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Zigzig20s, my understanding is that a "flat" is an apartment on one floor. Often/usually that would be one flat per floor, such as in "three-decker" type buildings in Boston Massachusetts area, a good number of which are listed on the NRHP. A rowhouse would likely have units with 2 or more floors. The usage "each flat contained more than one unit" seems odd. My guess is that they meant "each floor had more than one unit", maybe accidentally wrote "flat" where "floor" was intended? I would tend to think a floor could have more than one "flat", but a flat has to be on just one floor, and it doesn't make sense to me to talk about a flat having more than one unit. --Doncram (talk) 20:04, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Zigzig20s, Dictionary.com gives, for "flat": "Chiefly British . an apartment or suite of rooms on one floor forming a residence." I do think a flat usually has windows all around, like on three or four sides, i.e. is all of a given building or all of a wing of a building. The New Kasson Apartments building in Syracuse, New York, which I photographed and wrote up, is a relatively tall and narrow building whose NRHP doc I think i recall used the term "flats" (but I can't read the doc now, and maybe I am just recalling that each unit was very much like a complete home, having lots of windows on many sides). Maybe it had 2 or 4 units per floor, I am not sure now, and each would have windows on a central airshaft or courtyard maybe. Built in 1898, it was a new type of building for the area, as providing a complete luxury-type "home" for wealthy-enough households who would otherwise have chosen to occupy a standalone, single-family house.
It is clear from the source that the Lee Huff listing is about four contributing buildings (not just one as implied currently in the article): a three-story apartment building, two U-shaped two-story buildings each having four apartments (two on each floor of each building), and the garage. Only the three-story apartment building shows in the photo. Hand-drawn map in NRHP doc shows the four buildings' footprints.
Reading in the NRHP document, I think the writer is just wrong in her understanding of terminology, in her usage of "flat" and "flats". Maybe it would be best to write the article just omitting the term altogether. Offhand, it seems to me the two U-shaped buildings could have been termed "buildings of flats", because each of the four apartments was a "flat" single-floor unit each with windows on three or four sides, i.e. each having all of one floor on a given wing of the building. So consistent with most common usage of "flat" being for apartments having all of a given floor. That could have been the usage that the author ran into, then she wrote it up with a different twist. Or the very local usage was in fact wrong, while she reported it "correctly". Anyhow I think it could just be written up avoiding the odd usage altogether and probably not commenting on it, either. --Doncram (talk) 21:05, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
