a new, two-story brick kitchen and more fashionable finishes for its old interiors. Meanwhile, the heirs to the middling artisans, well-to-do merchants, and urban elites who occupied North Square through the eighteenth century sought housing elsewhere. The wealthiest relocated to Beacon Hill terraces; those of more modest means found new accommodations suited to social expectations and financial realities in Boston's dramatically growing southern and western suburbs. In the emerging city landscape of early-nineteenth-century Boston, architectural comportment assumed neighborhood proportions as urban settings grew increasingly segmented and distinct.[20]

The houses of North Square, standing and vanished, yield multiple insights into the eighteenth-century urban landscape. First, they provide a cross section of the domestic buildings crowding one city's colonial waterfront. North Square's architectural mix ranged from small frame cottages tucked into surrounding lanes and alleys to some of Boston's grandest town houses fronting the streets leading into the square. Second, the houses recorded in and around North Square suggest the mixed planning options individuals pursued in compact situations. Third, the range of houses in terms of material, size, and elevation indicates the dramatic variation of streetscapes in a small area and through the larger city. Finally, in their absence, both the smallest town house and largest mansion inform us of how little we actually know about the urban environment and the ways it acted on perception, action, and imagination. Comportment and circumstance, the visual and spatial relationships between buildings and their settings, describe the substance and significance of those processes.

The houses of Garden Court Street and North Square, however, were visually and experientially linked through their urban circumstances. All of the buildings stood in view of one another just as they stood in sight of the back lots of the houses overlooking Fish Street and the harbor with its boatyards, docks, and floating city of ships. What we discern in those visual relationships are nested sets of larger contexts. The houses define an environment where both difference and familiarity reign. As distinct as these buildings are from one another, they are also united in their shaping of a particular cityscape defined by qualities of juxtaposition. These houses interact with one another. The Clark-Frankland House echoes the sensibilities of the Foster-Hutchinson House even as it diminishes the visual impact of the Revere House. The Pierce-Hichborn House cleaves to the Revere House in the sense that both houses document the material position of a successful and influential artisan community. But they fracture along the lines of artisans' representation of self. The older Revere House draws its visual and spatial associations from local practice and significance; the Pierce-Hichborn House connects with an architectural vision linked to notions of urban identity more than of place.[21]

The relationships between the houses of North Square underscore two problems in thinking about town houses. First is the question of process. How did builders design a house? The second is one of experience. How did people encounter and know these buildings in the course of everyday life? The examples of Kensey Johns and Caroline Burgwin offer insight into these difficulties.

Recognizing the interplay between regional traditions and transatlantic metropolitan values in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century buildings erected in cities throughout the North Atlantic rim suggests a strategy that looks at individual buildings as options exercised by people making and communicating a sense of self and their environment. Whatever the physical and economic constraints on the planning and construction of actual dwellings, town house builders chose their solutions within an identifiable range of options. The idea of choice—the selection of options from that array of possibilities—stresses the myriad ways in which people conceived of, erected, used, and attached meaning to the places they lived, visited, and saw. Choice does not require an encyclopedic knowledge of town house types, but a familiarity with how the parts of houses work toward varying social and functional purposes. Choice softens the hard edge of type and reveals the suppleness of designers' minds negotiating the variables of client, artisan, function, site, and situation.[22]

While some town houses clearly document the triumph of one set of possibilities and their associated cultural values over another, most fall somewhere in between and reflect a process characterized by choice and constraint. Clients and builders drew on a range of design options, modifying them to suit both their expressive needs and the limitations imposed by cost, site, craft, and community perception. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the 1789 town house overlooking the public square in New Castle, Delaware, that Kensey Johns, attorney and state chancellor, designed for his family and legal practice (see Figure 1.10). Johns's design choices were exceptional. As members of the wealthy elite, he and his family enjoyed the means to undertake a house far beyond the expectations of the vast majority of city residents anywhere in the late-eighteenth-century United States. Johns's atypical choices are bound to broader town house design processes by the fact that every builder made choices about housing. Unfortunately, the more usual range of choices is documented only in rare instances.[23]