on the disappearance of the front porch

[solarbird]

Andrew Sullivan posts here about the shift from front porch to (back of the house) patio, linking also to this article here on the social shift accompanying it. But - as I've just written in a letter to Mr. Sullivan - I think both miss a major point. Specifically, I wrote:

You can't ignore the factor of the automobile in the end of the front porch. Historical communitarian impulses ended well after the disappearance of the large front porch, but the adoption of the car and the architectural shift are almost simultaneous. Living in an older house with a large front porch on a two-lane tertiary arterial made the cause immensely clear: even the moderate traffic of a residential street makes a front porch wholly unpleasant. The noise, the smell, the dirt from the vehicles, the unsettling speed of this modern form of transportation, the post-automobile danger of the street to children - all of these things helped ruin the front porch and yard. And by the late 1920s, domestic architecture shifted to accommodate this new reality, moving the relaxation space, the play space, the functional outdoor space, all of it, behind the shield of the home.

Interestingly, our current house, being on a dead-end street off a dead-end street, has the only large front porch in the neighbourhood. And we actually use it, in the summer, rather more than we use the little patio - tho' being the only such house, we have no one with whom to be social.

Oh, and if you don't think automobile speed is unsettling to someone not in an automobile, try walking on a sidewalk directly next to a traffic lane sometime, particularly on a busy road. The demonstrated, studied reality is that almost no one will use a sidewalk in that state, regardless of the actual safety situation, unless they have no other option; there must be a perceived barrier, even if that barrier provides no actual protection, to provide a sense of separation from those giant roaring running animals your lizard brain sees stampeding by you. A row of parked vehicles does nicely; so does a planting strip. Sidewalks built without these on streets of any speed or traffic load are all but a complete waste of money.^* Sidewalks built with these considerations get used.

So given all that, it seems obvious that in an automobile era, front porches were simply doomed. In that, I think the second article places the cart, as it were, before the horse; it does mention the automobile, but places the dependency on the car as a result, not a cause, of the loss of the front porch - and, following that, the loss of local community the author is attempting to describe.

---

^*: They do provide some value in the sense of an emergency pedestrian path in event of, say, automobile breakdown.

Comments

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Our house, built in the early 20s, had a lovely big front porch (http://www.nerdvana.at/view.cgi?file=/historic/nerdvana1937.jpg). It was still there until at least 1956 (http://www.nerdvana.at/view.cgi?file=historic/nerdvana1956.jpg). Some time after that is the porch was enclosed to make another room (http://www.nerdvana.at/view.cgi?file=/sunroom2.jpg), a big deck (http://www.nerdvana.at/view.cgi?file=/back.jpg) was built in the back, the yard was fenced around, and big shrubs were encouraged all around the front (http://www.nerdvana.at/view.cgi?file=/front-walk.jpg). Mind you, it's now a house that says a lot, most of it true, about its current occupants, but in thinking about /why/ someone would do all that (I don't know it was all the same owners, there's a good 40 years for people to play with) the fact that 35th is a major arterial street is pretty much the only conclusion I can come up with.

[solarbird]

It's not really hugely controversial in the architecture circles I frequent that the car killed the front porch. But my circles are not the mainline circles of residential architecture, so.

But: you really can watch the shift in the 20s and 30s away from still having large front porches, particularly in the more modernist designs. There are always exceptions, of course - revivals of old forms, all that - but the front porch is one of those things that really did mostly just die.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I walk alongside higher speed traffic than is legal in most residential neighborhoods at least once a week. It's no big deal. Noise and pollution are factors, but I think the bigger factor, at least at my latitude and southwards, was the invention of air conditioning. It used to be that everybody sat on the porch because it was sweltering in the house; now, they can sit inside, so they do.

[solarbird]

The sidewalk boundry effect is well-studied and generally pretty well understood. You need that barrier just to have people walking around. What I'm suggesting is that the level of disturbance is higher if you are not in transit - in other words, that there's a difference in achievable comfort level desired for utilisation between "sidewalk people will use" and "front porch people will use."

Also, front porches were architecturally dead before home air conditioning became even remotely common, and the patio (or the back porch, if you prefer) serves just as well in terms of an exteriour (cooler) sitting space as the front porch did; I don't think the placement of that outside-space is relevant w.r.t. this particular function.

[cubes.livejournal.com]

I just finished watching (10 minutes at a time before falling asleep at night) NOVA's "Absolute Zero" in which some expert or another also blamed the invention of the home air conditioner for a sharp decline in front-porch-sitting.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I thought the causal connection between cars and the loss of front porches (and the bit about buffers for pedestrians) were widely accepted by anyone who has actually studied this kind of stuff. What's aggravating is that we know what happened and how to build neighborhoods and streets to (partially) counteract the effects of cars, yet we still mostly don't.

[shadesofmauve]

Well said.

If you haven't examined them before, a look at Frank Lloyd Wright's "Usonian" houses illustrates this beautifully. He made a big deal of turning houses inward/backward, rather than out on to the street, and he was hugely influential. He designed that way for exactly the reason you describe.

I dislike them, personally, but I dislike them *because* they embody the anti-social, car-oriented shift that hadn't quite happened yet. If you want people to be social in their communities, decrease the traffic and narrow the roads (to hinder speeding and make crossing the street to gab less of a threatening experience).

I'm a huge fan of projects like Bellingham Cohousing, where there's a parking area on the outside of the cooperative development, and everyone walks in to the actual houses (which aren't far). THERE front porches are still useful!

[oh6.livejournal.com]

Thinking back on the streets that I customarily walked along in Toronto, it occurs to me that they mostly had curbside parking, so that there was a lane of parked cars between me and the actual traffic.

A wrinkle on this pattern is the use of back alleys instead of driveways off the main road, where having a back porch may be more convenient to the car/garage than in front.

[solarbird]

Exactly. Kenmore's new Bothell Way revision sidewalks will have both a planting barrier (not as wide as I'd like, but it'll be there) and be buffered by a transit-only lane, so between the two of those, I think it'll work out; even on the partially-completed sections - ones that wind through - through ongoing construction, you're starting to see pedestrian traffic.