In Praise of Porches

Before screens and backyards took over, American communities were held together by something much simpler—and more profound.

Porches historically served as gathering places for families to rest, converse, and interact with neighbors. Biba Kayewich

Stroll through the older neighborhoods of these United States, and you will see the ornate and towering structures of Victorian houses, complete with turrets, gables, and steeply sloping roofs. These old houses, emblems of faded glory, line the streets with a quiet, forgotten dignity. To passersby with the ears to hear, the old mansions murmur of a different way of life. Conspicuous on most of them is a central architectural feature: the front porch.

In the time when these venerable old houses were built, America was a nation of front porches—which is a statement more significant than it at first appears. A nation of front porches is a nation knit together by a highly localized social structure, bulwarked by neighborliness and sustained by the bonds of small-scale community.

The front porch stood for and enabled the kind of everyday interaction among neighbors and community members that wove together a strong social fabric—and it’s worth recovering for that very reason.

The Porch’s Purpose

Porches historically served as gathering places for families to rest, converse, and interact with neighbors. Biba Kayewich

The social climate of the porch was defined by rootedness in place and familiarity with the people of that place—as opposed to contemporary mobility and the anonymity of the modern town or city.

As Richard H. Thomas wrote many years ago in his study of society’s shift from front porches to backyard patios, “Part of the sense of community that often characterized the nineteenth-century village resulted from the forms of social interaction that the porch facilitated.” The front porch provided an intermediate space between the privacy of the home and publicity of the street; it incarnated the connection between home life and community life, helping to strengthen the bond between the family and the world (without losing all sense of privacy or autonomy), and also the bond between families.

Thomas outlined the kind of important social activity encouraged by the front porch: It provided a cool place for the family to rest from the day’s work and enjoy one another’s company, naturally facilitating conversation; it allowed for casual interactions between neighbors as they passed one another’s houses; it provided a courting space that was separated from the house and its inhabitants but still within earshot of the parents; it afforded a perch from which the older generation could sit and observe the world and the children at play.

What’s Been Lost

Yet rapid social and technological change in the 20th and 21st centuries slowly erased the front porch from most American dwellings, although of course we still see it in some places. As porches increasingly vanished from the front of the house, they were replaced by patios in the back—a space that does not enable interaction with the world outside the home in the same way. Thomas observed, “Twentieth-century man has achieved the sense of privacy in his patio, but in doing so he has lost part of his public nature which is essential to strong attachments and a deep sense of belonging or feelings of community.”

That sense of belonging became increasingly meaningless, Thomas argued, as more people moved into sleeper communities outside cities, since these communities by definition “lacked established social structures and the ingredients of community building prevalent in the older towns and villages.”

The increasingly nomadic lifestyle of American families, chasing career opportunities in various cities around the country, also decreased the relevance of porches. “In communities with a high rate of mobility, one did not often want to know his neighbor,” Thomas wrote. “The constant turn-over of neighbors worked against the long-term relationships which are essential to a sense of belonging.”

The new housing developments were marked by a distinctly different atmosphere than the old ones: They weren’t towns, strictly speaking, because most of the economic, cultural, and recreational activities happened elsewhere—generally in the city. They were marked by greater uniformity of design among the houses and a greater desire for anonymity among the people. They were also the product of the new world of the automobile, which made a daily commute to a distant place of work, school, or entertainment feasible, but also stretched out the geographic scale of daily life.

A new type of society had emerged: one characterized by a wider extent and a faster pace that would push leisurely evenings on the porch chatting with neighbors more and more to the margins of life.

There were other changes at work in the latter half of the 20th century that were the final wrecking balls of front porches. Priorities were shifting. As Jane Self wrote for The Tuscaloosa News: “With a newfound sense of independence in the 1950s, men and women started working more and spending less time at home. Leisure time became a precious commodity, not to be ‘wasted’ rocking and chatting on a front porch. Privacy took priority over neighborliness.”

Further, the introduction of air conditioning meant that it was easy to stay cool inside the house during the heavy, hot days of summer. Even more significantly, the widespread adoption of radio and television made the living room the center of evening entertainment. Instead of talking to neighbors, people watched TV shows. The residents disappeared from their porches like ghosts. When the days faded into evenings, the neighborhoods grew quiet, and the only sign of life was the flickering lights of screens emitting from every living room window like some strange form of Morse code.

Is It Too Late for Porches?

All this leads us to ask: Was the decline of porches and porch culture a good thing? As the drift of what I’ve written so far indicates, I tend to think not.

Porches have a venerable history of offering us pleasant outdoor spaces that bring us into closer contact with nature and also our local community. The fact that many families in the past sat outside in the evening with children playing in the yard instead of dazedly eyeballing screens suggests that past generations had a deeper sense of active, communal recreation activities, as opposed to the passive, technology-based activities we incline toward today. These passive forms of entertainment can benumb our minds and bodies and deaden the life of local culture.

While the structure of our towns and cities today may not lend itself well to the time-honored occupation of “porching,” it’s certainly not impossible to reintroduce this tradition. In fact, some parts of the country never really lost it, in spite of the swiftly shifting face of modern life. The city of Indianapolis, for example, is well-known for its porch-sitting custom, especially in the lead-up to the Indianapolis 500.

In a piece for Town & Country, Anne Roderique-Jones describes porching as a very-much-alive Southern custom. She wrote, “In a way, our new porch ushered us into life down here in the South. During the first month, we had so many people coming by for a ‘stop and chat’ that my husband thought innocent folks were trying to sell us something. Sitting on the porch is just that: an invitation, not for solicitation, but for conversation.”

The art of sitting on your porch might be making a comeback in other areas, too. The Porch Movement website, for instance, aims to “build community one ‘Porch’ at a time” in areas throughout the country. The movement is about “intentionally holding space for one another and lending a genuine helping hand as needed.” The mission statement continues, “We are stronger together. Together we can restore safe and caring neighborhoods which will transform the way we do life with one another.”

With many online resources, including a calendar of events, websites such as this are using one of the technologies that damaged front porch culture to help rebuild it.

Or, consider the town of Seaside, Florida, where the building code requires all new structures to have porches as an intentional effort to foster local community. Seaside is part of a larger architectural and city planning movement known as “new urbanism,” which prioritizes designs that reflect a human scale, a sense of beauty, and the importance of community-building.

Build a Better Tomorrow

Places like Indianapolis or Seaside teach us that a front porch culture doesn’t have to be a relic of the past, as incongruous as hoop skirts or carriages. Maybe modern neighborhoods aren’t built with porching in mind, but they’re rarely incompatible with it. Even a lack of a porch doesn’t have to pose an insurmountable barrier: An open garage and a couple of folding chairs will do.

This might seem like a small, almost meaningless gesture. But I hope I’ve been able to demonstrate how something as simple as sitting outside in the evenings can reshape and renew a neighborhood. Neighborhoods can feel like neighborhoods again. And the state of our neighborhoods, ultimately, comes to bear on the state of our nation.

I spoke of the “social fabric” above. A fabric is nothing more than thousands of individual threads woven together into something much bigger. And so it’s true that the thread of our individual activities, though small in themselves, become powerful when taken in the aggregate, woven into the activities of a community and, ultimately, the activities of a nation. Our porches have more power than we think.