Boston's Skinny House: The Ten-Foot Spite House

Every tour guide in the North End knows the story, and most of them still tell it. In 1874, two brothers in the North End inherited land from their deceased father. While one brother was away serving in the military, the other built a large home on the property, leaving the soldier only a shred of land — a strip the stay-at-home brother felt certain was too tiny to build on. When the soldier returned and found his inheritance depleted, he did not sue. He built. On that narrow shred at 44 Hull Street he raised a four-story wooden house, just wide enough to stand in, positioned to block his brother's sunlight and ruin his view of the harbor. Spite, rendered in timber and clapboard. The house wears the story proudly. A plaque on the front reads "The Skinny House (Spite House) Est. 1862," and the Boston Globe has given the building what it calls the "uncontested distinction of being the narrowest house in Boston." The executive director of the Boston Landmarks Commission has said that in a city of narrow lots, this one "far exceeds the norm." It is, as far as anyone knows, the narrowest house in the city. Whether it was built out of spite is another question entirely.

The legend started to wobble in 2021, when Boston.com dug into the archives. Massachusetts Historical Commission records, examined with help from Boston Landmarks Commission director Rosanne Foley, describe something much plainer than a revenge plot: the current-day Skinny House is what remains of a larger structure, originally built as a double house around 1857 at 46–48 Hull Street and subdivided into three properties — numbered 44, 46, and 48 — within the same footprint in 1884. Sometime after that, the 46–48 portion was demolished and replaced with two larger attached brick houses, leaving the easternmost sliver — today's Skinny House — as the only surviving piece. That explains the building's oddities better than spite does: the asymmetrical roof trim, the sideways front door, the four-foot-wide alley along its eastern side. The alley once gave access to homes behind the street frontage, and preserving it left too little room for the kind of replacement brick building that went up next door. The footprint of 44 Hull Street appears in the Hopkins Atlas of 1874; when the land was split into five lots in 1884, the smallest measured only 274 square feet. A 2024 review of primary sources reached a similar conclusion: there was likely no land dispute at all. One 1920s telling blamed a Tory blocking a neighbor's light during the Revolution — a century before the house existed in its current form. The brothers, the war, the stolen sunlight: all of it may be just a good story that found a narrow house to live in. But legends are load-bearing too. The plaque is still on the wall, the guides still tell the tale, and the crowds still come.

Whatever its origins, the measurements are not in dispute. The house spans 10.4 feet at Hull Street, its widest point, and tapers to 9.25 feet at the rear. Inside, the outer walls stand between 8.4 and 9.2 feet apart, and the narrowest interior point is 6.2 feet across — close enough for an adult to touch both walls at once. Somehow, that sliver holds 1,165 square feet of living space across four floors: two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen barely three feet by six, and a private roof deck with views over the harbor and the Zakim Bridge. There are only five doors in the entire house despite its four levels. The second floor holds the living room and the bathroom, one of the few spaces separated by a door. The front door faces sideways, opening off the alley rather than the street — a quirk inherited from the days when the alley served the whole block. It is, in the words of one former owner with a degree in architecture, a house where "instead of doors, we have floors between each space." Furniture goes up the narrow staircase or it does not go up at all; previous owners reportedly had to saw a box spring in half to get it upstairs.

In 2005, the Boston Globe profiled the house's then-owners, Jennifer Simonic and Spencer Welton, and their account of life inside remains the best description the building has. They called it "a vertical life." Simonic described a New Year's Eve party of ten at which the whole gathering had to rearrange itself every time someone needed the bathroom. Strangers wandered into the backyard, sat at the picnic table, and asked for a few minutes to take pictures. "That was bizarre," she said. Welton, the architect, explained the household system: floors instead of doors, and when guests stayed over, a mattress went down on the closet floor. "Except for sleeping in the closet, they seem to like it." The house demands choreography. Everything has its place because there is nowhere else for it to go — ingenious storage tucked into every nook, built-in bunks, a coat closet squeezed beside the front door. It sounds punishing, and the owners never pretended otherwise. But there is a visible affection in every account of living there, the particular pride of people who have made something impossible work. The Skinny House is not comfortable the way a normal house is comfortable. It is comfortable the way a well-packed suitcase is comfortable: everything fits, nothing rattles, and you know exactly where it all is.

The market has never cared about the floor plan. When the house last hit the market in 2017, listed at $895,000, more than fifty groups lined up for the open house, and it sold that May for $900,000. Four years later it was back, listed in August 2021 at $1.2 million. It went under agreement in less than a week with multiple offers and closed that September for $1.25 million — $50,000 over asking. The buyers were a family of four who wrote the sellers a letter explaining why they wanted the home. That is the going rate for ten feet of North End history: roughly $1,073 per square foot, for a house where you can touch both walls at once. The Skinny House remains a private residence, so the correct way to visit is from the sidewalk. Stand across the street at the front gate of Copp's Hill Burying Ground — the entrance is directly opposite — turn around, and there it is, squeezed between its brick neighbors, easy to miss if you walk too fast and impossible to forget once you have seen it.