Shotgun house

A modest shotgun house in New Orleans' Bayou St. John neighborhood. Shotgun houses are defined by their narrow, rectangular structure.

The shotgun house is a type of house that was the most popular style in the American South from just after the Civil War until the 1920s. Alternate names include shotgun shack, shotgun cottage, and railroad apartments. The style was developed in New Orleans, but the houses were found as far away as Chicago and California. Shotgun houses are characterized by their narrow rectangular structure, no more than 12 feet wide, three to five rooms deep, all connected to each other with no hallways, with doors at each end. The term "shotgun" is usually said to come from the saying that you could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would go cleanly through the house and out the back door. Though that is often true, it isn't always the case, and the name's origin may reflect its African heritage.

There are several variations allowing for additional features and space. The older shotgun houses were built without indoor plumbing, and this was often added later, often crudely. Double-barrel shotgun houses allowed for two houses to share a central wall and fit more houses into an area, and camelback shotgun houses allowed for a second floor at the rear of the house.

Shotguns, though initially popular with the middle class as much as the poor, became a symbol of poverty in the mid-20th century, but opinion is now more mixed, with some the targets of bulldozing due to urban renewal, but others the recipients of historical preservation and gentrification. They remain the most prevalent housing in many southern cities and towns.

History

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Shotgun houses spaced tightly together in New Orleans. In cities, shotguns were built closely together for a variety of reasons.

Shotgun houses were most popular before widespread ownership of the automobile allowed people to live further from businesses and other destinations, when building lots were kept small out of necessity. An influx of people to cities, both from rural areas and foreign countries, all looking to fill rapidly emerging manufacturing jobs, created the high demand for housing in cities. Shotgun houses were thus built to fulfill the same need as rowhouses in Northeastern cities.

Shotgun houses were typically built on lots about 30 feet wide at most. Another theory for its popularity over other styles was that in New Orleans, Property tax was based on lot width, thus a shotgun house would minimize property taxes . But the most compelling reason was probably its cheap construction cost and superior natural air cooling qualities, in a time long before air conditioning. The many variations suggest adaptation to conditions not present when the shape was first used.

It has been suggested, most notably by folklorist and professor John Michael Vlach, that the origin of the building style and the name itself may trace back to Haiti and Africa in the 1700s and earlier. The name may have originated from the Africa's Southern Dohomey Fon area term, to-gun, which means, "place of assembly." The description, probably used in New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves, may have been misunderstood and reinterpreted as "Shotgun."

The theory behind the earlier African origin is tied to the history of New Orleans. In 1803 there were 1,355 free blacks in the city. By 1810 blacks outnumbered whites 10,500 to 4,500. This naturally caused a housing boom, and as many of both the builders and inhabitants were Africans by way of Haiti, historians believe it is only natural they modelled the new homes after ones they left behind in their homeland. Many surviving Haitian dwellings, including about 15 percent of the housing stock of Port-au-Prince, resemble the single shotgun houses of New Orleans.

The shotgun house was popularized in New Orleans, Louisiana, first seen there definitively in 1832, though there is evidence that houses sold in the 1830s were built 15 to 20 years earlier . They were eventually built heavily in hot urban areas in the South, since its great length allowed for excellent airflow, while its narrow frontage increased the number of plots that could be fitted along a street. It was used so heavily that some southern cities estimate that even today their housing stock is 10% shotgun houses or more

After the Great Depression, few shotgun houses were built, and went existing ones went into decline. By the late 20th century, shotgun houses in some areas were being restored as housing and for other uses.

Shotgun houses were often initially built as rental properties, located near manufacturing centers or railroad hubs, providing logical housing choices for workers. By the late 20th century though, shotguns were often owner-occupied, for example, 85% of the homes in New Orleans' shotgun-dominated Lower Ninth Ward are owner-occupied.

Characteristics

The rooms of a shotgun house are lined up one behind the other, typically a living room is first, then one or two bedroom, and finally a kitchen in a back. Early shotgun houses were not built with bathrooms, but in later years a bathroom with a small hall was built before the last room of the house, or a side addition was built off of the kitchen.

Chimneys tended to be built in the interior, allowing the front and middle rooms to share a chimney with a fireplace opening in each room. The kitchen usually has its own chimney.

Other than the basic floor layout, shotgun houses have many standard features in common. The house is almost always close to the street, with a very short front yard and no porch. In some cases, the house has no front yard and is actually flush with the sidewalk. The original steps were wood, but typically were replaced with permanent concrete steps eventually.

Sketch of a typical camelback, or one and a half storey, shotgun house, with a detailed sketch of a typical decorative wooden door bracket.

A sign of its New Orleans heritage, the house is usually raised 2 to 3 feet off the ground. There is a single door and window in the front of the house, and often a side door leading into the back room, which is slightly wider than the rest of the house. The front door and window often were originally covered by decorative shutters. Because there is not much space between houses, there almost never are windows on the side walls.

Typically, shotgun houses have a wood frame structure and wood siding, although some examples exist in brick and even stone. Many shotguns, especially older or less expensive ones, have flat roofs that end at the front wall of the house. In houses built after 1880, the roof overhangs the front wall, and there is usually a gable above the overhang. The overhang is usually supported by decorative wooden brackets, and sometimes contains cast iron ventilators.

The rooms are good sized, and have relatively high ceilings for cooling purposes. They usually have some decoration such as moldings, ceiling medallions, and elaborate woodwork. In cities like New Orleans, local industries supplied elaborate, but mass-produced, brackets other and ornaments for shotgun houses that were accessible even to homeowners of modest means.

Variations

A conventional, 1-storey freestanding shotgun house is often called a single shotgun. Many common variations exist in high quantity.

A double shotgun structure in LaGrange, Georgia. Double shotgun houses were a form of multiple-family housing, where essentially two conventional shotgun houses shared a central wall

• Double Shotgun, also called double-barrel shotgun, essentially two shotgun houses connected to each other, a form of Semi-detached housing. The double shotgun requires less land per household than the traditional shotgun and was used extensively in poorer areas because it could be built with fewer materials and use less land per occupant. It was first seen in New Orleans in 1854.
• Camelback house, also called Humpback, a variation of the Shotgun that has a partial second floor over the rear of the house. Camelback houses were built in the latter period of shotgun houses. The floor plan and construction is very similar to the traditional shotgun house, except there are stairs in the back room leading up the second floor. The second floor, or "hump", contains one to four rooms. Because it was only a partial second story, most cities only taxed it as a single-story house - in fact this was a key reason for their construction.
• Double Width Shotgun, is where an extra large and wide shotgun house would be built on two lots instead of one. These were typically built one to a block in locations where a single person would first buy the entire city block during development, then build themselves a double sized home and then subdivide the rest of the block with single lot homes.
• "North shore" houses, shotgun houses with wide verandas on three sides. They were so named because most were built on the north shore of New Orleans' Lake Pontchartrain as summer homes for wealthy whites.

A combination, the Double Camelback shotgun, also exists. A minor variation is a side door allowing access to the kitchen, or a porch along the side extending almost the length of the house.

Decline and legacy

Construct of shotgun houses slowed and eventually stopped in the early 20th century. Technological innovations, the car and consumer air conditioning units, made the key advantages of the shotgun house obsolete. After World War II, shotgun houses had very little appeal to those building new houses, as car-oriented modern suburbs were built. There have essentially been no new shotgun houses built in America since the war, although the concept of a simple, single-level floor plan lived on in ranch-style houses.

The surviving urban shotgun houses suffered problems related to the inner city neighborhoods in which they were located. The flight of affluent residents to the suburbs, absentee owners, and a shortage of mortgage lenders for inner city residents lead to the deterioration of shotgun houses in the mid and late 20th century.

Though shotguns are sometimes perceived as being housing prevalent in poor African American neighborhoods, many were originally built heavily in segregated white neighborhoods. Many of these neighborhoods became predominantly black during the 1950s and 1960s, but many did not and remain predominantly white.

Regardless of who was living in them, from World War II until the 1980s, shotguns came to be widely viewed as substandard housing and a symbol of poverty, and they were demolished by many urban renewal projects. This thinking is no longer so prevalent, with cities such as Houston and Charlotte establishing "Shotgun Historic Districts". Shotgun houses even been praised as quality and cost-effective cultural assets that promote a distinctive urban life Other cities, such as Macon, Georgia, experimented with renovating shotgun houses for low-income residents, but found that it is cheaper and more effective to tear them down and build new housing.

There are many large neighborhoods in older American cities which still contain a high concentration of shotgun houses today. Examples include Bywater in New Orleans.

In some shotgun-dominated neighborhoods, property value has become quite high, leading to gentrification. Sometimes, a new owner will buy both homes of a double-barreled shotgun structure, and combine them to form a relatively large single house. Shotguns are also often combined to renovate them into office or storage space.

Rural version

The term may also refer to a different structure, common in rural areas and small towns, which takes the form of a small, long, free-standing house, generally made of wood, with no hallways. Unlike the larger terraced version, this is generally a single-storied dwelling, but it was still associated with poverty and popular partially because of its ability to make hot weather more comfortable. It was most prevalent along waterways and bayous in rural Louisianna.

Trivia

• Elvis Presley was born in a shotgun house, the Neville Brothers grew up in one, and Robert Johnson is said to have died in one
• Gold shotgun house Christmas tree ornaments are sold in New Orleans
• Superstition holds that ghosts and spirits are attracted to shotgun houses because they may pass straight through them, and that some houses were built with doors intentionally misaligned to deter these spirits.

External links

• Shotgun Houses on Architectural Patrimony (includes many example photos)
• Description on Great Buildings Online
• Shotgun Homes and porches
• Future of Shreveport's shotgun houses subject of public hearing