About Skinny House
At 44 Hull Street in Boston’s North End, a four-story house has been squeezed into a slice of land that looks too narrow to support an ordinary home. The building is roughly ten feet wide at its broadest point, with a sideways entrance reached through a slender passage beside the neighboring structure.
The house is often called the Spite House. A popular story claims that two brothers inherited land and one returned from military service to discover that the other had taken most of it, so he built an impossibly narrow house to block his brother’s light and view. It is a great story. The documentary record does not support it.
Research cited by the Boston Landmarks Commission instead shows that the present house is the surviving portion of a larger block of buildings. The structure was remodeled into its current form around 1884. A four-foot-wide access alley serving residences behind the property appears to have constrained later construction, helping preserve the narrow wooden house while neighboring lots were rebuilt more conventionally.
That makes the Skinny House more interesting, not less. It is both a genuine architectural oddity and an example of how a memorable legend can overtake messier historical records. The building is a private residence, so visitors should admire it only from public sidewalks and respect the people who live there.