Portland's Nob Hill was already a status address in the 1890s when Daniel Campbell built luxury townhouses on the corner of Northwest Irving Street and 17th Avenue.

Instead of wood homes, however, he constructed six attached brick structures, creating what historians consider the state's original East Coast (or perhaps San Francisco) inspired rowhouses.

When Campbell's construction was completed in 1893, Irving Street was the most densely built block in the area with 18 dwellings. It's also considered Nob Hill's first full block of rental properties. Until then, the area's status streets were lined with mansions.

Let's go inside the Campbell Townhouses.

-- Janet Eastman | 503-294-4072 jeastman@oregonian.com

Pacific Realty Northwest

As the city experienced a population boom in the late 1800s -- which would be repeated after the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition -- developers invested in multifamily houses suitable to the growing upper middle class.

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Pacific Realty Northwest

At the Campbell Townhouses, new buyers wanting the features of a fine house but the economy of a townhouse were treated to two levels of highly crafted construction plus a basement.

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Here, residents could greet visitors in their private entry hall, then escort them into the living room and dining room.

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Pacific Realty Northwest

[719 N.W. 17th Ave. sold in March for $935,000 through listing agent Sean Robbins of Pacific Realty Northwest. The fully remodeled townhouse has four bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms and 2,620 square feet. Original loft-style ceilings and brick walls blend well with the new kitchen, bathrooms and finishes. New HVAC, wiring and plumbing were also installed. The basement can be used as an in-law apartment.]

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Pacific Realty Northwest

Portlanders at the turn-of-the-last century were surprised to find a kitchen and pantry and, upstairs, three to five bedrooms plus a full bathroom with a claw-foot tub.

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Redfin

Although each of the six townhouses line up in a uniformed way along sidewalks, they vary inside and out.

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The four townhouses fronting Northwest Irving Street (1705, 1709, 1715 and 1719) have square projecting bay windows topped by gabled roofs while two townhouses looking out onto Northwest 17th Avenue (719 and 715) have hipped roofs.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

Some of the porches have flat roofs with box cornices; others have a pediment porch roof with carved panels.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

The architectural mix of Queen Anne-inspired facades adds character and a sense of individuality.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

The Campbell Townhouses also have a lot in common: All of the porch roofs are supported by square brick columns and turned wood posts.

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Redfin

Each townhouse has a basement entry below the main entry. (This is 1705 N.W. Irving St.)

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Pacific Realty Northwest

And the bricks are laid in what's known as "American" or "stretcher bond," which was fashionable in the Victorian era and is now common because of its simplicity. Bricks are laid with only their stretchers showing, overlapping midway with the courses of bricks below and above.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

The L-shaped buildings form an interior courtyard. In the 1940s, bachelor apartments were added that connect the two sets of townhouses.

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Pacific Realty Northwest

The Campbell Townhouses were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 because of their significance as the only old rowhouses in the state and because most of original features have survived.

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Pacific Realty Northwest

Even though units have been updated (especially the kitchens), you still feel as if you're stepping back to a more courtly time.

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You'll see original tongue-and-groove Douglas fir floors, wainscoting and baseboards with cap-and-shoe moldings.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

Stairways have turned balusters, formed handrail and a carved newel post with cap molding. Ornately carved oak surrounds fireplaces.

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Some units have double entry paneled doors, but even the single doors are crowned with a transom. The pre-1933 street number is sandblasted into the glass above the door to 1715 N.W. Irving Street.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

The townhouses are part of the 640 acres that Captain John Couch claimed in 1845. He created the West End as an isolated bastion for high society, and elegant homes rose around Northwest 19th Avenue.

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After Couch died in 1870, his widow, Caroline, willed the soon-to-be Campbell Townhouses property to their daughters and sons-in-law for $1.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

In 1886, they sold the townhouse lots plus two others for $5,050. Campbell completed the rowhouses 1893 and sold them to wealthy rancher William Hughes for $30,000, who sold them in 1898 for $35,000, before buying them back in 1908.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

As commercial and light industrial businesses encroached between 1910-1932, the area lost its prestige and the townhouses were converted to low-rent rooming houses. William Hughes' widow sold the property in 1948.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

In 1973, the townhouses were recognized by the Portland Historical Landmarks Commission. As the area began its renaissance, the once-coveted townhouses were transformed back to individual family units.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

Today, the three-level townhouse at 715 N.W. 17th Ave. is listed for sale at $899,000 by Chris Suarez of Keller Williams Realty Professionals.

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The 2,280-square-foot home has three bedrooms, an additional suite in the lower level with exterior access and 2.5 bathrooms.

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Keller Williams Realty Professionals

The estimated cost to buy 715 N.W. 17th Ave., after a $180,000 down payment, is $4,750 per month, which includes principal and mortgage interest, property taxes ($9,600 a year), homeowners association dues ($100 a month) and homeowner's insurance.

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A large rooftop deck, with bridge views, is used for entertaining.

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(w)here

See more of Portland's most famous apartment buildings: Wander through this gallery of important and surviving apartment buildings that rose from the pre-1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition days until the Depression. The photo is of the 1922 Ambassador Apartments at 1200 S.W. 6th Ave.

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Zillow

Read more: Learn why the East Coast idea of luxury living in a classically designed building caught on here in "The Apartment House in Portland, Oregon" by Ed Teague, director of branch libraries at the University of Oregon. This is the 1930 Sorrento Court in Kerns. The Mediterranean townhouse-style apartments, now condos, are at 2250 N.E. Flanders St.

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Deven Stross Photography via KBC Management

Check out this other historic building: Northwest Portland's 1911 Trinity Place Apartments at 117 N.W. Trinity Place were designed by architect William C. Knighton of Knighton & Root in the the Tudor Revival style. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Walter W. McMonies, who owns the Trinity Place Apartments, says many of Portland's classic apartment houses survived the "indifference" of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and were revived In the 1980s by investor developers.

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Ajbenj via Wikimedia Commons

The 1922

Ambassador Apartments

building at 1200 S.W. 6th Ave. was one of the new-style luxury

that rose in Portland before the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition until the Great Depression. The apartments in downtown Portland were converted to condos.

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Sally Painter provided by REACH affordable housing developer and property management organization

Here's another one of Portland's beautiful historic apartment buildings: The 1909 Admiral Apartments began as a luxury multifamily building on the fashionable South Park Blocks. After decades of decline, it was revived and converted into subsidized housing for low-income seniors and people with disabilities who enjoy living in the Portland Cultural District. Apartments are small, but so are the rents.

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Ian Poellet via Wikimedia Commons

A luxury apartment investment by the Bronaugh family was perfectly timed. The Italianate-style

Bronaugh Apartments were built in 1905

, right as Portland's population boomed. Today, the three brick buildings are owned by

, a nonprofit, affordable housing development and management company.

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Stephen Fiddes Imaging via Premiere Property Group

People poking around downtown Portland Plaza's high-rise have all kinds of choices: Live at tree level or in a place that seems to pierce the clouds; move in or rent it out; embrace the building's nickname, Norelco, because the roof resembles the electric razor with three round shaving heads, or not.

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Wikimedia Commons

If Portland's King's Hill Historic District had a throne, it would reside in the penthouse of the fabled, pink Envoy building that has reigned over West Burnside at Northwest 23rd Avenue since 1929.

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Stephen Miller

The Portland Development Commission sold a troublesome block on the east side of the Burnside Bridge to a developer for $1.5 million. A controversial tower was built and the property went to the next owner for $127 million. Here's the story of Yard and what it costs and feels like to live there.

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Stephanie Yao Long | The Oregonian/OregonLive

A luxury high rise in Portland's Pearl District has a sassy name: NV, which is pronounced "envy." What would evoke jealousy among green-eyed monsters? As part of our weekly apartment building series, we take you on a look inside.

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KBC Management

Developers eyeing the extreme housing crunch created by the crowd-drawing 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition saw a future in luxury apartments.

One self-made millionaire, grocery-owner-turned-developer Harry Mittleman, made a mint during the Depression investing $1 million in Southwest Park Avenue apartment construction.

In 1931, he paid $400,000 to erect the Jeanne Manor Apartment Building at 1431 S.W. Park Ave.

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Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices NW Real Estate

Just two years after the first purpose-built Portland apartment houses rose in 1904 -- the Jeffersonian and Oneonta Apartments, neither of which survive -- merchant P.E. Brigham paid $20,000 to construct the Mordaunt Apartments on a corner lot at at 1810 N.W. Everett St. (originally 586 Everett St.)

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Chuck Collier Schmidt/Windermere Realty Trust

A building earns cachet because of its posh location, luxe amenities and the status seekers who move in. Take the case of the 1910 Wickersham Apartments in Northwest Portland's Alphabet Historic District.

The handsome "apartment house" was designed by one of Portland's top architectural firms for developers flush from a railway sale and one of the famous tenants was Academy Award-winning actor Clark Gable.

Occupying a quarter of a block at 410 N.W. 18th Ave., the brick building is another surviving example of the housing boom ignited by the explosively popular Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905.

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Premiere Property Group

Did notorious gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen hide out for months inside Portland's Tudor Arms Apartments while mob bosses and the Feds were hunting them down for their decades-long abuses, betrayals, murders and misbehavior?

A plaque on a wall outside Unit 308 isn't very credible -- starting with the misspelling of "Seigel" -- but it's one more layer of history to a storied building in Nob Hill.

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Chris Lawrence/Prometheus Real Estate Group

Portland wouldn't be the same without Slabtown, that once soggy swath from Northwest Lovejoy Street north to the Willamette River. Here, Native Americans camped, Chinese immigrants grew vegetables and lumber-mill workers created fuel for cooking and heating their homes using castoff, cut-off log ends called slabwood. Hence, the nickname.

Slabtown is rapidly changing. What does it cost to rent there? In this week's gallery, we look inside the new high-tech, laid-back Carson Apartments.

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Ian Poellet via Wikimedia

Over time and in most cities, as housing needs change, large old houses are divided up into duplexes and even historic mansions serve multiple families at one time.

The 1908 Dayton Apartment Building, however, was one of the first luxury apartments in Portland that was designed to look like a big fancy house from the street.

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Debbie Chen of Keller Williams Realty Professionals

In 1910, a "socially acceptable," four-story masonry building rose to meet upper middle-class housing needs. The brick midrise at 2109 N.W. Irving St. became the Irving Street Towers Condominiums in 2006.

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What's your favorite old apartment building?