The double houses in Buffalo, New York, are fine examples of what is termed Industrial Vernacular housing.
...
The attraction of the double house, evident in even the earliest advertising, was that it was a house, and made the owner a property owner. The second flat's rent revenue could be applied to the payment of the mortgage. This arrangement also allowed family generations to live in convenient proximity. As owner occupied houses, tenants could be more selectively chosen for compatibility or friendship. Some families bought doubles together, gathering equity to move on.
Before 1890, Buffalo existed well within its 1854 city limits; the built up area comprised the 1832 city, and stretched out along the Niagara River north and northwest on the Erie Canal, the former Village of Black Rock, and along railway and road routes east and northeast from the center, extensions of Ellicott's 1804 radial street pattern and of Iroquois trails.
Not unlike Chicago, Buffalo on the eastern end of the navigable Great Lakes was also at the time a lumbering center. The Goodyear Lumber Company, a local firm, exploited the forest resources of northern and western Pennsylvania. Their Buffalo and Susquehanna Railroad from Galeton, Pennsylvania, terminated in the alluvial meanders of South Buffalo. Down the canal to the north, the new city of North Tonawanda became the "Lumber City" because of the canal-based lumber mills lining the Niagara River there.
Buffalo never had a fire to provoke a fireproof brick building code, unlike nearby Toronto.
...
The double house is the modal house in Buffalo, providing one third of the housing structures in this city, and an even greater percentage of housing units. The two floor/two flat houses in Buffalo were built during the economic and industrial heyday of the city, from about 1890 to 1929.
Double housing represented a step up from the inadequate and "tenement" housing occupied by certain older immigrant groups near the city center, e.g., the Irish in "Canal town," and the Jewish in the near east side (whose place was later taken by the newer Italian immigrants and African Americans respectively, who followed the move out after World War II.)
In Buffalo, double houses rather than apartment buildings were constructed by real estate developers such as the following:
- William Fitzpatrick, credited posthumously with "building" South Buffalo
- Speculators such as those who built the comfortable doubles of the Hamlin Park neighborhood in Buffalo's east side
- Jewish builders and realtors of North Buffalo
...
The double house was institutionalized by the zoning of large areas of the city into R-2 (residential, two-unit) areas, revealed in the present Buffalo city zoning maps. These areas were never one hundred percent doubles; recent city planning encourages the conversion of doubles into single homes as part of gentrification.
Owners have also left the city with a supply of double rental units which have provided income to support their moves to the still more desirable single house. Absentee landlords and the lack of care by renters has led to widespread destruction and abandonment of these buildings, especially in the older inner areas of Buffalo. Yet to be evaluated is the surprising persistence of these doubles, depending on location.
