The Demise of the Front Porch

Front porches are open invitations. They are void of schedules. You don’t have to call or text first. If people are on their porches, they are fair game for a visit.

Photo by James Garcia on Unsplash

After my grandfather had a stroke and couldn’t get around very well back in the mid-1980s, he spent a lot of time on his enclosed front porch in his old wooden rocking chair. He named the squirrels, watched the traffic, and chatted with anybody who stopped by to see him.

I think the front porch extended his life because it gave him something to look forward to every day. He saw people driving to work, kids walking to school and wildlife doing its thing. It’s also where we chatted when we came over to visit him.

My grandmother, his wife, used to tell her grandchildren stories about how her family gathered on their front porch when she was a young girl to sing songs while playing the washboard and spoons. Man, I wish a picture of one of those jam sessions existed. But Abby the Spoon Lady gives me a pretty good idea.

My Uncle Troy and his wife came to visit us from Kansas City sometimes. He was a huge Kansas City Royals fan. After dinner, he’d sneak away with a transistor radio onto that same front porch and talk to the players as if they could hear him. Long after he went home, I listened to those same Royals on my transistor radio in my bedroom and ended up becoming a lifelong fan.

Summer, radio, baseball and front porches were made for the perfect blend.

“Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball,” said Mordecai Brown, who pitched the Major Leagues between 1903-1916. “He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we’d play catch by the hour.”

When I was young, we moved to a house in an older neighborhood. I was painfully shy and didn’t make friends easily, but I spent some time on my front porch by myself. The cement floor had a fault-line-like crack that ran at a 45-degree angle behind this little hole in the floor about the size of a golf ball. So I took my putter out there and used the porch as my own mini-golf hole. The crack often stopped the ball when I overshot the hole. When you are a bit of a loner, you find ways to entertain yourself.

A couple of houses down, a family had a porch swing. Whenever Mom sent us to the neighborhood store to buy a six-pack of Pepsi, I’d walk by and see members of that family sitting on the swing. We’d wave at each other, and eventually, I became friends with the boy in the family. We played catch in his yard, traded baseball cards (he hung onto a Tommie Aaron card for dear life for some reason) and hung out. That friendship probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for his family’s porch.

Across the street from that friend, I made another kid. We used to set up his Hot Wheel tracks on his front porch, extending the tracks down his front steps. We’d divide his Hot Wheels collection, then race the cars down the steps, keeping meticulous notes of the results in a notebook. Those were the days. He had a Richard Petty #43 car that couldn’t be beaten, and he guarded that car the way my friend across the street clung to his Tommie Aaron baseball card.

By the way, if 12-year-old me would have known then that one day I would sit in the same room at a press conference with Richard Petty as I covered a NASCAR race as a journalist, I would’ve told you that you were off your rocker.

But I digress.

During the summertime, my mom sits on her front porch. She watches the traffic go by and talks to the animals. Once, she saw a cat chasing a small bunny and she bolted from her chair in pursuit of the cat, telling him that he’s not supposed to eat bunnies. “You’re supposed to eat cat food!” she lectured. When she’s not chasing bunnies, she chats with neighbors who see her on her porch and stop by to visit.

That’s the thing about front porches. They are open invitations. They are void of schedules. You don’t have to call or text first. If people are on their porches, they are fair game.

I’m afraid we’re losing the front porch.

In Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451,” there’s a paragraph that should give us pause: “My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong KIND of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches.”

It’s difficult to be divided when you know each other. I don’t think we’re pawns in a modern-day conspiracy the way this passage might suggest as much as we just don’t trust each other anymore, and therefore, don’t want to engage in front-porch conversation. But I think that’s a mistake.

That’s why looking at the history behind front porches is important. According to this Associated Press story, front porches began appearing 125 years ago, but their roots are much deeper.

Some say front porches can be traced back to porticos in ancient Greece. They were supported by columns in a building’s entryway (think: the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.). They were probably used more on institutional/organizational structures than private homes, though.

Others say front porches can be traced back to Equatorial Africa in the 1400s. This article on the Napa County Landmarks website says European explorers were intrigued by the Equatorial African “dwellings (that) often featured an exterior space that functioned like a room; but was open on three-sides, and had a roof supported by poles,” said Michael Dolan in his book “The American Porch: An Informal History of An Informal Place.” He continued, “During the day, when the (dwelling’s) interior became oven-like, these semi-public areas provided comparative comfort to conduct daily activities.”

That same article says James A. Garfield “successfully campaigned for the presidency from his front porch. His fellow republicans used the ‘porch stumping’ plan well into the 1900s.” It is now known as “the front porch campaign” and you can read it about here and here.

Several factors are believed to have contributed to the decline of front porches. These include the widespread availability and use of air conditioning, which made it more comfortable to stay indoors, as well as increased levels of exhaust fumes and noise that made sitting outside less enjoyable. Changes in architectural design, an emphasis on larger street setbacks and a greater emphasis on privacy (private decks in the backyard and backyard BBQs), also played a role. I’d suggest that the rise of technology (video games and binge-watching) likely also contributed to the trend.

With that said, this essay on the Hillsdale Forum website points out that the demise of the front porch may be a suburban issue: “Those who live in rural or older urban areas may be unfamiliar with this absence, for the disappearance of the front porch has largely been a suburban phenomenon. In smaller communities, however, whether rural towns or urban blocks, the front porch has thrived as a defining architectural feature of American homes.”

We have become so private that we often don’t even know our neighbors’ names, let alone what they might be going through. As we increasingly spend more time inside, this makes me wonder whether we are also losing the sense of community that the living room is meant to provide. Instead of using this shared space to connect with and support one another, many of us retreat to our private areas within the home to interact with the outside world on a less personal level, effectively ignoring the people and relationships that are crucial to our well-being.

This article on the Shaping Opinion podcast website says that the front porch was the original social media. That link points you to a 47-minute podcast episode with the aforementioned Michael Dolan that is well worth your time if you want to think about this further or just reminisce about your grandparents’ old front porch.

The host, Tim O’Brien, makes the point in that episode that the front porch used to be how we’d spend our time between our public world and our private world. In other words, we were intentional about making time for neighbors.

Neighborhood walks seem to be the new front porch, but they don’t really invite people to stop one another and chat. Maybe backyard fire pits are the new front porch? But again, they don’t really invite people to stop over on a whim, do they?

Of course, we don’t really need a front porch to be more social. We can check on neighbors, invite them over or accept their invites. While some people really do just want to be left alone, I find it hard to believe that most wouldn’t love to have an old-fashioned front porch chat once in a while.