Baltimore Builder Charles Duff's Ode To The Row House

Tom's next guest is the urban planner, builder and architectural historian, Charles Duff. As the president of Jubilee Baltimore since 1987, Mr. Duff has helped to revive dozens of Baltimore neighborhoods and is an expert on the city's architectural evolution. He’s written a book about how the homes in Baltimore and cities in other parts of the world came to look as they do.

The book is called The North Atlantic Cities. Among its many revelations, we learn that the row house, long a ubiquitous mainstay of the Baltimore cityscape, was invented in Amsterdam in the era of the great Renaissance painters Vermeer and Rembrandt.

How did row houses get from there to here, and why are they also a staple in cities like London and Washington, but less common in places like Paris or Minneapolis?

Charles Duff will also be speaking about his book tonight in a free online event for the Enoch Pratt Library's Writers Live! series, co-sponsored by The Ivy Bookshop. For a link to the event, click here.

He joins us now on Zoom…

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