May 10, 2012 • 23 mins
Shotgun houses are iconic pieces of American architecture: they're long, narrow, and filled with artistic flourishes. But where did they come from? In this episode, Chuck and Josh explore the mysterious origins of shotgun houses.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to you Stuff you Should
Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant
with me as always, Um, which makes this stuff you
(00:24):
should know? The stuff you should Yeah, that's what thinks
on it. Nice Joff, Thank you. Um, what are you doing?
I'm doing great. I feel like we just do this.
I'm looking forward to the show, are you Yeah? Because
it touches on parts of Atlanta in their in its history,
which I always loved, and that's this Atlanta man all
(00:45):
over the States, all over the States, Chuck as Uh,
the immortal David Byrne put it, you may find yourself
living in a shotgun check, and you may find yourself
in another part of the world. Mm hmm. I think
even David Byrne didn't realize what he was saying when
(01:06):
he put those two lines together. I think he meant
them to contrast with one another. But really, if you
found yourself in a shotgun check and say the beginning
of the nineteenth century, you probably were experiencing both. Yeah, yeah,
but he doesn't tip so now he doesn't care what
(01:26):
he said. That's crazy. Um So Chuck. You remember Hurricane Katrina,
Um I killed I believe people. There is a lot
of people. Um. And one of the things in addition
to all the loss of life and property was a
real worry about loss of very um specific type of architecture,
(01:50):
the shotgun house. And the reason even though you can
find it everywhere from Key West to Chicago to San Francisco,
all over the place. You can find shotgun houses Atlanta, UM.
The reason why people were worried about losing it in
New Orleans because as far as the United States goes,
that is where it was born. That's right. And the
(02:10):
whole reason anybody would even worry about a shotgun house,
if you've ever seen one, you might think, why would
anyone care about losing old chalk gun houses is because
they are routinely cited as the great possibly greatest contribution
by African Americans to American specific architecture and design, and
(02:32):
not only that, responsible for the bringing together, in many
ways of the African American communities due to their things
that we're going to talk about, I was going to
ruin it. I thank you for saving it. That was
good man. Um, you've surely seen a shotgun house. Yeah,
let's talk about some of the features people. We should. Yeah,
(02:54):
because there's probably plenty of people out there and people
who have seen them and don't know what we're talking about.
You're about to go. Oh, if you haven't seen him,
then go onto how stuff works dot com and type
in what's the shotgun house and you will find some
images of shotgun houses in this article that I wrote.
That's true. You wrote this years and years ago. I
don't think I knew that. Nice job. Shotgun house is
(03:17):
long and narrow. A lot of times they won't have
windows on the side of the house, although in researching
this I saw plenty that do so that sometimes they don't. Yes,
And the reason why it's because they're often really close together,
like I mean, like a foot a couple of feet
you can maybe walk without turning between two houses. But
(03:39):
that's it exactly. Um. They well you just said they
were close to one another. Um, they have high ceilings.
They very few of them had indoor plumbing at first.
That was usually brought on later, um and tacked onto
the rear of the house. Sometimes crudely. Uh. Typically what
you have is living room, bedroom, bedroom, kitchen, all in
(04:02):
a row, all in a straight line, all the doors
lining up, interior doors lining up right. So when the
front and back doors open, you can see clear through
the house, which is one of the reasons why a
lot of people think it got its name. You could
shoot a gun or a shotgun through the front door
and it would exit out the back door without hitting
a single wall, and that would hit the house behind
(04:24):
it or some in And like you point out, Josh,
it's a cute story, and it's all over the place.
I bet you there are many many tours of New
Orleans that'd say that story is true. May or may
not be. It probably isn't. Um. What else is? What
else is specific about shotgun houses? Chuck? Uh? They aside
(04:46):
from being a modest homes, they have certain architectural flourishes
that make them distinctive. Um. I think the idea was
kind of like, you know, we may be or and
not have the biggest house, but we can certainly adorn
the the vent venting greats and what the the arbor
(05:09):
that held up the not the arbor brackets, brackets held
up the roof they would be intricately carved, usually in
a gingerbread design, um, which a lot of people kind
of criticize her pooh pooed that addition, um as uh
poor blacks or even before that slave's just trying to
emulate whites um, which is not the case because if
(05:32):
you trace so, the shotgun house finds its origins in
the US and New Orleans, but if you go even
further back, you'll find older ones on Haiti, and then
even further back you will find something that looks started
startlingly similar. Um. In West Africa and in the Yoruba tongue,
these houses are called to gun, which means house in Yoruba,
(05:55):
or showgun, which means God's house. So probably that's where
the name comes from. By ways, to gun or showgun
from the Oruba dialect, right, which I love. UM. But
in these houses they also had like intricate details, but
they were more of an African motif. Over time here
in the United States they adopted gingerbreadin or Um Victorian. Yeah,
(06:15):
different kinds of carvings, but it is very cool. It's
kind of like this is a very modest, straightforward house,
but there's also pretty neat little details we can still
have like great pride in it. Um. They were usually
New Orleans. They were typically if you feed off the
ground because of the obvious flooding problems there. Um. And
(06:37):
this I found and it seems believable to me, but
I didn't have time to triple check it um. At
the time, property taxes were based on frontage still are man,
are they in New Orleans? If you have a house,
you're paying by them. The frontage, which is the width
of your house. Yes, and if you are looking at
(06:58):
a shotgun house is very nar but it's long, right um.
And the number of rooms and in New Orleans, I
thought they changed it to the number of rooms. They
added that on. Yeah, it's both okay uh. And in
New Orleans rooms include hallways and closets and you're not
going to find a hallway or a closet in a
shotgun house. So it's also another way to um, I
(07:21):
guess keep your property taxes low as well well. And
I found that they originally it was just frontage, and
then so they started building the camelbacks, which is a
shotgun house with the second story on the rear of
the house only. And then that's when the city said, oh, well,
we should tack rooms onto this as well, because these
smart people have found a way around paying, as you know,
(07:43):
property tax. Pretty smart. Yeah, it does, it makes it
makes sense. And I also found that the first mentioned
in print calling them shotgun houses was in our very
own Atlanta Journal Constitution in nineteen o three, a classified
ad may have been the first time that it was
actually named that in print, and it was like shotgun
(08:04):
house twelve dollars a month rent. Yeah, twelve bucks. That's
not too bad. But you could get a shotgun house
about that time a kit for a hundred bucks. Um.
They also allowed for good air flow too, I want
to mention, yeah, because you can open up the front
and back doors and you got a straight shot. Well,
that's one of the reasons why they were adopted in Haiti.
Not everybody in Haiti was from West Africa, but that
(08:25):
became the predominant style, this West African design house, because
it fit in really well with the tropics, all right.
So well, it made its way from Haitia to New
Orleans because of the well in indirectly because of the
French Revolution. Right, So French Revolution takes place and you've
(08:45):
got um, liberty, legality, fraternity to all people. That put
French planners in Haiti in kind of a pickle because
they couldn't grant liberty to their slaves because wouldn't have
any profits any longer. So as they're figuring this out,
they're trying to figure out what to do, a guy
(09:05):
named Toussaint low Mature makes the decision for him and
leads a slave uprising that lasts for many years and
basically drives all of the white plantation owners from the
island of Haiti, one of the places that they went.
And then Haiti became the first UM recognized sovereign maroon
nation of freed slaves revolting slaves UM, which is pretty cool.
(09:32):
But that also led to, if you go back and
listen to our voodoo podcast, a deep and abiding suspicion
by whites of Haiti all things Haiti from that point
on UM. But so that this slave uprising that led
to the UM. The freeing of Haiti also led to
the white populating of New Orleans. So about that time,
(09:54):
if you went to New Orleans, there about twelve thousand people,
and the third of them were slaves. The third of
them were white, and then a third of them were
free blacks, so it's it's real melting pot UM and
one of the place one of the things that came
about from that was people fleeing Haiti bringing the shotgun
houses with them, and then it just kind of it
was always African American UM and it was always associated
(10:17):
with African Americans, and it just kind of spread from
there to where if you if you came across the
working class African American neighborhood like in Chicago or something
like that, you're going to see shotgun houses or Atlanta,
like I've mentioned many times. Uh, if if you are local,
then you can see these kinds of houses in like
(10:37):
the Sweet Auburn district, Cabbage Down and I think Cabbage
Town where they were houses for factory workers for the
nearby cotton mill offt and uh factories. Yeah, it changed hands. UM. Also,
you're gonna find them directly across the street from Martin
Luther King's birthplace UM in the King Memorial area. The
whole park is UM. There's still people that live in
(10:59):
them and they been pretty well preserved over there. Yeah,
it's very cool, but those were like late nineteenth century built,
but it did kind of transition from African American only
to working class of all colors. The shotgun house became
kind of an emblem of the working class as much
as African Americans now. Is a is a row house
(11:20):
the same thing? Or is a row house? Just know
those are side by side, like touching, sometimes all forming
one large building, but then maybe different gables differentiating them.
A shotgun a shotgun house could be a rowhouse, but
a rowhouse can't be a shotgun house, because then row
house indicate like the proximity to one another more than
(11:42):
the style of the house. Or no, I think it's both, yeah,
And then the shotgun house is not supposed to be
confused with the railroad house either, which is you enter
and there's a long hallway from front to back. In
the off of the hallway are rooms apart mints. My
friend Mereth in New York, in Brooklyn, lives in a
railroad department, which was always a little weird because like,
(12:06):
in order for like when I would stay there, I
would stay in the living room, and when someone had
to go to the bathroom, they would have to walk
through the living room to get to the bath It's
always awkward. Or she could go outside through the hallway
and then come back in because she had two doors
to her apartment. It still does. I So, Chuck, we
(12:27):
were talking about where else they spread. There's UM also
a lot of them in Oklahoma, especially southern Oklahoma. Yeah.
And one of the reasons why is because southern Oklahoma,
the Oklahoma Territory Um before it became a state, was
a free black area and a lot of blacks traveled
to Oklahoma to moved to Oklahoma to be free, and
(12:47):
a lot of runaway slaves maroons is what they're called,
formed and integrated with um Native American tribes like the Seminoles.
And when these five civilized tribes and making air quotes
like furiously um were moved to the Oklahoma Territory Um,
a lot of blacks went with them, and shotgun houses
(13:09):
showed up alongside. The whole thing awesome, And there's like
all black towns are formerly all black towns in southern
Oklahoma where it's like shotgun houses everywhere. Yeah. So, Chuck,
if you ask me, I feel like, now we've reached
the point where this is the fact of the show.
And I know you're excited about this one. Well, it's
(13:31):
cool they um. It's one of the reasons I talked
about why the cultural legacy of the shotgun home had
a lot to do with bringing together the African American
community is because of a little something called the front porch. Yeah,
they didn't exist in the United States before the shotgun
house brought it along. So shotgun houses are typically I
mean a lot of them actually were so far forward
(13:52):
that they were on the sidewalk, But the ones that
weren't had a few feet of grass and then a
front porch to hang out on. And in a small house,
you're going to congregate on the front porch. And in
the evenings, if your neighbors on our front porch five
ft from you and there are five feet from another one,
then what you have is a big, old, friendly cultural
(14:13):
block party going on every evening, and the porch is
made it's a spandrel I guess of the overhanging roof.
And then if you add the fact that in New Orleans,
like you said, they were built off of the ground.
Some you have to build step to go up to it,
and then you have just buy you have a de
facto porch. And then yeah, you add a bunch of
(14:33):
them together and there you go. So we didn't have porchs.
So like these huge wraparound porches on old like plantation
mansions stoops in New York, like all of this stuff
can be traced back to the shotgun house. Really, yeah,
that's crazy, And thank you for that, shotgun house builders,
because one of my favorite things is the front porch
(14:55):
or porch. Good good ports. It's very important. Yeah, you know,
shotgun houses started to wane in the twenties, and it
wasn't It wasn't until fairly recently that we knew the
history of shotgun houses. That architects um went back and
and art historians went back and figured out where this
(15:16):
all came from and traced it step by step. I
mean it was within the last like a couple of
decades um. And they were like, okay, we found some
shotgun houses and these are really old, and they date
them and they'd be like, okay, New Orleans is the birthplace.
And then somebody be like, have you been to Port
of Prince Like they got some they're really really old there,
and then they traced them back and then somebody figured
(15:36):
out that they were from West Africa. But the new
construction in the United States waned in the twenties, and
like I said about the turn of the last century,
you could get a kit for about a hundred bucks,
which also made them really good cheap housing for labor.
Um if you had like a work camp, you probably
shotgun house. Yeah, exactly. Um, And they were all a
(16:00):
really good for disaster release. Specifically, they made a big
appearance in the San Francisco earthquake of nineteen o six. Well, yeah,
they needed to put up displaced people. And when you
can build a house for a hundred bucks, then you
do so exactly. And when it can be pre fabricated
and then taking apart in like six large parts, put
(16:21):
on a train and sent somewhere and then put back
together within like a couple of hours, it's like a
waffle house. Yeah, it's exactly like a waffle house. As
a matter of fact, I think you can go out
on a limb and say, we wouldn't have the waffle
house without the shotgun house. I think you're right. Uh.
Little pop culture, Yeah, you already mentioned David Byrne uh Coogs.
John Mellencamp my boy Coogs. Pink Houses was about a
(16:45):
shotgun house. Apparently his legend has it. He was driving
on a busy main road and he saw this little
black guy sitting on the front porch of his little
pink shotgun house. Gave him, gave him a wave, and
he said he just looked like he was as happy
as could be sitting out on his porch. And uh,
I wrote a song about it. That's nice, and and
that the album that I was on too, Yeah, I
(17:05):
think so great song. Elvis Presley was born in the
shotgun house, Oh yeah, in uh yeah, Mississippi, which is
where I have family actually, And Aaron Neville grew up
in a shotgun house, the incomparable and muscly Man and Moley.
(17:26):
But boy man that I can sing, yeah like a bird,
pretty good, Aaron Neville as me. Um, shotgun houses are
making a resurgence too, by the way, are they building
them again? Yes, there's this thing called the tiny house movement.
Oh yeah, that and the whole idea of living modestly
in the house you can afford that um grants a
(17:48):
very small carbon footprint. Ye, shotgun houses fit that. Bill.
I like the tiny house thing. I think I think
actually Emily might have written an article about that. Is
that right? If I'm not mistaken or maybe it was me.
Somebody did somebody in our family? Did I remember I
remember it happening? Was it Buckley a few years ago? Yeah?
Buckley wrote it. Um, you got anything else, no go,
(18:10):
you know, seek out local historic landmarks that might be
easily overlooked when you're angry in traffic. Yeah. And when
next time you pass the shotgun house, like, stop and
look at it, and you'll see some pretty cool little
details to it. Ask him to open the door so
you can shoot a gun through it. Let do that.
Don't do that, man, that was a reversal. I was like, no,
(18:30):
don't do it, Chuck said normally around Uh. And if
you're ever in Atlanta, Chuck and I always recommend going
to the King Memorial Center, the place where he's buried,
where the eternal flame is in all of the surrounding area.
Um is like a living museum. Preserved house is just awesome.
One of my favorite parts in Atlanta for sure. Um. So,
(18:51):
if you want to learn more about shotgun houses and
see pictures of shotgun houses, you can type the words
shotgun house two words into the sir to bar at
how stuff works dot com and that'll bring up this
article that I wrote, and I said search bar, which
means it's time for a listener mail. Josh, I'm gonna
call this beast email. Hey, guys, did you did you
(19:14):
read this one? Um? I just listened to the Music
Sampling Podcast. We got a lot of good feedback on that.
But man, everybody loved that. It was a good and
a lot of people offered up like people that know
way more than us offered up a lot of cool insight. Yeah,
we get getting called out for not mentioning girl talk.
I've never heard girl talk, so I don't feel bad.
But everyone we know about girl talk. Now, Okay, guys
(19:37):
that just listened to the Music Sampling Podcast wanted to
say how great it was that you featured the Beastie
Boys so prominently in the show. But I share a
little story when I met them during your nineteen seven
Licensed Build tour in Las Vegas when I was fifteen.
So this girl must be my age because I saw
that tour and I was about to wow. All right.
They performed in a concert hall on the un l
(19:58):
V campus, so it was easy to get to the
area where their tour bus was because I lived in
the bleachers. They were inviting every female they saw back
to their hotel for a party, including fifteen year olds.
Well they were only like eighteen nineteen. Still, well, I know,
but you get to be forty and you're like, what's
the big difference of five years? Man, that's back then.
(20:22):
I'm just saying, it's not like they were like years older,
all right, I'm defending their pedophilia. Uh. By the time
we got there, the party had taken over the ninth
floor and had already been shut down. We got to
say hi to m c A before being escorted away
by security for curfew violation. But I was determined. I
(20:42):
skipped school the next day went back to the hotel,
basically casing the joint. I ended up finding m c A,
who remembered me from the night before. I said, how
did he said? Hi? Very nice? What you heard waiting
on that one? I ended up spending the whole day
with the guys, chatting, playing arcade games, while king over
to a seven eleven with a very hungover ad Rock,
(21:03):
and even helping load their bags onto the tour bus.
They were only nineteen twenty and twenty one at the time,
very unassuming, so they weren't getting much attention. I felt
like a little sister tagging along with their super cool
older brothers. That is very cool. At one point m
c A offered me a tour of the bus. We
got on and he closed the door and said, now
we cannot do all sorts of things that you're going
(21:24):
to tell all your friends. We did anyway, he was
really hysterical, so he was like he was still a gentleman, unfortunately,
and he's like a Buddhist now and he unfortunately I
had not thought to bring a camera with me, so
I have no picks. I did get her auto document
any of this happened. Now she does um. I did
get their autographs, but the only paper I had in
(21:44):
my jacket was old school snoopy Valentines. I had thought
could give up friends. I still treasured my three snoopy Valentines,
each one with their autographs, and she sent pictures of them.
That's cool. I stayed until they left around six at night.
I naively asked m c A if he would write
to me. He answered with an honest no, and gave
me a very sweet kiss on the cheek. I loved
(22:07):
it that they have continued to rise on popularity and
her given the respect of being true innovators in the
field first year, that is Ali Smith and she got
kissed on the cheek by a very sweet sounding m
C And all your fifteen year olds out there, you
better be at home sleeping. Yeah, don't be hanging out
with twenty one year old dudes, especially not the girl
talk people. Those guys are girls. I think girl talks
(22:31):
a guy's dear clear that girl talked to um. Let's see,
what do you want to call out for? Mm hmm.
Do you live in a shotgun house? No? I guess yeah,
if you have like a house with an interesting history,
we did that one, but let's do it again that boy. Um,
if you live in a house with an interesting history,
(22:52):
or you flung out with the beastie boys, we want
to hear those. You can write to us at uh
let's see. You can tweet to us at s y
s K podcast. That's our handled Facebook dot com. Slash
Stuff you should Know is us on Facebook and you
can send us an email at Stuff Podcast at Discovery
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(23:18):
Is it how stuff works dot com h Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera, it's ready.
Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to you Stuff you Should
Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant
with me as always, Um, which makes this stuff you
(00:24):
should know? The stuff you should Yeah, that's what thinks
on it. Nice Joff, Thank you. Um, what are you doing?
I'm doing great. I feel like we just do this.
I'm looking forward to the show, are you Yeah? Because
it touches on parts of Atlanta in their in its history,
which I always loved, and that's this Atlanta man all
(00:45):
over the States, all over the States, Chuck as Uh,
the immortal David Byrne put it, you may find yourself
living in a shotgun check, and you may find yourself
in another part of the world. Mm hmm. I think
even David Byrne didn't realize what he was saying when
(01:06):
he put those two lines together. I think he meant
them to contrast with one another. But really, if you
found yourself in a shotgun check and say the beginning
of the nineteenth century, you probably were experiencing both. Yeah, yeah,
but he doesn't tip so now he doesn't care what
(01:26):
he said. That's crazy. Um So Chuck. You remember Hurricane Katrina,
Um I killed I believe people. There is a lot
of people. Um. And one of the things in addition
to all the loss of life and property was a
real worry about loss of very um specific type of architecture,
(01:50):
the shotgun house. And the reason even though you can
find it everywhere from Key West to Chicago to San Francisco,
all over the place. You can find shotgun houses Atlanta, UM.
The reason why people were worried about losing it in
New Orleans because as far as the United States goes,
that is where it was born. That's right. And the
(02:10):
whole reason anybody would even worry about a shotgun house,
if you've ever seen one, you might think, why would
anyone care about losing old chalk gun houses is because
they are routinely cited as the great possibly greatest contribution
by African Americans to American specific architecture and design, and
(02:32):
not only that, responsible for the bringing together, in many
ways of the African American communities due to their things
that we're going to talk about, I was going to
ruin it. I thank you for saving it. That was
good man. Um, you've surely seen a shotgun house. Yeah,
let's talk about some of the features people. We should. Yeah,
(02:54):
because there's probably plenty of people out there and people
who have seen them and don't know what we're talking about.
You're about to go. Oh, if you haven't seen him,
then go onto how stuff works dot com and type
in what's the shotgun house and you will find some
images of shotgun houses in this article that I wrote.
That's true. You wrote this years and years ago. I
don't think I knew that. Nice job. Shotgun house is
(03:17):
long and narrow. A lot of times they won't have
windows on the side of the house, although in researching
this I saw plenty that do so that sometimes they don't. Yes,
And the reason why it's because they're often really close together,
like I mean, like a foot a couple of feet
you can maybe walk without turning between two houses. But
(03:39):
that's it exactly. Um. They well you just said they
were close to one another. Um, they have high ceilings.
They very few of them had indoor plumbing at first.
That was usually brought on later, um and tacked onto
the rear of the house. Sometimes crudely. Uh. Typically what
you have is living room, bedroom, bedroom, kitchen, all in
(04:02):
a row, all in a straight line, all the doors
lining up, interior doors lining up right. So when the
front and back doors open, you can see clear through
the house, which is one of the reasons why a
lot of people think it got its name. You could
shoot a gun or a shotgun through the front door
and it would exit out the back door without hitting
a single wall, and that would hit the house behind
(04:24):
it or some in And like you point out, Josh,
it's a cute story, and it's all over the place.
I bet you there are many many tours of New
Orleans that'd say that story is true. May or may
not be. It probably isn't. Um. What else is? What
else is specific about shotgun houses? Chuck? Uh? They aside
(04:46):
from being a modest homes, they have certain architectural flourishes
that make them distinctive. Um. I think the idea was
kind of like, you know, we may be or and
not have the biggest house, but we can certainly adorn
the the vent venting greats and what the the arbor
(05:09):
that held up the not the arbor brackets, brackets held
up the roof they would be intricately carved, usually in
a gingerbread design, um, which a lot of people kind
of criticize her pooh pooed that addition, um as uh
poor blacks or even before that slave's just trying to
emulate whites um, which is not the case because if
(05:32):
you trace so, the shotgun house finds its origins in
the US and New Orleans, but if you go even
further back, you'll find older ones on Haiti, and then
even further back you will find something that looks started
startlingly similar. Um. In West Africa and in the Yoruba tongue,
these houses are called to gun, which means house in Yoruba,
(05:55):
or showgun, which means God's house. So probably that's where
the name comes from. By ways, to gun or showgun
from the Oruba dialect, right, which I love. UM. But
in these houses they also had like intricate details, but
they were more of an African motif. Over time here
in the United States they adopted gingerbreadin or Um Victorian. Yeah,
(06:15):
different kinds of carvings, but it is very cool. It's
kind of like this is a very modest, straightforward house,
but there's also pretty neat little details we can still
have like great pride in it. Um. They were usually
New Orleans. They were typically if you feed off the
ground because of the obvious flooding problems there. Um. And
(06:37):
this I found and it seems believable to me, but
I didn't have time to triple check it um. At
the time, property taxes were based on frontage still are man,
are they in New Orleans? If you have a house,
you're paying by them. The frontage, which is the width
of your house. Yes, and if you are looking at
(06:58):
a shotgun house is very nar but it's long, right um.
And the number of rooms and in New Orleans, I
thought they changed it to the number of rooms. They
added that on. Yeah, it's both okay uh. And in
New Orleans rooms include hallways and closets and you're not
going to find a hallway or a closet in a
shotgun house. So it's also another way to um, I
(07:21):
guess keep your property taxes low as well well. And
I found that they originally it was just frontage, and
then so they started building the camelbacks, which is a
shotgun house with the second story on the rear of
the house only. And then that's when the city said, oh, well,
we should tack rooms onto this as well, because these
smart people have found a way around paying, as you know,
(07:43):
property tax. Pretty smart. Yeah, it does, it makes it
makes sense. And I also found that the first mentioned
in print calling them shotgun houses was in our very
own Atlanta Journal Constitution in nineteen o three, a classified
ad may have been the first time that it was
actually named that in print, and it was like shotgun
(08:04):
house twelve dollars a month rent. Yeah, twelve bucks. That's
not too bad. But you could get a shotgun house
about that time a kit for a hundred bucks. Um.
They also allowed for good air flow too, I want
to mention, yeah, because you can open up the front
and back doors and you got a straight shot. Well,
that's one of the reasons why they were adopted in Haiti.
Not everybody in Haiti was from West Africa, but that
(08:25):
became the predominant style, this West African design house, because
it fit in really well with the tropics, all right.
So well, it made its way from Haitia to New
Orleans because of the well in indirectly because of the
French Revolution. Right, So French Revolution takes place and you've
(08:45):
got um, liberty, legality, fraternity to all people. That put
French planners in Haiti in kind of a pickle because
they couldn't grant liberty to their slaves because wouldn't have
any profits any longer. So as they're figuring this out,
they're trying to figure out what to do, a guy
(09:05):
named Toussaint low Mature makes the decision for him and
leads a slave uprising that lasts for many years and
basically drives all of the white plantation owners from the
island of Haiti, one of the places that they went.
And then Haiti became the first UM recognized sovereign maroon
nation of freed slaves revolting slaves UM, which is pretty cool.
(09:32):
But that also led to, if you go back and
listen to our voodoo podcast, a deep and abiding suspicion
by whites of Haiti all things Haiti from that point
on UM. But so that this slave uprising that led
to the UM. The freeing of Haiti also led to
the white populating of New Orleans. So about that time,
(09:54):
if you went to New Orleans, there about twelve thousand people,
and the third of them were slaves. The third of
them were white, and then a third of them were
free blacks, so it's it's real melting pot UM and
one of the place one of the things that came
about from that was people fleeing Haiti bringing the shotgun
houses with them, and then it just kind of it
was always African American UM and it was always associated
(10:17):
with African Americans, and it just kind of spread from
there to where if you if you came across the
working class African American neighborhood like in Chicago or something
like that, you're going to see shotgun houses or Atlanta,
like I've mentioned many times. Uh, if if you are local,
then you can see these kinds of houses in like
(10:37):
the Sweet Auburn district, Cabbage Down and I think Cabbage
Town where they were houses for factory workers for the
nearby cotton mill offt and uh factories. Yeah, it changed hands. UM. Also,
you're gonna find them directly across the street from Martin
Luther King's birthplace UM in the King Memorial area. The
whole park is UM. There's still people that live in
(10:59):
them and they been pretty well preserved over there. Yeah,
it's very cool, but those were like late nineteenth century built,
but it did kind of transition from African American only
to working class of all colors. The shotgun house became
kind of an emblem of the working class as much
as African Americans now. Is a is a row house
(11:20):
the same thing? Or is a row house? Just know
those are side by side, like touching, sometimes all forming
one large building, but then maybe different gables differentiating them.
A shotgun a shotgun house could be a rowhouse, but
a rowhouse can't be a shotgun house, because then row
house indicate like the proximity to one another more than
(11:42):
the style of the house. Or no, I think it's both, yeah,
And then the shotgun house is not supposed to be
confused with the railroad house either, which is you enter
and there's a long hallway from front to back. In
the off of the hallway are rooms apart mints. My
friend Mereth in New York, in Brooklyn, lives in a
railroad department, which was always a little weird because like,
(12:06):
in order for like when I would stay there, I
would stay in the living room, and when someone had
to go to the bathroom, they would have to walk
through the living room to get to the bath It's
always awkward. Or she could go outside through the hallway
and then come back in because she had two doors
to her apartment. It still does. I So, Chuck, we
(12:27):
were talking about where else they spread. There's UM also
a lot of them in Oklahoma, especially southern Oklahoma. Yeah.
And one of the reasons why is because southern Oklahoma,
the Oklahoma Territory Um before it became a state, was
a free black area and a lot of blacks traveled
to Oklahoma to moved to Oklahoma to be free, and
(12:47):
a lot of runaway slaves maroons is what they're called,
formed and integrated with um Native American tribes like the Seminoles.
And when these five civilized tribes and making air quotes
like furiously um were moved to the Oklahoma Territory Um,
a lot of blacks went with them, and shotgun houses
(13:09):
showed up alongside. The whole thing awesome, And there's like
all black towns are formerly all black towns in southern
Oklahoma where it's like shotgun houses everywhere. Yeah. So, Chuck,
if you ask me, I feel like, now we've reached
the point where this is the fact of the show.
And I know you're excited about this one. Well, it's
(13:31):
cool they um. It's one of the reasons I talked
about why the cultural legacy of the shotgun home had
a lot to do with bringing together the African American
community is because of a little something called the front porch. Yeah,
they didn't exist in the United States before the shotgun
house brought it along. So shotgun houses are typically I
mean a lot of them actually were so far forward
(13:52):
that they were on the sidewalk, But the ones that
weren't had a few feet of grass and then a
front porch to hang out on. And in a small house,
you're going to congregate on the front porch. And in
the evenings, if your neighbors on our front porch five
ft from you and there are five feet from another one,
then what you have is a big, old, friendly cultural
(14:13):
block party going on every evening, and the porch is
made it's a spandrel I guess of the overhanging roof.
And then if you add the fact that in New Orleans,
like you said, they were built off of the ground.
Some you have to build step to go up to it,
and then you have just buy you have a de
facto porch. And then yeah, you add a bunch of
(14:33):
them together and there you go. So we didn't have porchs.
So like these huge wraparound porches on old like plantation
mansions stoops in New York, like all of this stuff
can be traced back to the shotgun house. Really, yeah,
that's crazy, And thank you for that, shotgun house builders,
because one of my favorite things is the front porch
(14:55):
or porch. Good good ports. It's very important. Yeah, you know,
shotgun houses started to wane in the twenties, and it
wasn't It wasn't until fairly recently that we knew the
history of shotgun houses. That architects um went back and
and art historians went back and figured out where this
(15:16):
all came from and traced it step by step. I
mean it was within the last like a couple of
decades um. And they were like, okay, we found some
shotgun houses and these are really old, and they date
them and they'd be like, okay, New Orleans is the birthplace.
And then somebody be like, have you been to Port
of Prince Like they got some they're really really old there,
and then they traced them back and then somebody figured
(15:36):
out that they were from West Africa. But the new
construction in the United States waned in the twenties, and
like I said about the turn of the last century,
you could get a kit for about a hundred bucks,
which also made them really good cheap housing for labor.
Um if you had like a work camp, you probably
shotgun house. Yeah, exactly. Um, And they were all a
(16:00):
really good for disaster release. Specifically, they made a big
appearance in the San Francisco earthquake of nineteen o six. Well, yeah,
they needed to put up displaced people. And when you
can build a house for a hundred bucks, then you
do so exactly. And when it can be pre fabricated
and then taking apart in like six large parts, put
(16:21):
on a train and sent somewhere and then put back
together within like a couple of hours, it's like a
waffle house. Yeah, it's exactly like a waffle house. As
a matter of fact, I think you can go out
on a limb and say, we wouldn't have the waffle
house without the shotgun house. I think you're right. Uh.
Little pop culture, Yeah, you already mentioned David Byrne uh Coogs.
John Mellencamp my boy Coogs. Pink Houses was about a
(16:45):
shotgun house. Apparently his legend has it. He was driving
on a busy main road and he saw this little
black guy sitting on the front porch of his little
pink shotgun house. Gave him, gave him a wave, and
he said he just looked like he was as happy
as could be sitting out on his porch. And uh,
I wrote a song about it. That's nice, and and
that the album that I was on too, Yeah, I
(17:05):
think so great song. Elvis Presley was born in the
shotgun house, Oh yeah, in uh yeah, Mississippi, which is
where I have family actually, And Aaron Neville grew up
in a shotgun house, the incomparable and muscly Man and Moley.
(17:26):
But boy man that I can sing, yeah like a bird,
pretty good, Aaron Neville as me. Um, shotgun houses are
making a resurgence too, by the way, are they building
them again? Yes, there's this thing called the tiny house movement.
Oh yeah, that and the whole idea of living modestly
in the house you can afford that um grants a
(17:48):
very small carbon footprint. Ye, shotgun houses fit that. Bill.
I like the tiny house thing. I think I think
actually Emily might have written an article about that. Is
that right? If I'm not mistaken or maybe it was me.
Somebody did somebody in our family? Did I remember I
remember it happening? Was it Buckley a few years ago? Yeah?
Buckley wrote it. Um, you got anything else, no go,
(18:10):
you know, seek out local historic landmarks that might be
easily overlooked when you're angry in traffic. Yeah. And when
next time you pass the shotgun house, like, stop and
look at it, and you'll see some pretty cool little
details to it. Ask him to open the door so
you can shoot a gun through it. Let do that.
Don't do that, man, that was a reversal. I was like, no,
(18:30):
don't do it, Chuck said normally around Uh. And if
you're ever in Atlanta, Chuck and I always recommend going
to the King Memorial Center, the place where he's buried,
where the eternal flame is in all of the surrounding area.
Um is like a living museum. Preserved house is just awesome.
One of my favorite parts in Atlanta for sure. Um. So,
(18:51):
if you want to learn more about shotgun houses and
see pictures of shotgun houses, you can type the words
shotgun house two words into the sir to bar at
how stuff works dot com and that'll bring up this
article that I wrote, and I said search bar, which
means it's time for a listener mail. Josh, I'm gonna
call this beast email. Hey, guys, did you did you
(19:14):
read this one? Um? I just listened to the Music
Sampling Podcast. We got a lot of good feedback on that.
But man, everybody loved that. It was a good and
a lot of people offered up like people that know
way more than us offered up a lot of cool insight. Yeah,
we get getting called out for not mentioning girl talk.
I've never heard girl talk, so I don't feel bad.
But everyone we know about girl talk. Now, Okay, guys
(19:37):
that just listened to the Music Sampling Podcast wanted to
say how great it was that you featured the Beastie
Boys so prominently in the show. But I share a
little story when I met them during your nineteen seven
Licensed Build tour in Las Vegas when I was fifteen.
So this girl must be my age because I saw
that tour and I was about to wow. All right.
They performed in a concert hall on the un l
(19:58):
V campus, so it was easy to get to the
area where their tour bus was because I lived in
the bleachers. They were inviting every female they saw back
to their hotel for a party, including fifteen year olds.
Well they were only like eighteen nineteen. Still, well, I know,
but you get to be forty and you're like, what's
the big difference of five years? Man, that's back then.
(20:22):
I'm just saying, it's not like they were like years older,
all right, I'm defending their pedophilia. Uh. By the time
we got there, the party had taken over the ninth
floor and had already been shut down. We got to
say hi to m c A before being escorted away
by security for curfew violation. But I was determined. I
(20:42):
skipped school the next day went back to the hotel,
basically casing the joint. I ended up finding m c A,
who remembered me from the night before. I said, how
did he said? Hi? Very nice? What you heard waiting
on that one? I ended up spending the whole day
with the guys, chatting, playing arcade games, while king over
to a seven eleven with a very hungover ad Rock,
(21:03):
and even helping load their bags onto the tour bus.
They were only nineteen twenty and twenty one at the time,
very unassuming, so they weren't getting much attention. I felt
like a little sister tagging along with their super cool
older brothers. That is very cool. At one point m
c A offered me a tour of the bus. We
got on and he closed the door and said, now
we cannot do all sorts of things that you're going
(21:24):
to tell all your friends. We did anyway, he was
really hysterical, so he was like he was still a gentleman, unfortunately,
and he's like a Buddhist now and he unfortunately I
had not thought to bring a camera with me, so
I have no picks. I did get her auto document
any of this happened. Now she does um. I did
get their autographs, but the only paper I had in
(21:44):
my jacket was old school snoopy Valentines. I had thought
could give up friends. I still treasured my three snoopy Valentines,
each one with their autographs, and she sent pictures of them.
That's cool. I stayed until they left around six at night.
I naively asked m c A if he would write
to me. He answered with an honest no, and gave
me a very sweet kiss on the cheek. I loved
(22:07):
it that they have continued to rise on popularity and
her given the respect of being true innovators in the
field first year, that is Ali Smith and she got
kissed on the cheek by a very sweet sounding m
C And all your fifteen year olds out there, you
better be at home sleeping. Yeah, don't be hanging out
with twenty one year old dudes, especially not the girl
talk people. Those guys are girls. I think girl talks
(22:31):
a guy's dear clear that girl talked to um. Let's see,
what do you want to call out for? Mm hmm.
Do you live in a shotgun house? No? I guess yeah,
if you have like a house with an interesting history,
we did that one, but let's do it again that boy. Um,
if you live in a house with an interesting history,
(22:52):
or you flung out with the beastie boys, we want
to hear those. You can write to us at uh
let's see. You can tweet to us at s y
s K podcast. That's our handled Facebook dot com. Slash
Stuff you should Know is us on Facebook and you
can send us an email at Stuff Podcast at Discovery
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(23:18):
Is it how stuff works dot com h Brought to
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