People who’ve been with this website for a while might recall the Spite House. The long-since-demolished, super-skinny, New York City house was constructed in 1882 by real estate developer Patrick McQuade. In order to start building a new project, he had to obtain an adjoining parcel of land owned by fellow developer Joseph Richardson. When McQuade’s $1K offer to buy the parcel was rejected, he erected a four story apartment (picture below) on the 5′ lot he did own–motivated primarily by the desire to piss Richardson off. McQuade’s anger-fueled construction led many to call the place the “Spite House.”
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Turns out that 52 years before McQuade built his building, another tiny house was constructed in the anger school of architecture. In 1830, a tiny home in Alexandria, VA–once called America’s narrowest by “Ripley’s Believe it Or Not” (we’re not sure how credible that source is)–was built. It’s name? The Spite House.
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The origins of Alexandria Spite House weren’t quite as spiteful as McQuade’s creation. The house (pictured at very top), which is really just an enclosed alleyway, was then-owner John Hollensbury’s way of keeping horses and loiterers from occupying the unused space between his two other homes. The house is comically wide at 7′; it’s 25′ deep, has two floors and is 325 sq ft overall.
In 2008, the NY Times did a profile on the place. At that time, Colleen and Jack Sammis owned the place. Though the occupants prior to the Sammis’ had used the space as their primary residence for 25 years, the new owners, like the owners of many cool small spaces, used the home as a pied-à-terre. Their main home is 3200 sq ft (likely with a garage bigger than the Spite House).
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As it happens, there have been dozens of spite houses big and small built around the world, such as this one in Boston (above. aka “Skinny House”). Wikipedia has many more if you’re interested.
While the origins of these spaces are admittedly dubious, they do show a great deal of architectural ingenuity, utilizing spaces that wouldn’t otherwise be used (granted, often, and intentionally, to the chagrin of others). These homes harken to simpler times, when all you needed was a grudge and some bricks to start building. We imagine modern building codes with all of their rules about neighbor rights ended the era of the intentional spite house. Fear not, there are surely many unintentional ones–blocking once unobstructed views, creating eyesores, driving up/down property values–going up every day.
