This collection of pictures by Austin Hodges – the last remaining houses from rows and blocks that are otherwise demolished – is slightly misdescribed in the linked article. I don’t believe that any of those buildings are half of a house. Rather, some of them were part of rows that were designed as an overall whole.
There are two basic approaches to rows of houses: design a series of houses that are identical or have trivial differences, or design the group as a single building visually that happens to be a group of buildings in reality. The first scheme is generally more common, but the second has produced some interesting results. The picture above is LaGrange Terrace on Lafayette Place (now Lafayette Street) in New York in 1895. At that time, the conversion to commercial use had already taken place, with some modification to the northmost house on the right. Today, only four of the nine houses remain, but even now the group looks like a single large building more than it does separate houses.
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