A row house built in brick as an income-producing property was a rare occurrence in mid-nineteenth-century Providence. Even as the Greek Revival was fading statistically, this building, which positioned the principal parlor of each unit across the full width of the second story, lent a somewhat sophisticated urban presence to a city that generally favored detached wood-frame houses. The five attached single-family dwellings provided income for the heirs of Thomas Poynton Ives, who himself had built another brick row about thirty years earlier across the street at numbers 270-276. Tallman & Bucklin provided both design and construction. Rented to upper-income individuals and families (including Ives family relatives), the row’s units were gradually converted to multiple apartments in the early twentieth century, a trend now in gradual reversal.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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