The handsome three-story walk-ups scattered through the Fan and Museum District have a name problem — and a fascinating second life as condominiums. What they really are, where the word “tenement” comes from, why they were converted, and what to check before you buy.
The handsome little three-story walk-ups scattered through the Fan and Museum District have a name problem and a fascinating second life. Let’s talk about what they really are, where the loaded word “tenement” comes from, why developers carved them into condominiums, and what to look for before you buy one.
Walk the Fan or the Museum District long enough and you’ll start to notice them tucked in among the rowhouses: modest, dignified, three-story brick apartment buildings. A shared front door, a central stair, a handful of flats stacked up on either side. They’re older, they’re charming, and if you’ve spent any time reading real estate listings, you’ve probably seen one described — sometimes proudly, sometimes nervously — as an old “tenement” building.
That word does a lot of heavy lifting, and most of it is wrong. And here’s the part that matters if you’re shopping today: a huge share of these buildings are no longer apartments at all. They’ve been converted into individually-owned condominiums, which makes them one of the more attainable, character-rich ways to own in two of Richmond’s best neighborhoods.
So let’s do what we do here: get the history right, get the vocabulary right, understand why these buildings became condos — and figure out what actually separates a great one from a merely okay one.
Short answer: technically maybe, culturally no, and it’s worth understanding why.
The strict definition is neutral. The word “tenement” got its most precise meaning from New York’s housing law, where — going back to the Tenement House Act of 1867 — a tenement is essentially any building occupied by three or more families living independently and doing their own cooking on the premises, sharing common halls and stairs. That’s it. By that bone-dry legal definition, a huge share of early apartment buildings in America — including plenty in the Fan — would technically qualify. The word originally just meant “a multi-family building,” full stop.
But the connotation is anything but neutral. Over the late 1800s and early 1900s, “tenement” became fused in the public mind with a very specific and grim picture: the desperately overcrowded, poorly lit, badly ventilated buildings of places like New York’s Lower East Side, where waves of arriving immigrants were packed onto narrow lots with inadequate plumbing and real public-health crises. By 1900, roughly two-thirds of New York City lived in tenement housing, and reformers spent a generation publicizing the squalor. The word absorbed all of that. It stopped meaning “apartment building” and started meaning “slum.”
So is it derogatory? Not by its dictionary definition — but in everyday use, yes, it carries a slur’s worth of baggage that simply doesn’t fit what was built here.
And that’s the key point about Richmond. The Fan and Museum District apartment buildings were, overwhelmingly, not that. They were built during Richmond’s prosperous westward expansion — roughly 1890 to 1930 — as respectable housing for a growing, aspirational urban middle class. Same era, wildly different intent. These weren’t cramming machines for the desperate poor; they were built to attract clerks, professionals, young couples, and small families who wanted a modern, convenient address in a fashionable neighborhood. So while a preservationist might use “tenement” in its strict technical sense, I’d gently retire the word for our local buildings. “Early-20th-century walk-up apartments” is both more accurate and more fair.
These buildings didn’t appear at random. They’re a direct product of how the Fan came to be.
The neighborhood filled in westward from downtown between about 1890 and 1930, and the engine was the streetcar. Once electric streetcar lines pushed out Broad and Main in the late 1880s, land that had been semi-rural suddenly became commutable, and development took off at a fever pitch. By around 1920, the Fan was essentially built out. The bulk of what went up was rowhouses — but speculators and builders also filled in the blocks with apartment buildings, corner stores, and churches to serve the new density.
That’s your context: these apartments were the “missing middle” of their day — a way to add households to desirable close-in blocks without a single-family footprint. (If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the exact same problem we’re trying to solve today, a century later, with ADUs and stacked condos. The Fan solved it in 1915 with a three-story brick walk-up.)
The classic form is simple and repeatable, which is why you see it everywhere once you start looking.
Three stories, no elevator — a “walk-up.” That term is literal: your legs are the elevator. In the era before elevators were standard (or affordable) in small buildings, three stories was about the practical ceiling for how high people would happily climb every day. That single constraint shaped everything.
And it created a natural hierarchy of desirability by floor. This is a detail people miss. In a walk-up, the floor you’re on mattered, and it still does:
That old logic has flipped somewhat today — now the top floor often commands a premium for its light, its views, and having no footsteps overhead — but the bones of that hierarchy are baked into these buildings, and it’s worth thinking about when you buy one.
You’ll hear the layout of these old flats described as “shotgun” or “railroad.” They’re related ideas, and both describe how the rooms are arranged, not the building itself.
Railroad (or “railroad flat”) means the rooms are lined up end-to-end in a single file, like boxcars on a train — you pass through one room to get to the next, because there’s no hallway connecting them. It was an efficient way to lay out a long, narrow unit on a long, narrow lot.
Shotgun is the same basic idea with a more colorful name: the rooms line up so directly, front door to back door, that — as the old saying goes — you could fire a shotgun straight through the house and the pellets would sail out the back without hitting a wall. One room opening directly into the next, in a straight shot.
Both layouts share the same trade-off. They’re space-efficient and they let light in at the two ends — but the middle rooms can be dark and short on privacy, since you’re walking through them to get anywhere. When you tour a converted flat with this layout, that’s the thing to feel out: how do the middle rooms live? Many beautiful renovations have solved it cleverly; some haven’t.
Here’s the pivot that turned these old rentals into something you can own. For most of the 20th century, these buildings were exactly what they were built to be — apartments, held by a single owner who collected rent. Then, especially as Richmond’s close-in neighborhoods got hot, a lot of them got converted to condominiums. Why? Follow the money, because the logic is simple and powerful.
A building is worth more sold by the unit than rented as a whole. This is the engine behind almost every conversion. If you own a 12-unit walk-up, its value as a rental is capped by the income it produces. But chop it into 12 individually-titled condos and sell them one at a time to owner-occupants, and the sum of the parts routinely exceeds the value of the whole. That spread — the “condo premium” — is the developer’s profit motive in one sentence.
And in Virginia, the mechanical cost of creating a condo is surprisingly low. Turning an apartment building into a condominium is largely a legal exercise: a competent real estate attorney drafts the “condo docs” — the Declaration, the plat/plans, and the bylaws — and registers them with the Virginia Real Estate Board. The paperwork to create the condominium can run on the order of $10,000 for a small building. Compared to the value unlocked, that’s a rounding error — which is exactly why so many of these buildings got converted.
The neighborhood tailwinds made it a no-brainer. As the Fan and Museum District became some of the most desirable addresses in the city — walkable, historic, supply-starved — demand for ownership in these blocks outran the supply of houses. Conversions fed that hunger: they created for-sale product in neighborhoods where a detached home might be out of reach, at a price point that actually works for first-time buyers, downsizers, and investors.
But — and this is the honest part — these buildings weren’t designed to be condos. This is the crux, and it’s where good conversions separate from bad ones. The best apartment buildings are designed to maximize rental revenue, which means squeezing in more, smaller units. The best condo buildings are the opposite — buyers want bigger units with real rooms. A rental floor plan carved straight into condos can leave you with a “two-bedroom” where a bedroom is so small it really lives like a one-bedroom, and the market prices it that way. The developers who converted these buildings well rethought the layouts — combining or reworking units so each one has genuine, functional rooms (ideally a true second bedroom or a real flex/office space). The ones who just slapped condo docs on an unchanged rental floor plan created units that fight the market. When you tour, you’re not just judging the finishes — you’re judging whether the conversion was thoughtful.
Done right, these can be a genuinely great buy. What you get:
No sugarcoating — here’s the other side of the ledger:
If you take one thing from this article, take this: in a converted building, you’re not just buying a unit — you’re buying into an association and a building. Vet all three.
The differences from a century ago still drive value today. What separated the good from the ordinary:
Here’s an honest bit of nuance. Richmond’s grand houses and monuments have well-documented, name-brand architects. But the everyday apartment buildings and rowhouses of the Fan were more often the work of local builders, speculators, and pattern-book design than of celebrated individual architects — which is exactly why the neighborhood feels so cohesive rather than showy. As the historians who’ve studied the district point out, the Fan’s magic isn’t one signature building; it’s the unity of the whole — consistent heights, setbacks, materials, and rhythm, block after block. These apartment buildings were part of that fabric: built to fit in, not to stand out. Some individual buildings absolutely had notable architects, but the district’s real achievement is collective. It’s a triumph of good urban design, not of individual monuments.
So, are the Fan and Museum District’s little brick apartment buildings “tenements”? By a dry legal definition, some technically fit the bill — but the word drags along a century of Lower East Side connotations that genuinely don’t belong to these dignified, middle-class, streetcar-era walk-ups. They deserve a better name and a fairer reading.
What they are is one of the most charming and enduring housing types in the city — and, in their modern life as converted condominiums, often an attainable, character-rich way to own in two of the best neighborhoods we’ve got. But because the buildings vary so much — by light, by layout, by the quality of the conversion, and by the health of the condominium association — they reward a careful eye. Which unit, in which building, converted by whom, with what in the reserve account, is the whole game.
That’s exactly the kind of walk-through we love to do. If you’re looking at a condo in one of these historic walk-ups and want someone to help you read the building and the association — not just the unit — reach out.
— Rick
Educational, not legal, tax, or financial advice. Building details, pricing, and availability change frequently — confirm current specifics and always review the condominium resale documents with your agent and the appropriate professionals before purchasing. Equal Housing Opportunity.
