Why Historic Preservation is so difficult....it is our own fault in some ways.

                           

                       Southeast corner of Sixth and  Columbia Street, circa 1890. 

In addition to my own personal Facebook page which I largely devote to family and photography, I am a “moderator” for the Preserve Historic Lafayette page and an “administrator” for the Tippecanoe County Historical Association page.  On both of those sites my posts are often historic photographs of people, places, or things involving the history of Lafayette, Indiana and Tippecanoe County.  Many of the most popular posts are photos and history of long gone buildings.  Almost without fail someone will comment something like “It’s beautiful, why would they ever tear something like that down?" Followed by a “sad or angry” emoji.  

I understand the feeling of loss when looking at a photo of something that was so beautifully constructed but no longer exists, however,  maybe it’s time to inject some harsh realism about historic preservation.   I also want to assure all readers that I believe preservation is worth the effort in the long run.  

To put it in the most blunt terms I can think of, historic preservation is backbreaking, dirty, hard, and frequently very expensive work. Often the problems you encounter require solutions that I can only describe as “inventive”.  Modern tools and materials are sometimes, quite simply, not suitable replacements for repairs or replacements for an 1865 structure.   Materials that were once easy to get, and craftsmen with knowledge and skill to use those materials are rare today and if available are more expensive than the standard materials used today.  Lumber is a great example.  Nineteenth century buildings were full of hardwood.  Oak, walnut, poplar, and cherry, all are still available but more difficult to find and always twice or more the cost of softwoods.  Flooring is a prime example.  While a pine floor might cost from $2 to $4 a square foot an oak hardwood floor will range from $8 to $15 per square foot and much more if you want wide planks.   So the question naturally arises, is it financially practical to attempt to save an old structure?  

Aside from all the physical and financial things that make preservation such a challenge is a very common human trait that works against preservation.   That trait is that humans in a lot of ways have short attention spans and at the same time they love change (as much as we claim not to).   While we can claim to be devoted to preservation we also love new styles and trends.  Furniture, clothing, automobiles as well as the houses in which we live are all victim to almost constant changes in tastes.  Some of that change comes from the top down, designers and manufacturers want to create new excitement to sell more products. As much as we might not want to admit it, a good bit is driven from the bottom up, you simply get tired of wearing the same style of shoe and stop buying it in favor of something new.  With fewer sales of said shoe style the shoe company tries something new.  It is no different with buildings.  

Another factor that affects what gets preserved and what drives style changes are general changes in society and living conditions. Changes in family size is one example.  In the 19th century families often consisted of 4,8, or even a dozen or more children.  Today the average number of children in a family is a bit less than 2 so less physical space is needed in a home today.  Can you imagine a family of 10 in a typical 3 bedroom 1950’s tract house?   Another example is that during the depression when money was short, and immediately following those years of financial hardship came WWII and that resulted in a general shortage of all sorts of materials…those two decades saw homes generally become much smaller and plainer than during the early years of the century.  

  Here is one last issue that affects preservation.   Land is limited, and while we can change the city boundaries the space within any given boundary stays the same.   Certain parts of the town become seen as more desirable for certain activities as towns develop and grow. Very often, in the beginning, residences, businesses, and even industry were all mixed together. An individual would arrive in a brand new little town and decide they want to open a dry-goods store.  They would build their store first and right next door they then built their new home after the business was up and running.  Across the street their neighbor has established his brick making company and his house is at the rear of his brick factory.  Eventually residential areas develop away from business areas or industrial areas.  A residential location near the business area in town in the period leading to the Civil War era would have been a popular option but as time passed that same location was seen as less desirable for a new house to be built.  People wanted to be a bit away from all the traffic, noise, and congestion of the central business area.  A specific piece of land with a big house at 6th and Columbia would not have been as desirable as that same house away from downtown, in a location like Highland Park or the Perrin neighborhood.  Still the land itself had value aside from the value of the house sitting on it.  In that way, houses were often removed  to make room for a structure more suited for the central business area.  Using the example of 6th and Columbia, a grand old house became a public library, which was then torn down to build a high school, which later became City Hall, followed by a parking lot, and soon a grand new police department headquarters will be there.   During the early days of our community there were many residences located in or near what we today call “downtown” but by the end of the nineteenth century those were disappearing.  Residential Lafayette was moving up the hills south and east of downtown.  The suburban village of Linnwood developed to the north.  As land closer to the central business area became more valuable for “business” purposes even Lafayette’s first city cemetery at 9th and Ferry was seen as being “in the way” of progress. 

It has been interesting to witness a very real and substantial reversal of the trend toward people moving away from downtown and with that trend it is my hope than some of the remaining grand old residential properties will be preserved and restored. In my view, historic preservation implies more than just not tearing an old building down.  My hope is that in the future many of those old homes in the downtown area that have managed to survive will be restored, and that those old single family homes that were converted to multiple apartments will be preserved/restored, and returned to single family occupancy, their original purpose.      

Why am I here?

What am I doing here?  I mean, what draws me here,  and where does this desire to write come from? I was certainly not trained or educated to be a "writer", and maybe I'm not even that good at it.  I think of myself more as a story teller.  You can have a good, interesting story in your head that you want to tell someone, but sometimes getting the words out is a little more difficult than you anticipated....  what I discovered was that if I write the story down I am better able to organize the words into a smoother flowing, more logical order, without the story getting all jumbled up from starts and stops and repeats and missing thoughts that happen when I try to tell the story vocally. 

I guess you would say that is the practical reason you find me blogging, but there is a much deeper reason that drives me to write.  

I had a close relationship with my paternal grandparents, especially my grandmother.  We were a farm family and my dad and his 2 brothers all lived within a mile or so of my grandparents, and farmed my grandfather's farm along with their own land.  The physical proximity made it easy for me to spend lots of time with them...and my grandmother lived to be 99 years old.  My children all got to know her too. During her lifetime she told me lots of stories.  Stories about her childhood and youth, about her parents and grandparents and other local folks and there were so many times I thought to myself how neat it would be to be able to go back in time and get to know the subjects of those stories, to ask them questions.  I heard many of the stories often enough that I became familiar with all the highs and lows of her life, including the deaths of three of her children and the loss of their home to fire in 1929.  

One of the first of my ancestors I learned a bit more about was my great-great grandfather Jesse Robinson and if I could chose only one ancestor to get to go back and meet it would probably be him.  I'd ask him to tell me what this family land looked like when he first came here, why did your parents come here, what were your hardships, Tell me about Lafayette in 1850, tell me about your parents and grandparents....so many questions I could ask him. He served during the Civil War, what were his thoughts on the war, his thoughts on the causes, was it justified, did he support Lincoln?  How well did he know his maternal grandfather who was a Revolutionary War Veteran.  

By now you might be able to guess where this is leading and how it relates to my original question, What am I doing here? I have 7 grandchildren, and so far I  also have 4 great grandchildren.  I am 72 years old and the truth is, I want my great and great-great grandchildren and those after them to be able to know something about me.....to remember that I existed.  Not simply a tombstone in a cemetery, but more than that. What was my life like?  What was my job like? What were my passions?  It's probably just that simple.  I'm leaving a little trail of bread crumbs in the way of blog posts and other writing.  I don't know what questions my great great grandkids will wish they could ask, or if they will even care, so it's a little like baking a cake without  a recipe, but at least there will be something if they are curious.  

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Another summer ruined?

As tough years go 2019 would rank right up there....at least that is what I thought then.  Diagnosed with cancer, followed by the removal of the lower lobe of my left lung, followed by the normal recuperation that follows such an operation but then the news that the cancer had been totally removed and there was no further treatment needed.  That changed my initial opinion of 2019.   Not as bad as I thought. 

Then along comes 2020 it started out just fine, I was making a good recovery from the cancer surgery, but then the crap hit the fan yet again and boy another year that sucked...at least from March onward.  Following 2019 I had hoped for the ability to get back to normal...including some travel and a visit to our Arizona kids.  Needless to say that didn't happen, but it is hard to complain since everyone else in the world was in the same boat and a lot of people lost loved ones....so again a year that seems terrible at first glance turns out to be one that I really shouldn't be complaining about.  We got a lot of work done around the house and I did a lot of work in the flower beds and got things cleaned out and on top of that we got a whole new kitchen, pretty much from the walls out.  The sort of thing that makes you fall in love with your house all over again.  

One little odd event during the late summer which we gave little thought to at the time is worth describing.  I had been working out in the yard and it was a typical hot and humid day and I was doing some pretty aggressive hacking away of ground cover I was eliminating.    I needed to cool off and walked into the house, through the kitchen which was then only about half completed, into the dinning room where a new sink, and a new fridge and stove were all sitting in the dinning room still in their boxes where they had been for several weeks.  

Now the rest of this story I don't remember...I only know what Camilla has told me.  I walked into the living room and asked her what was in the boxes!  Keep in mind they had been delivered something like 2 to 4 weeks earlier.   I kicked the sink box and asked....."What's in this box?"  Was I kidding around?  She looked at me and said she knew I was serious and that something was very wrong.   She told me what was in the boxes and that we were getting a new kitchen and she then led me to the kitchen and was pointing things out and I kept repeating..."I don't remember any of this".  She took me back to the living room where I sat for some time before I came back to myself after 5 or so minutes.   We thought maybe I had suffered a heat stroke which can cause confusion.  We talked about the "event" for a couple of days and Camilla finally talked me into going to talk to the Doctor, just in case it was something more serious.   My doc, suspecting a possible stroke,  ordered an MRI which came back showing nothing significant that would explain the "event".  I had not had a stroke. Good news, add it up to being overheated and forget it.  

Several months passed and Camilla reported one other "event" and suspected another but both were of fairly short duration and in fact the first one she did not even realize what it was at the time it happened.  We were both sitting in the office and she was talking on the phone and I was at my computer.  She said I spun around and vomited on the floor....then I got up, cleaned up the mess with paper towel and went back to the computer.  That evening she asked me how my stomach was feeling and I told her "fine, why?"  She explained that she was just concerned since I had thrown up.   I looked at her like she was nuts and told her I did not know what she was talking about...even getting up and looking in the wastepaper basket for the dirty paper towels and CRAP...THERE THEY WERE.  WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?  

I had been making plans for a trip out west with our youngest grandson, and then came March 16th.  We finished dinner and I picked up my plate and carried it to the kitchen thinking to myself I was going to find something for dessert.  Camilla heard a loud crash and called out asking if I was all right.  I did not respond.  She found me laying on the floor in the pantry, unconscious, she talked to me, and then touched my leg and she said my whole body stiffened when she touched me. She called 911 and both the LFD and the Ambulance arrived.  I am told, but do not remember that the firefighters helped me up off the floor and walked me to the dinning room and were talking to me.  I have no memory of any of that. Then the Ambulance arrived and they helped me onto the cot and wheeled me down to the street and hoisted me into the back of the truck.  I do have a sort of hazy recollection of the feeling of being lifted up and I recall that the medic kept talking to me, asking questions all the way to the hospital and all I wanted to do was go to sleep.  As they were unloading me things were clearing up in my head and I remember being wheeled into the ER and of the events that happened there.   I had a cat scan which showed no stroke so they sent me home and did not make a specific diagnosis, just an unexplained loss of consciousness.  

I returned to the family doctor and I was referred to a neurologist.   At the first meeting with the Neurologist he said "You are having seizures".    So here I am in 2021 with an new ailment...a seizure disorder.  I have had 4 or 5 EEG tests, including one this weekend where I will be wired up for the whole weekend, day and night.  Like everyone else in the world as soon as the doctor suggested it was probably some kind of seizure disorder I started combing all the information I could from sources on the internet.  The closest definition to what I have experienced is something called a "Complex partial seizure". My symptoms all fit that particular type of disorder.   Since March 16th there have been two other "events" that were both less dramatic, but still troubling.  I have had another MRI and the result was much the same as the one from last summer.   

Oh...and did I mention, my driving privileges have been suspended by the doctor and Camilla.  That might be the biggest challenge of all.  LOL...  she and I have very different driving styles and habits. My driving style is one that was influenced by 30 years as a police officer and I have a hard time being a passenger.  I am learning to keep quiet, but it has been a challenge, and I have a ways to go.  Even though I know that I will always get a ride to wherever we need to go or even wherever I want to go...there is still a sense of loss of freedom and that's a very real thing...that feeling of needing to be dependent on someone else. We helped take care of both my mother who developed dementia and my father in law who developed full on Alzheimers disease.  I now have a much clearer idea  of a few the challenges they encountered, like when we took away their car keys.  

So I escaped Covid but am getting a lesson on brain health.  Maybe that is the most healthy way to deal with this...look at it as a lesson and learn as much as I can?  Does that even make sense?  As far as I know this isn't life threatening so I just need to deal with it.  I could bitch and whine that it isn't fair that 3 years in a row have sucked for me, three summers ruined but what would that get me?  2020 could have been so very much worse for me than it was.  I recognize that.  

 

This Old House

      I grew up in an old house of both indeterminate age and style. 

     It probably dated to sometime in the late 19th or very early 20th centuries, it never seemed to have a definite "style".  It lacked all of the elements normally associated with any specific architectural style.    It was just a big square two story box with 4 rooms down and four rooms up.  It had been built with no extra ornamentation either inside or out. No gingerbread trim, the woodwork was plain and probably of pine which was always kept painted.  The floors were pine, great for splinters, also kept painted or mostly covered with rugs and later with wall to wall carpet. The walls were plaster with wall paper in one or two rooms downstairs.  At some point in time an enclosed porch had been added to the front.  When my parents purchased it in 1950 there was not even any indoor plumbing.  Dad walled off one corner from the kitchen and created a small modern (for 1950) bathroom before they moved in and the old outhouse was moved away from yard near the back door and sat behind the tool shed for several years.  The new bathroom left my mother with a smallish L shaped kitchen. I'm sure she was happy to give up some kitchen space for an indoor bathroom.  

For a short time, perhaps around a year or two, three of the upstairs rooms were occupied as a separate apartment by my dad's brother Gwin and his wife Josaphine. The fourth room upstairs was shared as storage space.  There were small closets in three of the upstairs rooms, but none downstairs.  They shared the downstairs bathroom as well but had their own kitchen upstairs.  I can remember, as a toddler, standing at the bottom of the stairs and asking my aunt for gum and she would throw a stick or part of a stick down to me. Eventually my sister was born and my Aunt gave birth to my cousin and the shared living arrangement became crowded. My Aunt and uncle and cousin moved out and my family expanded into the upstairs. My parents occupied that house for 54 years and raised us 5 children there.  During those 54 years the house received several major updates including a kitchen remodel and two different additions.  Today my nephew is raising his family there and there have been further remodeling projects and additions. The house still lacks any definitive style description.    

I have had people tell me that they were not interested in owning an old home, for a variety of reasons…. too much cost to bring them up to date and keep them maintained, style not what they like, room layout that doesn’t meet current lifestyles, and any number of other reasons (excuses).  My wife and I have lived in a “modern” house exactly 4 of our 50 years of marriage.  It was a nice place, and served our young family well for those 4 years but it just didn't seem "natural" for either of us.  Besides that 1960’s vintage National Home we have lived in a classic 1920’s bungalow, an 1880 farmhouse, a small 1880’s town house that that originally sported a gingerbread victorian porch that a prior owner had had removed as he tried to alter the appearance of of the house to appear as a much older colonial style (not recommended),  a very special 1850 brick Greek Revival farm house and finally a 1913 Colonial Revival where we have been for the past 30 years. All very different styles and all had their own advantages and all presented different challenges as we tried to make them into homes that worked for our family. 

As you can see, besides the National Home, our homes all shared one trait…they were all homes of “a certain age”.  Some might label them “historic” and indeed our current home is part of a historic neighborhood and is protected under the city’s historic preservation ordinance.  That protection assures us that after we are gone the house will retain some protections and will perhaps be maintained long into the future. The first thing a friend asked me when he learned our home had been included in a historic district was “does that mean you can never change anything?”   

In short the answer to that question is “NO, that does not mean we can never change anything”. Exterior work requires approval by the historic review commission and that normally presents no problems.  I would probably be prevented from wrapping this brick home with vinal siding or tearing off the porch or making some other alteration that changed the overall style of the house.  Work on the interior of a historic house however, does not require pre approval…you can make the interior as “modern” as you want.  Add bathrooms, remove bathrooms, remove walls to make larger rooms, refinish floors or replace them with modern material, etc, etc.  Let me provide an analogy for what you can't do, using food.  You can't take a meatloaf and put icing on it, making it look like a cake.  

Kitchens in old homes are notoriously unfriendly to the way in which people today like to work in a kitchen.  For one thing kitchen designs of old never assumed more than one person would ever be working in the kitchen at the same time so many original kitchens in older homes were quite small and had few cabinets and few or no counter tops, instead relying on the home owner using a stand alone kitchen cupboard. 

I want to show you what I mean about making the inside of an historic home as modern as you wish. The following photos were taken 4 historic homes in my neighborhood. Each kitchen is suited to the homeowners tastes.  Two of the houses date to the first decade of the 20th Century, the other two are in homes that date to the mid and late 19th Century.  

 

Lake Stansbury, Quigly's Pond and other forgotten places

It's really difficult for us today to imagine what our downtown looked like before we were here.  The natural inclination is to believe that we would probably have no trouble identifying where we were if we were suddenly dropped into the center of downtown a hundred years ago...or much farther back in 1835.   What did it look like when William Digby arrived?  Some, maybe even most of the buildings would be familiar if we found ourselves back in 1920...street names would certainly be the same....the courthouse would be recognized right away.   Fifty years earlier, less than one lifetime, would be a different story...it might take some walking around to get our bearings...a lot fewer buildings would be recognizable...there's a railroad running down the middle of 5th Street.  There is a courthouse square...but wow...that building in the middle looks a lot different than we are used to seeing. Good heavens...there are saloons and grocery stores in almost every block downtown.  A number of the folks we meet along the walk are speaking German.   

How about one more bump back in time...let's take a look at downtown around 10 years after it was first laid out.  If asked I bet most of you would agree that downtown Lafayette is mostly flat, and today a drive down Main street from about 11th to the river would seem to verify that belief.  The truth is, that at the time Lafayette was first laid out on paper, and for more than the first decade of existence, downtown wasn't the wide-open flat space we know today. There were hills and even a small lake covering a portion of the original townsite. That downtown area would best be described as slightly rolling, and clearly sloped toward the Wabash.    

One of the best, if not the best descriptions of old Lafayette were written by Sanford Cox who was a very early settler in Lafayette arriving here before 1830.  Some 30 years later Cox published many of his memories of his adopted hometown.  One of the most astonishing things he remembered was our very own Lake Stansbury.  Yes, we had a lake downtown.  A body of water that was more or less permanent but grew or shrank with the seasons would have looked quite similar to the photo above. The true nature of that body of water would probably be better described as a pond, or marsh, rather than a lake which is usually a deeper body of water than a pond. What it lacked in depth it made up in surface area.  Cox described it covering ground from 6th and Brown streets to the southwest reaching Third and South during the wet season.  An area of several acres and blocking the routes of several streets.   It was a popular skating area during the winter. Finally, about 1839 the town board voted to drain and fill the "lake".   

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Lake Stansbury is that the demise of the lake was intimately tied to the birth of the Pearl River according to Cox. Lets allow Sanford Cox himself to explain.  During the 1860's and '70s Cox published several newspaper articles about the history of Lafayette as he remembered it. One such collection was published in a book called "Old Settlers" Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley which he published in 1860.  His Newspaper articles came later.  On November 15, 1871 Cox said this:   "If one of the early settlers of Lafayette that had moved away 30 or 40 years ago were to read the newspaper accounts of the improvements on Pearl River and the frequent inundations of that stream that occurred within the last 8 or 10 years he would be puzzled to know what portion of the town the raging river poured"    He would recollect the Spring Branch, just large enough to swim a duck that ran along near Samples Tan Yard at the south extremity of the village: and Lake Stansberry in the northeastern portion of the village"  "but our long-absent settler would not have the slightest remembrance of Pearl River"   Cox went on to explain that improvements of the streets and alleys, along with some extra effort by the town board in 1839 drained the little lake and where kids once skated during the winter was then covered with homes, churches, hotels and business blocks.  "Caleb Scudder, (first male child born in Lafayette) and his juvenile companions used to do some of their best skating where Trinity Church now stands"   

Now for the connection between Lake Stansbury and Pearl River:  Cox explains that the same cause that drained the lake created Pearl River.  Water always seeks a lower elevation, always.  Before the forest was cleared and "improvements" made....streets and lots graded, buildings built, Canals and railroads built...before that, all of that surface water (rainwater that wasn't absorbed) drained toward the river from the hills east and south of downtown....some of that water never made it all the way to the river...instead of ending up in pools such as Lake Stansberry and other wet places scattered here and there and then being slowly absorbed.  Another location that collected a lot of surface water was known as Quigly's pond located where St. Elizabeth Hospital was later built.  The building of the Wabash Railroad, diagonally through town had a major effect on water descending the hills east of town...forcing excess water to turn north to around Greenbush where it finally got over or under the railroad embankment and from there it wound around, ending up in Quigly's pond.  The pond had an outlet where excess water flowed generally southwest to about 8th and Main.   This was not a steady stream like a creek or river...it was surface water running toward the river from the high ground east and northeast of town during and after rainy or stormy weather.  The more that streets got graded with stone gutters and brick paving the less water was absorbed along the way, instead that water just ran down the street seeking lower ground.  There seems to be no one, not even Cox who can explain how the name Pearl River came about.  One guess is that 7th St. North of Main street was originally named Pearl Street, and that was the location where much of the flood waters ended up on their way to the river.  Around 1870 the city built a storm sewer line from Main street where the Pearl crossed to a point on South 5th, south of Alabama where waters of the Pearl joined the waters of the Spring Branch stream westward to the river.  

That storm sewer solved periodic flash flooding that had plagued parts of the downtown area as more and more of the surface area was covered by pavement and buildings.  It retained the name Pearl River even though it was never really a river at all.  It developed a strong and somewhat mysterious local mythology over the years.   Most or at least many portions of that original brick sewer have been replaced and rerouted with stronger and longer lasting material.  

Birth, Life, and Death of the American Porch

 

 Beautiful, full wrap around porch with lots of gingerbread. 

        The Birth, Life, and Death of the American Porch

    There is a lot to see and admire when walking or driving through historic neighborhoods.   One of the architectural elements that might attract your attention are the porches on some of the older homes.  The original idea of a porch can probably be traced back to the rock overhangs in front of caves.  If you had a cave home with some protective overhanging rock you had a place to sit out of the weather and watch for danger approaching.  Even better if your rock shelter was on a hillside providing an even greater more distant view.  

Porches have not always been a feature on American homes but they reached their height of popularity, and extravagance, during the second half of the 19^th century.  The word porch comes from the Latin, porticus but the feature has gone by many names including portico, stoop (Dutch), veranda, plaza, and others.  A porch can be open or enclosed, but they all serve the same function as a transition space between outdoors and indoors and between what is public and what is private.  It is a literal intermediate space between two worlds that have been increasingly separated in our time.  

Inviting

  

    Porches were originally built for good, practical reasons but quickly became important social gathering spots.  Porches were where social norms evolved as the use of porches evolved.  Porches became the extravagant and important architectural feature that they were in 1900 as a result of American industrialization during the 19^th century plus the suburbanization of our cities.  Gingerbread was in high demand and Fancy millwork was being created on an industrial scale that was readily available for new construction or the addition of a new porch onto an older existing home.  You could select from a wide variety of styles right out of a catalog.  Additionally,  mass-produced millwork was much less expensive than fancy ornamentation that had formerly been created specifically for one customer, perhaps even on-site at the new building. 

Among the practical reasons for the development of porches was protecting the door from the weather.  In the days before air conditioning shading the house from the hot summer sun was a big benefit of a large porch.  A large wrap-around porch, along with high ceilings, and large windows helped keep Victorian homes bearable in the summer heat.   

Sometimes though, even those features were not enough, and porches were used for sleeping and even eating meals.  In the early twentieth century, some homes were built with a porch designed specifically as a “sleeping porch” usually located on the second floor near bedrooms.   If they did not have a porch our Victorian ancestors sometimes slept in tents in the back yard during periods of excessive heat. 

When it got too hot to sleep in the house a tent under the trees worked for some.  

As the nineteenth-century progressed the social role of the porch increased.  It developed into an outdoor parlor, a true extension of the house into the landscape.  Sitting on the porch became an important part of the daily routine for many of our ancestors.  Rutherford B Hayes summed up the Victorian love of porches when he wrote in his journal in 1873: “The best part of his house is the veranda. But I would enlarge it. I want a veranda with a house attached.”  

While innovations such as mass-produced millwork fostered the proliferation of porches in the nineteenth century, new inventions led to the decline of the porch in the twentieth century.  The automobile allowed people to get out of the house for entertainment and relaxation.  The telephone allowed neighbors and friends to chat without meeting personally.  Housing styles popularized in the construction boom following World War II eliminated the front porch as the back yard became the focus of family activity.  The final nail in the coffin for the popularity of the porch were the inventions of air conditioning and television.  Why sit on the hot porch and watch traffic drive past when you could sit in your air-conditioned living room and be entertained by a program playing on that magic box?

I grew up in a house with a front porch that was nothing other than a transition space between outside and inside the house. It was a place to leave muddy shoes and dirty coveralls.  There was a closet at one end where dad hung his work coats and boots. We had a back door but no porch was associated with that door at all.  Eventually, dad had a concrete stoop poured but no one would ever mistake it for a porch.  

Some of my fondest memories of childhood are recollections of hours spent at my grandparent's house which had three porches, designated as North porch, East porch, sometimes called the front porch, and the back porch or South porch.   Some of my best quality time was spent there on the "north porch" with one or both of my grandparents on the porch swing that always hung there.  Usually, that was during the early evening hours as the last of the daylight was fading and bats would come out and start swooping over the front pasture getting fat on mosquitos and other insects.  It was there on that porch that stories of "the old days" were told and eagerly listened to.  My later interest in genealogy must have certainly started on that porch.  The large back porch was what I'd call a working porch.  Two large cupboards there kept jars of canned produce, jams and jellies.  Work boots, aprons, a large wash tub could also be found on that porch.  My earliest memories are that it was open but some years later they enclosed it and a daybed appeared there.  

One of my favorite neighborhood porches.

Finding much of a porch on any house built since World War II is just about impossible.  As a society we have turned inward, turned our backs on the street, and on our neighbors and are poorer for it.