SYSK Selects: What Is a Shotgun House?

our themes on it. Nice time, Thank you. Um. How are you doing. I'm doing great. I feel like we just did 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 as Atlanta man all over the States, all over the States. As uh, the immortal David Byrne put it, you may find yourself living in a shotgun check, you may find yourself in

another part of the world. I think even David Byrne didn't realize what he was saying when 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 he said. That's crazy. Um, So Chuck, you remember her, Kane, 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, 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 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 chotgun houses is because they are routinely cited as the great, possibly greatest contribution by African Americans to American specific architecture and design, and 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'm thank you for saving it. That was good man. Okay, Um, you've surely seen a shotgun house. Yeah, let's talk about to some of the features people. We should. Yeah, because there's probably plenty of people out there and people who have seen him 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 a 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 long and narrow. Yeah, 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 it's almost

like a throwaway. Sometimes they do, 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 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. UM. That was usually brought on later um and tacked onto

the rear of the house, sometimes crudely. Uh. Typically what you have is a living room, bedroom, bedroom, kitchen, all in a row, all in a straight line, all the doors lining up, interior doors lining up right. So when the front and back door is 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 it or some poor staff who's coming in and like you point out, Josh, it's a cute story, and it's all over the place. A bet you there are many many tours of New Orleans. I'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 from being a mada homes, they have certain architectural flourishes that make them distinctive. UM. I think the idea was kind of like, you know, we may be poor and not have the biggest house, but we can certainly adorn the the vent venting greats and what the the arbor that held up the not the arbor brackets,

brackets that held up the roof. They would be intricately carved, usually in a gingerbread design, um, which a lot of people kind of criticize or pooh pooed that addition, um as h poor blacks or even before that, slaves just trying to emulate whites. Um, which is not the case because if 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, or showgun, which means God's house. So probably that's where the name comes from. By the ways, to gun or showgun from the Yoruba 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, 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 exactly. Um, they were usually in New Orleans. They were typically a few feed off the ground because of the obvious flooding problems there. Um. And 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 aren't in are they in New Orleans? If you have a house, you're paying by the um the frontage, which is the width of your house. Yes, and if you are looking at a shotgun house is very narrow, but it's long. Um. And the number of rooms okay, and in New Orleans though 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 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 a

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, property tax pretty smart. Yeah, it does, it makes it makes sense. And also found that the first mentioned in print calling them shotgun houses was in our very own Atlanta Journal Constitution in nine three a classified ad may have been the first time that it was actually named that in print,

and it was like shotgun 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 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 Haiti to New Orleans because of the well in indirectly because of the French Revolution. Right, So French Revolution takes place and you've

got UM, liberty, gality, 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 they 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 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.

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, if you went to New Orleans, there were about twelve thousand people and a 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 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 of

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 the Sweet Auburn district, Cabbage Down and I think Cabbage Town where they were houses for factory workers for the nearby cotton mill offten 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 them. Yeah, and they've been pretty well preserved over the Yeah. 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 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. So a shotgun a shotgun house could be a row house, but a row house can't be a shotgun house because den row house indicate like the proximity to one another more than the style of the house. Or no, I think it's both. And then the shotgun house is not supposed to be confused with the railroad house either, yea, which is you enter and there's a long hallway from front to back,

and then off of the hallway our rooms apartments. My friend Meredith in New York, in Brooklyn, lives in a railroad department which was always a little weird because like 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 you know, living room to tend to get to the Bathroom's always awkward. Or she could go outside through the hallway and then come back in because she

had two doors to her apartment. Got it still does, hi, Meredith, So Chuck, we're talking about where else they spread. There's UM also a lot of 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, moved to Oklahoma to be free, and a lot of runaway slaves maroons is what they are 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 shockun houses showed up alongside the whole thing, and there's like all black towns are formerly all black towns in southern Oklahoma where it's like shocking 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. Well, it's 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 the shotgun houses are typically I mean a lot of them actually were so far forward 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 feet from you and they're five feet from another one, then what you have is a big, old, friendly cultural block party going on every evening, and the porch is made. It's a spandrel I guess of the um overhanging roof. And then if you add the fact that in New Orleans, like you said, they were built off of the ground. Some yeah, you have to build steps to go up

to it. And then you have a just buy you have a de facto porch. And then yeah, you add a bunch of them together and there you go. So we didn't have porch. 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. So because one of my favorite things is the front porch or the back porch. Good good porches.

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 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 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 exactly um. And they were also really good for disaster relief. 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 on a train and sent somewhere and then put back

together within like a couple hours, like a waffle house. Yeah, it's exactly like a waffle house. As 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 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 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 and Moley. But boy man like I can sing yeah like a bird? Okay, face pretty good, Aaron Neville ask me, it's um shock. Gun 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 very small carbon footprint. 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, because I remember I remember it happening. Was

it Buckley a few years ago? Yeah? Buckley wrote it. Um, you got anything else, no go, 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 a 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. Don't do that. Don't do that. Man, that was a reversal. I was like, no, don't do it,

Chuck said, Normally it's the other way 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 the surrounding area. UM is like a Living Museum Preserved House is just awesome.

One of my favorite parts of Atlanta for sure. Um So, 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 search 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 now, Josh, I'm gonna call this beast email. Hey, guys, did you did you read this one? Um? I just listened to the Music Sampling Podcast.

We got a lot of good feedback on that by man, everybody loved that was and a lot of people offered up like people don't know way more than us, offered up a lot of cool insight. Yeah, we kept getting called out for not mentioning girl talk. I've never heard girl talk, so I don't feel bad. Yeah, but everyone we know about girl talk. Now, Okay, guys 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. I thought i'd share a little story when I met them during the nineteen seven licensed to Ild tour in Las Vegas when I was fifteen. So this girl must be my age because I saw that tour and I was about fifteen. Wow. All right. They performed in a concert hall on the un l 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 teen 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. 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 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 do 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, walking over to a seven eleven with a very hungover ad Rock, and even helping load their bags onto the tour bus. They're

only nineteen twenty and twenty one at the time. I'm 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 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 oh yeah. Unfortunately. I had not thought to bring a camera with me, so I have no picks. I did get the auto documentation any of this happened, now, she does, um. I did get their autographs, but the only paper I had in my jacket was old school snoopy valentines I had bought to give up friends. I still treasure 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 it that they have conceid need to rise in popularity and her given the respect of being true innovators in the field. First. Sure that is Ali Smith and she got kissed on the cheek by a very sweet sounding m c And all of your fifteen year olds out there, you'd 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 talk to a guy. It's dear clear that girl talk to um. Let's see what do you want to call out for? M 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, or you've hung 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 handle Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know is us on Facebook, and you can send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H