There’s one major problem with this theory: no one can seem to find that tax code.Ĭould the shotgun be an architectural response to narrow urban lots? Indeed, you can squeeze in more structures with a slender design. One theory, popular with tour guides and amateur house-watchers, holds that shotgun houses were designed in New Orleans in response to a real estate tax based on frontage rather than square footage, motivating narrow structures. He and other researchers have proposed a number of hypotheses explaining the origin and distribution of this distinctive house type. Kniffen’s field research in the 1930s on Louisiana folk housing. Note, for example, how privacy-conscious peoples of Anglo-Saxon descent who arrived to New Orleans in the early 19th century brought with them the American center-hall cottage and side-hall townhouse, in preference over local Creole designs.Īcademic interest in the shotgun house dates from LSU geographer Fred B. Cultures that valued privacy, on the other hand, were willing to make this trade-off. Theory contends that cultures that produced shotgun houses (and other residences without hallways, such as Creole cottages) tended to be more gregarious, or at least unwilling to sacrifice valuable living space for the purpose of occasional passage. Inside, what is salient is the lack of hallways: occupants need to walk through private rooms to access other rooms. Its most striking exterior trait is its elongated shape, usually three to six times longer than wide. Vlach defined the prototypical shotgun as “a one-room wide, one-story high building with two or more rooms, oriented perpendicularly to the road with its front door in the gable end, aspects such as size, proportion, roofing, porches, appendages, foundations, trim and decoration” vary widely. The term itself postdates the shotgun’s late-19th-century heyday, not appearing in print until the early 20th century.
Tradition holds that the name “shotgun” derives from the notion of firing bird shot through the front door and out the rear without touching a wall, a rustic allusion to its linearity and room-to-room connectivity. Thus we have shotgun houses adorned in Italianate, Eastlake and other styles, just as there are Creole and Federalist style townhouses, and Spanish colonial and Greek Revival cottages.
The shotgun house is not an architectural style rather, it is a structural typology - what folklorist John Michael Vlach described as “a philosophy of space, a culturally determined sense of dimension.” A typology, or type, may be draped in any style. Once scorned, now cherished, shotguns shed light on patterns of cultural diffusion, class and residential settlement patterns, social preferences for living space and construction methods. Learn more about New Orleans’ shotguns at the Shotgun House Tour presented by Entablature Design + Build and Entablature Realty on March 23 & 24.įew elements of the New Orleans cityscape speak to the intersection of architecture, sociology and geography so well as the shotgun house. In recent years, however, preservationists have reignited interest in the unique house style, working to restore these historic homes and their surrounding neighborhoods.This article appeared in the March issue of Preservation in Print, originally appearing in the author’s “Cityscapes” column on in 2014.
Because shotgun houses were most common in working-class neighborhoods in Southern cities, they became associated with poverty by the middle of the 20th century and weren’t very popular.
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Many enslaved and free Africans eventually moved from Haiti to New Orleans, bringing the building style with them. “The shotgun house style originated in Haiti, where enslaved West Africans built similar dwellings based on the architecture in their homeland. Native to states like Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, it is perhaps no surprise that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina many proposals for rebuilding New Orleans involved modern variants on this historic regional vernacular – simple construction for small lots means quicker, cheaper and easier-to-build housing. While some have since been remodeled to include passageways between primary spaces, the lack of halls remains a hallmark (if you will) of the original intent, preserved by many owners of old originals as well as local builders today.
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