A repeat porch from October 2013. . .
Nicholas County, Kentucky, November 1940, by John Vachon, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
What frills attached to such a simple farmhouse and yard.
Her dress goes with the house and her curls with the porch.
A repeat porch from September 2013. . .
Seven Washington, D.C., rowhouses, 1939, by David Myers, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The name of the neighborhood was not given in the original caption. It was only described as “one of the nicer old sections of the city.” It looks like Capitol Hill to me.
In his book, The American Porch, Michael Dolan attempts to trace the European, African, and Asian origins of our many types of porches. The front stoop — several steps and a small landing — came from the Dutch.
Down the coast [from New England], in Nieuw Amsterdam, a different entry was proliferating. Made of stone or brick, the stoep — Dutch for “step” — was a roofless link between doorway and street. Though municipal tradition required a building’s occupants to maintain the stoep, the Dutch deemed it public territory. However, in Nieuw Amsterdam, the stoop acquired a private connotation: “. . . before each door there was an elevation, to which you could ascend by some steps from the street,” an observer wrote. “It resembled a small balcony, and had some benches on both sides on which the people sat in the evening, in order to enjoy the fresh air, and have the pleasure of viewing those who passed it.”
The stoops above lack benches, but the owner of the first one has brought down a chair, and two doors down there is a park bench in the tiny garden. You can see a similar arrangement here.
“Waiters at Day and Brothers Ice Cream Saloon,” 1880, Ocean Grove, New Jersey, by William H. Stauffer, via Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, The New York Public Library.
The image is not very clear, but it looks like a fun place. The same company still exists at the location shown above as Day’s Ice Cream. It is Ocean Grove‘s oldest continuously operating business.
Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, winter 1941/42, by Jack Delano, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
“Calvert Richard Jones (on the right), with six women, a man, boy, girl and dog, standing and sitting in a colonnaded porch way,” probably Swansea, Wales, ca. 1860, via National Library of Wales Commons on flickr.
Jones was a member of Swansea’s wealthly, landowning elite. He studied mathematics at Oxford and was ordained as an Anglican priest, but spent much of his time traveling and painting. Like many men and women of his class in the Swansea area from the 1840s to the early 1860s, he was a photography enthusiast. In 1841, he took a daguerreotype that is now the earliest accurately dated photograph in Wales.
The photo may include Mrs. Jones (Portia Smith) and one or more of their three daughters.
enclos*ure 