Front porch life: Best seat in the house

By Liz Barry

Published: July 9, 2008

Jennifer Adams slouches in a plastic deck chair on her front porch. She chomps on a cheeseburger, while her husband, John Adams, soaks up the sun from behind oversized D&G knockoff shades.

“He’s the couch potato, and I’m the porch potato,” says 24-year-old Jennifer.

The couple lives on Eighth Street, in a historic neighborhood where the streets are narrow, the houses stand close to the road and nearly everybody has a front porch. With or without her husband, Jennifer posts up on the porch all year long.

“I love my front porch,” she says. “It’s the center of attention.”

Tonight, the air is hot and sticky. Jennifer Adams wears a hot pink polo shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts — a bright outfit that contrasts with her stark porch, which is little more than a concrete slab framed by a black metal railing. The furnishing is also sparse: one white plastic table, four white plastic chairs and a lone plant sprouting from a mason jar.

But for Adams, it’s home. She hollers to her friends on nearby porches and waves to passersby. Her all-time favorite porch pastime is watching the cars cruise by past.

“Out of 10 cars that pass by, I know about eight,” says the Lynchburg native.

An American Icon
The front porch — an American icon on par with baseball and apple pie — came into vogue during the middle of the 19th century, thanks in part to Andrew Jackson Downing, a landscape architect and influential tastemaker.

Downing advocated the front porch as a way to distinguish American architecture from English design, during a time when America was still seeking to define a unique national identity, says David Schuyler, a professor of American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College and author of a biography on Downing.

“Downing said a house without a front porch was as ‘incomplete, to the correct eye, as a well-printed book without a title page,’” says Schuyler, quoting Downing during a phone interview from his side porch.

With its proximity to the street, the front porch performs a social function that backyard decks cannot provide. It links the “public world of the street and the private world of the home,” Schuyler says.
The porch becomes a community meeting point, a stage for storytelling, playing music and catching up with the Joneses.

For decades, the front porch also served a downright practical purpose. Before air conditioning became widespread in the second half of the 20th century, people relied on their porches for a cool evening respite and to shade the front of the house during the day, says Dorothy Potter, an American social historian at Lynchburg College.

Old time nostalgia
There’s something undeniably nostalgic about summer evenings on the porch. It evokes ice tea and rocking chairs, unhurried conversation and stories of the good old days.

For Potter and her husband, Clifton, the front porch brings back a flood of memories.

Clifton, who grew up in Lynchburg, spent countless summer nights on his grandparents’ front porch. To him, the front porch evokes memories of grandmother in the rocking chair, guitar-playing, and hand-cranked peach and banana ice cream.

Dorothy, from Waynesboro, has vivid memories of the expansive porch at Lynchburg College’s Westover Hall, which was razed in 1970s. The front porch was an epicenter of student life.

“After dinner, we would go out there, and sit or talk to our friends,” Dorothy says. “If you had a girlfriend or boyfriend, you’d go off into a darker corner of the porch to hold hands or kiss.”

Today, the Potters still spend mornings and evenings on their front porch in the Rivermont historic district. Clifton likes to star-gaze. Dorothy watches for lightning bugs and deer.

The decline of the porch
Schuyler attributes a “government subsidized suburban housing boom” after World War II to the rise of urban sprawl and the decline of the front porch.

New technology was another culprit. Television, video games and the Internet kept people inside more, and away from neighbors.

“Television ruined it all,” laments Potter.

In the 1980s, Andres Duany, an architect and urban planner, sparked a design movement called new urbanism, which called for the creation of tight-knit communities to reign in urban sprawl. The idea was to build pedestrian friendly communities where residents were less isolated from their neighbors. Front porches were part of the plan.

To Schuyler, the front porch is essential to bringing community to some of America’s alienating suburbs.

“Being out on the porch with people next door on their porches creates opportunity for social interaction that you simply do not have otherwise,” Schuyler says. “I think porches are absolutely essential to the recreation of community in the United States.”

Front porches culture is alive in parts of the city, especially in the historic districts, where they are a staple. Some contemporary planned developments, such as Wyndhurst, feature front porches on almost every house — signaling a potential resurgence of front porch culture in newer communities, too.

Porch community
When evening descends on Early Street off of Rivermont Avenue, the front porches buzz with activity.

Welford Brown, a lean 76-year-old with crooked front teeth and a soft smile, sits in a sliver of shade on his gray metal rocker. Brown has been watching Early Street from his front porch for 32 years. Everybody knows him as “Mr. Brown.”

“I like to watch my neighbors,” he says. “Just in case something goes on, I want to know about it.”

As a child, he spent his evenings on his family’s front porch in College Hill. Today, he carries on the same tradition.

Next to Brown lives Amy Hall, a mother of two who has been living in her house for eight years. Hall sits in a metal chair with floral cushions on red wooden porch, decked with freshly potted flowers. She wears a red sundress and leopard print slippers.

“It’s big in the South. You watch people go by, wave at everybody, get to know who lives where,” says Hall, who grew up in Baltimore.

Hall can read the porches. Flowers, she says, are usually the touch of a woman. A porch strewn with bicycles and toys means kids live there. Meticulous landscaping means it’s a gardener’s porch.

“A lady down the street is sickly,” Hall says. “Her porch is stark and simple.”

And then there are the porches piled high with boxes and clutter. Unless the family is still in the stages of moving, these porches are hopeless.

“Some porches you run across and you’re like, ‘Oh, hell,’” Hall says with a laugh.