These three homes caught my eye because they looked so similar. Not identical, but pretty close.
Standard floor plans and cookie cutter homes are not so unusual these days, or even during the post-war build-out of the country’s first suburbs. But it is less common to see three adjacent homes built in the early 1900s look so similar, even down to the same color scheme.
It turns out that all three structures are on a single lot. There is actually a fourth multi-family home behind the one on the left, and some garages along the back of the property.
I’ve seen similar homes spread throughout a neighborhood or town, but don’t ever remember seeing this before. I’ll have to be on the lookout for other examples of repeated designs in turn of the century homes.
That’s Manchester!
The house I grew up in (in Evanston, IL) was one of four on adjacent lots that were clearly all built to a standard pattern between WWI and the Great Depression. At least one was mirror-reversed, and later modifications had made them less than identical, but they were all basically the same. The windows and rooms lined up so perfectly that when we sat down to eat we could look across the narrow yard into the neighbors’ dining room to see what they were having for dinner.