Town House: Architecture And Material Life In The Early American City, 1780-1830

by Bernard L. Herman

In this abundantly illustrated volume, Bernard Herman provides a history of urban dwellings and the people who built and lived in them in early America. In the eighteenth century, cities were constant objects of idealization, often viewed as the outward manifestations of an organized, civil society. As the physical objects that composed the largest portion of urban settings, town houses contained and signified different aspects of city life, argues Herman.

Taking a material culture approach, Herman examines urban domestic buildings from Charleston, South Carolina, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well as those in English cities and towns, to better understand why people built the houses they did and how their homes informed everyday city life. Working with buildings and documentary sources as diverse as court cases and recipes, Herman interprets town houses as lived experience. Chapters consider an array of domestic spaces, including the merchant family's house, the servant's quarter, and the widow's dower. Herman demonstrates that city houses served as sites of power as well as complex and often conflicted artifacts mapping the everyday negotiations of social identity and the display of sociability.

Genres: History, Architecture, Nonfiction, Heritage Preservation

295 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2005

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first real vernacular architecture book to focus on American urban buildings, and I enjoyed its fresh look at merchant palaces, artisan dwellings, servant's quarters, and widow's hostels, especially worthwhile at a time when most other VA books look only at rural barns and farm houses. Also unlike other vernacular architecture books, this one takes America's debt to European house forms seriously, examining in detail things like the cellars of Bath circus-court housing and the half-timbered German "burgherhauses" in Mainz and their effect on American styles. It's an impressive synthesis by an author who knows his stuff.

Unfortunately, much like Dell Upton's recent antebellum architecture book, this one is marred by pointless postmodern Newspeak. E.G.: "Agency comprehends an association between elite status and the means, ability, and inclination for elites, singly or in concert, to act in ways that affect their larger community and perpetuate their economic power, social authority, and individual identity." Gibberish translation: the rich, like everybody, try to protect their power. Why Herman thinks this and similar statements need to be reiterated dozens of times, let alone obfuscated by incomprehensible jargon, is simply beyond me. Similar talk continues to be a blight on much American history writing.

Also, too much of the book is focused on detailed descriptions of individual house layouts. Yes, most well-to-do Charleston houses had a "center passage plan," entered from a side-piazza, which itself opened onto both a street shop/parlor and a dining room. Examining in detail five houses with almost the exact same layout adds little to this story. More time should have been spent on the literary quotations that show how daily life was "placed" in houses, such as an Englishwoman's poem about moving to a Norfolk lodging house: "And took two rooms near Market-Square/Dirty enough indeed they were;/ Five windows in one room were plac'd,/And three with light the other grac'd,/ Pouring in full the blaze of day,/ Which plainly told-no tax to pay." This snippet shows that despite America's then rude habitations, an English person who had lived with the distorting effects of the old 1696 window tax could be amazed by the amount of light and air coming into an American house.

There are other interesting facts here, such as the three-person committees formed in some towns to create a "widow's third" from a deceased husband's house. They literally drew lines down the middle of a house to determine which parts belonged to a widow and which to children or creditors (they also determined which rooms could be shared or "passed and repassed" by the widow). Also, the distinctiveness of the German houses in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was surprising. Many today know about their half-timbered gables, their stone exteriors, and their short pent-roofs, but I didn't know they often abjured fireplaces for heavy iron stoves, and that they were typically divided into only three rooms (the Kuche (kitchen), the Stube (stove-room), and the Kammer (store-room)), all contained snuggly on one small story. This was perhaps the most distinctive house form in early America outside the tipi.

Also impressive were the inventories of travelers portmanteau's, who basically had to bring their own house with them as they lodged in different cramped taverns and boardinghouses. They brought their own glassware and crockery, tea pots, silver ware, charcoal for purifying watter, books, chess-sets, and sometimes even their own mattresses (to avoid the vermin-infested ones sometimes crammed four or six to a room on cots in the inns). Moreover, the descriptions of four-room, two-story artisan houses that ranged only from around 300 to 400 feet shows just how cramped living spaces were back then, but even more surprising is the fact that the most expensive piece of furniture in many of these houses was an elaborate desk or secretary in the front room, designed to show the householder's respectability and literacy. It's touching.

This book had so much possibility, but unfortunately too much of it is filled with unnecessary clutter.

[Stacy Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful source for anyone interested in the early building history of the east coast. I had the chance to connect with Mr. Herman while working on a summer internship in Baltimore. I found his book very useful in explaining the rise of the town house in Baltimore. I was looking at several specific houses in the Fell's Point neighborhood, which he profiled. It's a great read, especially if you are a fan of urban architectural history like me!

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprising, I liked it despite it being an architecture book. The examination of life through objects is always interesting, and this certainly proves that houses are expressive objects indeed. Great variety of sources put together for support.