A large amount of Shield Park is given up to townhouses, sharing walls or semi-detatched on streets like Jericho, San Alonzo, and Clinton. In the United States, such townhouses (also known as row houses) were imported from terrace developments in London or Paris. Here, a lot of development is parallel across the Atlantic Ocean. Leyton in East London contains a very similar building style, in a planned development that was not highly dependent on terrain.
While Britain and America are wildly different, the 19th century featured a more unified design style- in architecture, building footprint, and road layout. Because of this, and similarities between apartment complex design and location, this time can be seen as a sort of convergence of the two countries in terms of their style. And while the comparison between both countries' urban design history begins to diverge soon after, this is the point in time in which Shield Park is set. However, the townhouse is not originally from the 19th century- and was first introduced from London and Paris into New York in the 17th century. The Place des Vosges, a planned square in central Paris in Marais and finished in 1612, is an early example of the style, and a number of Manhattan's Midtown and Uptown blocks feature them. Throughout the years townhouses can be seen as a telltale sign of city planning in Britain, France, Canada, and the US. In the United States, they are most often built with brownstone and brick, but they often adopt elements of vernacular architecture in cities like Penang and Paris.
Row houses, however, have since fallen out of favor, and are mostly limited in the Americas by the western line of Winnipeg-New Orleans. Given that the inspiration for Barstone falls mostly outside of those lines, the choice to create rows of townhouses suggests that this part of town is significantly older than the rest of the town, and is likely older than towns surrounding it in the region. This same effect can be noticed in the oldest neighborhoods of Denver, Colorado.
Also present is a number of apartment developments, some of these are built with amenities and parking that suggest that they were built by the city and some suggest that they were built privately. Typically, privately built apartments are larger and shorter, to increase the value and because of the difficulty of obtaining a height permit in an old area of town.
This neighborhood is served by a larger commercial area, a hospital, a park, a school, and a small museum featuring a historic mock-tudor style house. It is preserved with premises and has visitor access.
Thanks for reading,
Jacob
