Musing on Mews

The Lure of the Littlest Alleys

Have a look at the little black gate in the picture above. What's behind it? This is what's behind it.

In Philadelphia this is called a mews. It's a block from Fitler square. I define a mews as a narrow service alley connecting to several buildings.

There are a lot of these little alleys in the area around Fitler square. There's a reason for that. Mews are an efficient way to provide rear or side access to houses or businesses that otherwise would not have it. In addition to residents and their contractors, they are popular with linemen stringing fiber-optic cable. They are also popular with fire fighters, who, in any remotely serious fire, are always looking for multiple angles of attack.

Access, however, is by foot. These mews are too narrow for a car, or a van, or a Ford F-350 pickup truck. 

Here's one that's a little closer to Rittenhouse square. It's the narrowest mews I know of. 

There's one that's almost this narrow in Old City, near Christ Church. It's called Grindstone Alley.

History of a Word

You may be wondering where the peculiar little word mews comes from. Here's the short version. The kings of England used to keep hawks for hunting. When moulting, or mewing, these creatures were not used for hunting and were kept in confinement in a mews, which I suppose we could also call a hawk coop. One day, King Henry VIII decided to build the royal stables (for horses) on the site of the royal mews (the hawks were moved to other accommodations). He also decided to call the new royal stables the royal mews. Hey, he was the king. 

Fast forward a few centuries to the arrival of motor vehicles. As the wealthy in cities like London abandoned their horses, a question arose: what to do with the stables behind the mansions, which generally contained not only housing for horses but also carriage houses for coaches and, upstairs, housing for the people who looked after the horses. All of this would be accessible by a small road, or perhaps driveway, leading to a street. The first answer was garages for cars; the second was to create a line of small houses. On this side of the Atlantic, you can see the result of this evolution in Greenwich Village's Washington Mews.

In Philly, the word mews is occasionally used for similar developments, but it is primarily used for the little alleys we have been talking about. How did that transition take place? I don't know, but I do have a guess.  Perhaps we owe it all to an imaginative real-estate agent who wasn't in love with the word alley, which after all does have a whiff of the utilitarian (think rotting garbage). The word mews, on the other hand, gives us England's royal pageantry, with horses clopping along pulling an antique coach and a monarch on the way to address the opening of Parliament. 

Meanwhile, back in Rittenhouse, here's a mews that actually seems to see regular foot traffic from the residents, making it a bit more like the mews in London. Note the side door in the left wall and the building in the background, in what appears to be a small courtyard at the end of the alley.

And here's a mews with some workmen just finishing up for the day. They're loading their truck, which is parked behind me on the street.

Not all mews are in great shape. The one below is next to the Good Karma cafe, across from the Goddard School. Much as I enjoy the greenery, it strikes me that this passageway is probably impassable.

Why would you let your second means of access, and egress, be blocked? I suspect it's another gift from the Bad Days, back when it looked a lot like Philadelphia was dying. And perhaps it was. People were certainly concerned about crime, and didn't want to offer the local burglars any more angles of attack than was absolutely necessary. And then there were the homeless people, who might see a nice cozy mews as a lovely place to bed down for the night. So let's make the mews impassable. 

Legal Entanglements

Changes like this can be irreversible. My understanding is that these mews are generally owned by the abutters, the people who live directly next to the mews. Each owner gives an easement for a few feet along the interior line of his lot. These chunks are added together to create a continuous pathway, and  the easement is granted to all the cooperating homeowners. 

If the mews is disused and possibly blocked, the next step is for one of the landowners to decide he's going to take back his piece of the pathway, extending his back yard and blocking the pathway with brick walls. 

Let me digress for a moment on the subject of crime. Yes, there was a war, back then. That war is over. There are still criminals and crime, most notably the porch pirates who steal packages from your front stoop.

Let's end on a more positive note. Above is a mews that extends all the way through the middle of a block, from one street to the next. If you look carefully, you can see a car in the next street. I have a feeling that a lot of the truncated mews we see started off like this, and then got whittled away.

However, I'm not one to spend a lot of time imagining a return to some golden age in the distant past. First of all, it's not going to happen. Second, using what has come down to us often creates some very interesting design problems - problems that can lead to new thinking. 

We aren't owned by the past, but we do need to deal with it. If we think that way, I think the future starts to become very interesting, and possibly quite a lot of fun.

See also Permeable Blocks, Streets Without Joy, Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, A Few Deft Touches for Back Streets.