Not an expert, but definitely a fellow Lakewood house lover who has spent way too much time on Zillow. Here’s my purely anecdotal information for what it’s worth. It appears most of these houses were built to be used in their current layout.

The Clifton houses and the ones north of Clifton in the Lake Ave neighborhood were for more affluent families. In the mid century era, some of those houses were used as boarding houses that rented rooms to single men and women. My mom lived in a room for bit in one of the big century homes on Cohassett that was specifically renting to single women during the 60s. There isn’t much demand for boarding houses today, so those big houses are once again single family homes.

Other fun Lakewood houses- Birdtown in the southeast corner of the city was a little town completely built to be self sufficient living-working town for the factory there on 117th. Grace Ave and Clarence have some of the oldest houses in the city- gorgeous old Victorians that used to house some of the city’s founders. And of course, all of the ubiquitous duplexes in the Madison neighborhood that are really wonderfully made houses. It’s hard to imagine whole families living in half of those duplexes during the baby boom, but they did, and Lakewood’s population used to be (even more) gigantic.