Daily News Magazine publishers Dorette Jackson and Dawn Rhoades sit outside the rowhouse where they grew up, on S. 12th Street. IT'S BEEN TWO years since two young women visited South Philly real estate broker Barbara Capozzi to persuade her to advertise in their new quarterly magazine. They were calling it Philadelphia RowHome.

The veteran Realtor was openly leery of the advisability of an ad in a publication with "row home" in the title.

"I just thought it was a stigma," Capozzi admits. But the fledgling publishers convinced her otherwise.

"I was absolutely wrong and they were absolutely right," Capozzi said as she prepared to anchor the back cover of April's RowHome issue.

Capozzi wasn't the first advertiser to look askance at the title of the magazine, say founders Dorette Rota Jackson and Dawn Rhoades, sisters who boast of being South Philly rowhouse-born and -bred.

"The reason we started this magazine was to draw attention to our little section of the city, which we felt was being overlooked and overshadowed by places like Center City, South Street and Manayunk," said Rhoades, RowHome's marketing and promotions director. "We'd been talking about this for a decade at least before doing anything. We know the streets. We grew up here. We are proud of the heritage and the diversity of the neighborhood."

And the sisters believe other residents should be, too.

RowHome was born in the basement office of Rhoades' restored rowhouse near 16th Street and Oregon Avenue. Rhoades, 44, a former editor at the South Philly Review, was between jobs, and did not want to go to work for someone else. So, she sold her sister on the idea. Then, she sold her home in Washington Township, Gloucester County, and moved in with her big sister and brother-in-law to save money. Much of the proceeds from the sale of the New Jersey house went to launch the magazine, she said.

Their first press run was 5,000 copies, most of which they gave away in an effort to build awareness of the magazine, Jackson said.

The dynamic duo guffaw even now over that first morning when they dropped off the first bundle of RowHome in front of the Fitzwater Café. "We sat in the car and watched until the first customer walked up and took one out of the bundle," Jackson recalls. "We giggled and hugged each other. It was a thrill that someone besides us was finally reading it."

Over time, Jackson and Rhoades overcame the business community's skepticism. The glossy quarterly is now chock full of ads from area merchants, including a full-page ad on the back cover featuring Capozzi Real Estate. The spring 2007 issue due out next month will be the fifth time Capozzi's ad has anchored the back page. It will be mailed to more than 20,000 subscribers. And for the first time, Philadelphia RowHome magazine will be available at the Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores in Center City for the $4.99 cover price. Subscriptions are available at www.gohomephilly.com at $16 for four issues a year.

The magazine features stories on prominent current and former South Philly residents - state Sen. Vince Fumo, city Register of Wills Ron Donatucci, and author Lisa Scottoline - as well as photo spreads on the area's more elegant rowhouses.

Philadelphia RowHome is "Our Neighborhood's Official Business and Lifestyle Magazine," boasts the line below the title.

Until recently RowHome's focus was almost exclusively South Philly society and culture, but the sisters have begun to widen the scope with the current issue.

The rowhouse featured on the cover is the family home of state Sen. Anthony Williams and is located in Cobbs Creek, in West Philadelphia. The cover story is a profile of city District Attorney Lynne Abraham written by none other than former Daily News columnist Larry McMullen.

McMullen lives in Bucks County but grew up in South Philly, first in Grays Ferry and later near Front Street and Snyder Avenue. The grizzled journalist came out of retirement to write for the magazine because "I think it's an amazing idea, and I'm really enjoying doing it." He writes for every issue.

McMullen's gritty style adds a little spice to RowHome's unabashed "feel-good" flavor.

"When we profile people we try to keep politics out of it," Rhoades said. "We are completely bipartisan. We don't care who hates who. We want to know about your family and how you got here. What are your passions? We want to know what you are doing for the community."

"This neighborhood has been around for a long time and people should be proud of their homes," said Jackson, 48, who has done some research into the origins of the rowhouse. "The row home is to Philadelphia what the brownstone is to New York."

The rowhouse originated in England as a way to solve the housing crisis that followed London's Great Fire of 1666. The economical design migrated to the New World along with hundreds of thousands of immigrants. But nowhere was the rowhouse concept more thoroughly embraced than in Philadelphia. About 500,000 of them were built in Philadelphia between the Civil War and 1920 to meet the demands of a fast-growing industrial city.

The rowhouse design worked so well here that Philadelphia displayed one as a "model workingman's home" at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The expo celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in America attracted 46 nations and 27 million spectators.

"A hundred years ago, that row house astonished visitors in Chicago," wrote Ohio State University Professor Steven Conn in his 2001 Christian Science Monitor article, "Ode to the Philly Row House."

"It stood as the signature structure of Philadelphia's industrial neighborhoods and as the manifestation of a particularly American dream."

To this day, the rowhouse remains the dominant architecture used by urban builders, although the contemporary version is commonly called a town house.

Jackson said that in the early days, advertisers often urged changing the magazine's name to Philadelphia Town House. They stuck to their guns, and I'm glad they did.

A rowhouse is defined as one of a line of houses joined to each other by their side walls. A town house is no different. It only sounds more hoity-toity.