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The Lure of the Porch in Summer: Privacy and Pleasure

WITHOUT A PORCH, life at my summer place in Maine seemed incomplete. A granite patio-terrace adjoining the main house suited everyone as a gathering space for eating, drinking, and socializing—until the sun went down and the mosquitoes drove us inside. Nearby, however, was a small guest cottage with a wooden deck that had a roof over it. A local carpenter constructed a screened enclosure with a door on either side, and, with three wicker rockers, I was in business.

True, it was not the wide-screened porch of my childhood on a quiet city street shaded by maples. But the very structure of this new porch gave continuity to the cherished habit of privacy on summer afternoons. As I sit there reading or writing, or just watching the day settle as the lobstermen pick up their catch, the question is always before me: What special contribution does the American front porch make to the quality of life that the outdoor patio, as conceived for modern homes, can never provide? Answering this question forces one to acknowledge how architectural design both determines social habits and is, in turn, determined by them.

In ancient Greece, the porch, or portico, was a public area, an open gallery alongside a building with a roof supported by a colonnade. Zeno's Stoic school of philosophy derived its name from the Greek word for porch, stoa, after the place in Athens where he taught his disciples. The Pompeii exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History shows how open-air patios—in the form of peristyle gardens and atriums—were private areas of the house within the confines of the external walls.

With the exception of Spanish-style houses, American homes have generally looked outward, reversing the situation. The porch, architecturally, is considered inside the boundaries of the home and usually forms part of a main entrance; the patio, with little structural form except for the flagstone or concrete paving that defines the area, is outside and not particularly private.

The porch as we know it now appeared about 1840 on the Gothic Revival cottage; as the century progressed, it became larger and more elaborate, preferably on two sides of the house to give a choice of exposure. It was covered with honeysuckle or some other lush vine to add scent on warm evenings and protect it from road dust.

In his invaluable text on the American home, The Domesticated Americans, Russell Lynes tells us that when screening was made with fine mesh in the 1890s, porches were further protected from mosquitoes and other insects. They already were shelters from the hot sun and inclement weather and provided the family, Lynes wrote, “with a window on the world about them and ample space for relaxation, gossip, games, and interludes of romance.” The couple on the porch swing in moonlight is the image that comes to mind.

Although outdoors in the fresh air, the porch is a midpoint between inside and outside, governed still by the rules of the home but with formalities of its own. Ultimately, it is these formalities that make porch life a liberating experience by offering the benefits of privacy. When a person is alone on a porch, it is assumed he wishes not to be interrupted. Others may join him, but it is not considered polite to intrude unless he makes a sign. Similarly, though passersby may greet people on a porch, they will not come up without being invited. The ability to choose whether to be alone or to be sociable gives one's time a higher value. The porch offers delicious isolation in conjunction with nature or an awareness of others, particularly where porches are close together and near the front paving-line.

On the screened porch of my childhood, I could look into all the porches up and down the street and hear, above the sound of crickets, the murmur of voices. When the streetlights came on, there was a magical quality that seemed to link all of us night-watchers. Sitting still that way for a long time, and usually unseen behind the screens. I would observe the smallest details, which for me added drama to my neighbors' lives. What was revealed to me there, as I sat on the porch, added to my experience of life.

Porches were not restricted to private homes; they were also a main feature of those enormous wooden structures, the resort hotels. Here is how Henry James described one at Newport, Rhode Island, in An International Episode: “In front was a gigantic veranda, upon which an army might have encamped—a vast wooden terrace, with a roof as lofty as the nave of a cathedral. Here…American society…was distributed over the measureless expanse…and appeared to consist largely of pretty young girls, dressed as if for a fête champêtre, swaying to and fro in rocking chairs.”

So highly do we value the porch and the lifestyle that went with it that even though the porch itself has been in decline, the “porch look” has survived inside the house. Wicker furniture has become increasingly expensive and is used everywhere in a way unheard of in the porch era.

That era waned after 1910. The decline of the porch coincided with the advent of the automobile, which made it both easier for people to go out and noisier on the streets. At this point, many porches became glassed-in sun parlors or were removed.

In suburban communities, so dependent on the automobile, life revolves more around the back of the house. As meals became central to sociability—an emphasis the porch era did very well without—dining moved outside in the summer, onto an area near the kitchen called the patio or terrace. And then cooking moved outside, too, and passed into the male domain.

Even though it may be carefully landscaped, because the patio has little or no structural definition or boundary it is an outdoor public space subject to another standard of behavior. Anyone sitting alone on a patio is fair game; it is assumed that he is available to anyone passing by. Patio life, with its stress on family recreation that often involves complicated equipment, like that for barbecues, may lack spontaneity. And because it is an unprotected area, patio furnishings must be covered or put away. All this, along with the insects, makes patios a great deal of trouble. They are not for me.

Two plays shown on public television this year illustrate my point. The Long Wharf Theater's production of Ah, Wilderness! used an actual front porch, although Eugene O'Neill's stage directions only imply its presence on the other side of a screen door. At the end of the play, most of which takes place on the Fourth of July, the young hero goes out on the porch alone to contemplate an evening that is for him momentous. Respecting his privacy, his parents advance only to the screen door, but no farther, to gaze at the moonlight.

The other example is British: the third part of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests, called Round and Round the Garden. A seemingly endless series of conversations by various combinations of characters takes place on a patio-like area near the house. The point is made that no one is allowed to be alone for long.

This porch story does not have a sad ending. At a time when postmodern architects are rediscovering valuable aspects of the traditional house, porches are again in evidence, particularly in quiet areas with attractive views. A pair of shingle beach houses by Venturi & Rauch at Nantucket, Massachusetts, for example, has covered porches facing the bay.

And porches that have survived are now being restored. On East 92nd Street in Manhattan, there are still two wooden houses with porches set cheek by jowl, remnants of an earlier era when New Yorkers, too, sat outside in the evenings. As I walk by them these early summer days, they touch off an image of another two houses I know—two plain white ones on a rise, overlooking a bay dotted with islands, in a town called Sunset, in Maine. Every nice evening now, their residents are sure to be sitting out on the porches in black rocking chairs, silhouetted against the white. They are satisfied spectators of an annual display: the sun going down over the water on the longest days of the year.

New York Times, June 28, 1979

Facing page: Walker Evans, Detail of a Frame Hou.se in Ossining, New York, 1931.