Shotgun House
The term Shotgun House ( German : Shotgun House ) describes a type of single-family house that is widespread especially in the south of the USA . These houses are sometimes referred to as Shotgun Shack , Shotgun Cottage , Shotgun or Railroad Apartment . The term “shooting hut” used in German has nothing to do with these buildings. Houses of this type were first built at the beginning of the 19th century, but especially in the period between the American Civil War and the 1920s. The architectural style first developed in New Orleans and spread from there to Chicago and California .
Shotgun Houses are characterized by their very narrow, long, rectangular shape. Traditionally built Shotgun Houses have no hallway ; the two to five rooms of the house are directly connected to each other.
In the 19th century, shotgun houses were popular with both poorer and middle-income groups. However, in the course of the 20th century, this type of house became a symbol of poverty .
In many cities in the US South, shotgun houses were and are being demolished as part of urban redevelopment; elsewhere, people advocate their renovation and preservation as part of American building culture, such as in Key West , Florida . There these houses are under monument protection.
Origin of name and use of the term
Especially in travel guides you can often read that the term shotgun has become naturalized for this type of house because the shot of such a weapon fired in front of the front door can fly unhindered through the house when the door is open (because of the small distance between them) and it through the back door can leave again.
However, some architectural historians have referred to this definition as an urban legend . The ethnologist John Michael Vlach in particular pointed out that both the origin of this design and the name can be traced back to Haiti and Africa at least to the year 1700. In his opinion, the name for this design comes from the Fon from southern Dahomey (today Benin ) in West Africa. There, to-gun means meeting place. The term, which was probably used in New Orleans by Afro-Haitian immigrants, was then reinterpreted in terms of folk etymology in English usage .
In the true sense of the word, shotgun house is a house type typical of urban development. Occasionally the term is also used to refer to houses found in rural or small-town areas of the southern states. These are also one-story, elongated houses that do not have a hallway inside. These houses were also associated with poverty and were built because the natural air conditioning inside made life in this warm, humid region more pleasant. They're mostly found along waterways in rural Louisiana today.
The term “double-barrel shotguns” refers to a construction variant in which two shotgun houses share a house wall.
Structural characteristics
The rooms of a shotgun house are one behind the other. The front door of the house usually leads directly into the room used as the living room, behind which there are one or two bedrooms. The kitchen completes the suite of rooms. The oldest houses built in this style had no sanitary facilities; the toilet was outside the house. Often in later years a bathroom was built into the house by separating part of the room before last as a bathroom. In a number of Shotgun Houses, the bathroom was also added to the side of the kitchen. In many cases, the original design of the houses was changed so that they now have a hallway.
The first and second rooms usually each had a heating point, so that these rooms could share a chimney . A second chimney at the end of the house was mostly used for the kitchen stove . Basically, the houses do not have a basement , but are usually raised between 60 centimeters and one meter above the ground. Some architectural historians see this as a further indication that this design was created in flood-prone New Orleans.
In addition to the characteristic construction concept, Shotgun Houses have a number of other common features. The plots are always very narrow and usually between 3.5 and 9 meters wide. The houses are very close to the street and often have no or only a very small front garden or veranda . The front side to the street usually has only one door and one window. Originally, wooden stairs led up to the front door. Today these are mostly replaced by more durable concrete stairs . There is also usually a door on the back of the house. Because of the generally very narrow development of the properties, shotguns usually have no windows on the side walls of the house. Inside the house, the doors are one behind the other; the connecting door between the first and the room behind is often a bit wider and slightly offset to the side.
Wood was typically used as an essential building material in the construction of shotgun houses. Very few were built using brick or hewn stones. Many shotgun houses, especially those from the earliest construction phase, have a flat roof that ends with the house wall. In houses that were built after 1880, the roof usually protrudes over the front wall of the house and has a slight gable. The canopy is usually supported by wooden supports. The resulting space is used as a veranda. Often a fan is installed under the canopy.
The rooms are relatively large and high. The room height in particular supports the natural air conditioning of the rooms. Both the walls and the ceilings of the rooms are often decorated. Typical is the use of wooden strips for the transition area between the ceiling and wall or carvings on the lintels . During the period in which a particularly large number of shotguns were being built, there were a number of factories in cities such as New Orleans, some of which manufactured elaborate ornaments for these houses on an industrial scale. They were so affordable that even low-income homeowners could afford them.
Construction variants
Based on the original floor plan - narrow front and several rooms lined up next to each other - Shotgun Houses have a number of structural variations. Some construction variants have become so prevalent that they are more common in some cities today than the original design.
- Shotguns in which two houses share a house wall are called “double shotgun” or “double-barrel shotgun”. This means that less land is required per house than with the traditional shotgun and the cost of building materials is lower. This design was used particularly often in poor regions. Houses of this variation were first built in New Orleans in 1854.
- A "camelback shotgun" (= camel back), sometimes also referred to as a "humpback shotgun" (= hump), has a second floor in the back of the house. This design developed in the late construction phase of Shotgun Houses. The room arrangement and the construction are largely similar to traditional shotgun houses. Only in the last or penultimate room do stairs lead to the second floor. This second floor, also known as "hump", had between one and four rooms. Since the house was only partially two-story with this type of construction, it was taxed as a one-story house in most cities. This tax aspect was also the main reason for this type of construction.
- "Double Width Shotguns" are less common than the other construction variants. These are particularly wide shotgun houses that were built on two building plots. The history of their origins can usually be traced back to the fact that a single client initially acquired an entire block of streets, which was designated as new building plots. He then built a particularly large house for himself and built the more traditional shotguns on the remaining lots to either sell or rent.
- The shotguns, which have a veranda on three sides of the house, are called “North shore houses”. They get their name because they were mostly built on the northern side of New Orleans Lake Pontchartrain , where they were used as summer homes for wealthy whites.
Within these standard variants there are further variants that are rarely found. This includes the “double camelback shotgun”, in which both halves of the house have a second floor in the back half. Occasionally one can also find shotguns that have an additional front door on the side of the house or a veranda built along the length of the house.
Historical development of the architectural style
The African-Haitian origin
The theory that the term Shotgun House is a corruption of a term from the Fon language is also supported by the historical development of this architectural style.
New Orleans attracted a number of new settlers towards the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, who left the French colony of Saint Domingue - now Haiti - because of the slave revolt there . The planters, slaves and free blacks not only brought Caribbean culture and the voodoo cult to New Orleans, but also introduced new architectural styles in what was then still a small town. In addition to the Shotgun House, this includes the so-called Plantation House .
In 1803 there were 1,355 non-enslaved blacks in New Orleans. In 1810 their number was already 10,500, the number of white residents of New Orleans was around 4,500 at that time. The increase in population triggered a construction boom in New Orleans. Many of the builders and residents of the newly built houses were of African origin and came to New Orleans via Haiti. Historians think it is likely that they built their new houses according to the designs they knew from Haiti and Africa. In fact, many of the Haitian buildings that still exist today are reminiscent of the one-story shotgun houses of New Orleans. In Port-au-Prince in Haiti, as many as 15 percent of the building fabric corresponds to this type of house. The theory of African origin is therefore shared by a very large number of historians.
The earliest records of shotgun houses in New Orleans are found in 1832. This evidence suggests that the shotgun houses that were sold in the 1830s were built fifteen to twenty years earlier.
Cheap rental space for the workers
With the beginning of industrialization, more and more people moved to the US cities. New Orleans was one of the fastest growing cities in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. In 1812 the first paddle steamer docked in the city's port, heralding an era in which New Orleans became increasingly important as a port city. In 1840 the city was home to around 80,000, and the New Orleans port was the second most important in the United States after New York. In 1860 there were already 35,000 paddle steamers that docked at the quays each year and New Orleans, with 168,000 inhabitants, was the largest city in the southern states and the sixth largest in the USA.
Due to the limited transport options, the newcomers had to rely on living within walking distance of their workplaces. Shotgun Houses were mostly built as rental houses and were often located near manufacturing facilities or railway junctions. Builders and owners were very often the owners of industrial companies that could provide their workers with housing for a few dollars a month. Since a builder usually built several houses at once, they were mostly very uniform in their appearance. One example is the shotguns that are still on East Washington Street in Louisville , Kentucky today.
However, the growing need for living space could also have been met with other house forms than the Shotgun House. For example, the so-called brownhouse , a row house made of bricks, developed in the northeast of the USA . However, a number of different factors contributed to the fact that the Shotgun House became the preferred design in the southern states. Since property taxes in New Orleans were levied according to the width of a property, a shotgun house with its narrow house front contributed significantly to minimizing the tax burden. Shotguns were also inexpensive to build: the narrow front increased the number of houses that could be built along a street and the house was easy to adapt to the local conditions. This type of construction became particularly popular in the hot inner cities of the south. Shotguns still make up 10% of the housing stock in some cities in the US South.
Symbol of poverty
The construction of Shotgun Houses slowed at the beginning of the 20th century and came to an almost complete standstill in the 1930s. Two technical innovations increasingly undermined the advantages of the Shotgun Houses: ever larger parts of the population were able to afford a car and air conditioning . Accordingly, more and more population groups, for whom the Shotgun Houses once offered acceptable living conditions, moved to the suburbs. After the Second World War , only the poorest strata were willing to move into these houses. The basic construction concept of the Shotgun Houses - a largely standardized, simple floor plan based on one floor - lives on in the ranch-style houses , which were the predominant type of construction in the suburbs, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.
The districts with a high number of shotgun houses experienced all the problems that were and are typical of inner cities in the USA in the second half of the 20th century. After financially better off strata of the population moved to the suburbs, the strata of the population remained in the inner cities, most of which were not even creditworthy enough to receive mortgages for the maintenance or purchase of their shotgun houses. The third factor that contributed to their decay, particularly at Shotgun Houses, was unclear ownership. Shotgun Houses were often passed on to a family over several generations. Inheritance disputes meant that many houses remained uninhabited for several years.
Shotgun Houses were increasingly perceived by the public as a typical form of living for the poorest of the Afro-American population in the American South. Historically, this is not the case. Many of the Shotgun Houses were built in what were originally all-white residential areas during the period of racial segregation. At that time the living conditions were comfortable compared to their later decline. When black people moved into these residential areas in the 1950s and 1960s, the white previous owners could afford to move to the suburbs. Contrary to public perception, there are still residential areas with a high number of shotgun houses, which are mostly inhabited by whites. However, these cannot be compared with the shotgun houses inhabited by Afro-Americans. They are inhabited more because of poverty and not because of their special design.
Regardless of which population groups lived in them, shotguns were seen in the period from the end of World War II to the 1980s as a form of living that no longer offered contemporary living standards. As a symbol of poverty, numerous shotguns were torn down as part of urban renewal programs. This practice has now partly changed. Cities like Houston and Charlotte have established Shotgun Historic Districts in their cities in order to preserve this type of housing typical of US history. Shotgun Houses are praised for their build quality and inexpensive construction and are classified as a design that could be helpful in revitalizing the often neglected US city center. The Rice University in Houston, Texas held under the title Shotguns 2001 even an exhibition on the only paintings of these houses have been shown to recognize their role in the history of the southern states. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of lectures that also contained Shotgun Houses. Some cities, such as Macon , Georgia, have attempted to refurbish Shotgun Houses to provide housing for the low-income population. However, these cities have also made the experience that it is cheaper to demolish the shotgun houses and build new residential buildings.
Many of the older southern cities still have a very high density of shotgun houses in some neighborhoods. These include, for example, the boroughs of Bywater in New Orleans and Cabbagetown in Atlanta . Unlike when they were built, most shotguns are now owned by their residents. In the 1990s, for example, 85% of the homes in the Shotgun House-dominated Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans belonged to their residents. In some neighborhoods dominated by shotgun houses, land prices have risen sharply in recent years. This has led to another change in the population structure of these neighborhoods: financially better off sections of the population are gradually returning. In urban geography , such a change is known as “ gentrification ”. It is not uncommon for the new home owner to buy both halves of a double barrel shotgun and combine them into one relatively large house. Shotgun Houses are also often linked together to be used as office or retail space.
Others
According to a popular superstition in the southern states, ghosts are attracted to shotgun houses because they can walk right through them. In some houses, the doors were deliberately moved slightly to one another to distract the ghosts.
Shotgun Houses are often used as a symbol of life in the southern states - their appearance in film sequences is, at least for American viewers, the clue for the location of the action. Shotgun Houses are also closely linked to the musical history of the southern states: Elvis Presley was born in a shotgun house, the Neville Brothers grew up in one, and Robert Johnson is said to have died in a shotgun.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Historical Architectural Review Commission (HARC), Key West, Florida, US ( Memento of November 5, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), (English) (of September 12, 2008)
- ^ The Shotgun house - An African Architectural Legacy. in: Pioneer America. Wilmington NC 1976.8. ISSN 0884-3309
- ↑ a b c d John Michael Vlach: Shotgun houses. in: Natural History. New York 1977, 86, pp. 51-57. ISSN 0028-0712
- ↑ Fred B. Kniffen: Louisiana House Types. in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Blackwell, Malden ????, pp. 179-193. ISSN 0004-5608
- ↑ a b c The Shotgun house - urban housing opportunities. Preservation Alliance of Louisville and Jefferson Co., Louisville 1980.
- ↑ Steven Holl: Rural and Urban House Types in North America. Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton 1990, pp. 34-39. ISBN 0-910413-15-0
- ↑ Southeast shotguns , (May 16, 2006)
- ^ Yi-Fu Tuan: Space and Place. The Perspective of Experiences. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1977. ISBN 0-8166-0808-3
- ^ A b S. Frederick Starr : The New Orleans Shotgun - Down but Not Out. in: New York Times . September 22, 2005, SF 7. ISSN 0362-4331
- ↑ Heather S. Duncan: Rehab or replace? The case for and against shotgun houses. in: The Macon Telegraph. Macon March 6, 2006, p. 1.
- ↑ Karal Ann Marling: Graceland. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Ma 1996. ISBN 0-674-35889-9
- ^ Marty Roney: Old shotgun homes given new purpose. in: Montgomery Adviser. Montgomery AL July 2, 2005, p. 1.
- ↑ Karal Ann Marling: Elvis Presley's Graceland, or the Aesthetic of Rock'n 'Roll Heaven. in: American Art. Chicago 7.1993, no. 4, pp. 72-105. ISSN 0890-4901
