Description

Athenaeum Row is located next to the Atheneum lending library on Benefit Street and was designed in 1845 by Architect Russell Warren, one of the two designers of the Providence Arcade. Brick row houses are rather atypical of residential architecture in Providence at the time. This was Providence’s introduction to the “English plan” row house similar to those built in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The block consists of five attached brick houses each four-and-one-half-stories high.“ The principal stories were not at entrance level, as was then common, but at the next level, corresponding to the English first story or Continental piano nobile." Built for the heirs of Thomas Poynton Ives, the five homes were leased out as apartments in the 1920’s. Ives himself had built four row houses a few decades earlier, across the street at 270-276 Benefit.