Where I live in Castor Gardens, I've noticed that many blocks of rowhomes have a break in the middle. My wife grew up around the corner from our house, and she and her family refer to the break as a breezeway, so I'll defer to that name even though I'm not sure that is the correct term. Essentially each side of the street winds up with 4 corner houses instead of 2. The houses at the breezeway have side windows, so they are not like the missing houses seen in some parts of the city where the house next to gap has the remainder of the missing house's interior walls on the outside. The breezeways were obviously designed to be a feature of the house and the block.

Does anyone know whether a breezeway serves any engineering or architectural purpose, or are they for aesthetics?

Also, I was wondering about airlite versus straight-through designs. Does anyone know why there was such a shift away from straight-throughs toward airlites? Personally, I like how straight-throughs look, and they usually are more spacious than neighboring airlites. My wife's best friend lives on the even side of the 30xx block of Knorr, and her house is awesome. When you compare our airlite to her straight-through, we have a bigger front yard from patio to sidewalk, while she has a house that was built with a finished basement and 200 additional square feet of living space. My one basement wall is cinder block, while the other is some kind of crumbly sand-like plaster material covering the actual load bearing wall. Where I grew up on the 45xx of Shelmire was all airlites, but long ago I dated a girl on the 34xx of Shelmire, and her parents' house is a straight through. I know the different styles were built at different times, but I was wondering why there is such variation in such small area.

On a walk from Acme on the Blvd to my wife's friend's house, I noticed the differing styles of rowhomes on the 30xx block of Unruh. It appears that there are four different styles of house on that block. On the odd numbered side of the street, you have houses that are 10-15 feet higher at the roof line when you get near Hawthorne than when you started at Battersby. One the even side you have the "Chestnut Hill Style" near Battersby, which then changes to the boxier style you see on Unruh closer to Frankford. Our friend on Knorr found the original sales brochure to her house (which she grew up in) and it referred to those houses as Chestnut Hill Style due to the stone exteriors.

One last observation - it's pretty wild to check out the photos at phillyhistory.org and see some of the streets around here being built. The houses are brick shells without windows or doors and the streets and sidewalks are dirt or mud with the workers walking up long wooden planks to get the interiors of the houses.

I too have heard the gaps referred to as breezeways. Why they were put there ... I don't know.

I too find myself cruising around just looking at the different designs of the houses. I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone. I do think that it has more to do with the age of the home over anything else. I don't know if straight through's were still being built after the 40's. Not sure though. Mine was built in 1936 and it's an Airlite.

I grew up on 1000 Cheltenham Ave. in the 60's & 70's and we had a breezeway on each side of the block. We were told when we were kids that it was for fire reasons to allow access for the firemen to get around the back in a hurry. What did we know, we were kids. We couldn't understand why all the blocks in the neighborhood didn't have them. We were also told that it was against the law to block the access. Again, what did we know, we were kids.

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Fire safety maybe? To let people get out from behind the houses in an emergency -- that might be my guess.