Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: What Is a Shotgun House?

Episode Date: August 10, 2019

Shotgun houses are iconic pieces of American architecture: they're long, narrow, and filled with artistic flourishes. But where did they come from? Join Chuck and Josh and explore the mysterious origins of shotgun houses. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everybody, it's May 10th, 2012. What? No, that just means it's me, Chuck, picking out a select episode from May 10th, 2012. What is a shotgun house?

It's cool, cause I like houses. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant with me as always, which makes this stuff you should know. It's the stuff you should know. Yeah, that's our theme song.

Nice job. Thank you. How you doing? I'm doing great. I feel like we just did this. I'm looking forward to this show. Are you? Yeah, because it touches on parts of Atlanta

and its history, which I always love. Sure. And that's a Atlanta man, all over the states. All over the states. Chuck, as the immortal David Byrne put it, you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. 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 shack and say the beginning of the 19th century, you probably were experiencing both. Yeah. But he doesn't tip, so. No, he doesn't.

Here's what he said. That's crazy. So Chuck, you remember Hurricane Katrina? Sure. I killed, I believe, 1,800 people. That is a lot of people. And one of the things, in addition to all the loss of life and property, it was a real worry about loss

of a very 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. The reason why people were worried about losing it in New Orleans is 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 shotgun houses, is because they are routinely cited as the 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. Thank you for saving it. That was good, man. You've surely seen a shotgun house. Yeah, let's talk about just some of the features, so people know we're talking about.

Yeah, because there's probably plenty of people out there. And people who have seen them and don't know what we're talking about, you're about to go, oh. If you haven't seen them, then go on to howstuffworks.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. A lot of times, they won't have windows on the side of the house. Although, in researching this, I saw plenty that do.

I did, too. That was almost like a throwaway sentence. Sometimes they don't. Yes, and the reason why is because they're often really close together. Sure. Like, I mean, like a foot, a couple of feet, you can maybe walk without turning between two houses.

Yeah. But that's it. Exactly. Well, you just said they were close to one another. They have high ceilings. They, very few of them, had indoor plumbing at first. That was usually brought on later and tacked onto the rear of the house, sometimes crudely.

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 doors 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. Right. Or some poor sap who is coming in to visit. And like you point out, Josh, it's a cute story. And it's all over the place.

I bet you there are many, many tours of New Orleans that say that story's true. May or may not be. It probably isn't. Yeah. What else is specific about shotgun houses, Chuck? They, aside from being modest homes, they have certain architectural flourishes

that make them distinctive. 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 venting grates. Right. And what? The arbor that held up the, not the arbor. The brackets.

Brackets that held up the roof. They would be intricately carved, usually in a gingerbread design, which a lot of people kind of criticized or poo-pooed that addition as poor blacks or even before that slaves, just trying to emulate whites, which is not the case. Because if you trace so, the shotgun house finds its origins in the US and New Orleans.

That's right. 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 startlingly similar in West Africa. And in the Yoruba tongue, these houses are called Togun, which means house in Yoruba, or Shogun, which means God's house.

So probably that's where the name comes from, by the way, is Togun or Shogun from the Yoruba dialect, right? Which I love. But in these houses, they also had intricate details, but they were more of an African motif. Over time, here in the United States, they adopted gingerbread or 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. Right. We can still have great pride in it. Exactly. They were usually in New Orleans. They were typically a few feet off the ground

because of the obvious flooding problems there. And this I found, and it seems believable to me, but I didn't have time to triple check it. At the time, property taxes were based on frontage? Still are, man. Are they? In New Orleans, if you have a house, you're paying by the frontage.

Which is the width of your house. Yes. And if you are looking at a Shogun house, it's very narrow, but it's long. Right. And the number of rooms. OK, yeah. And in New Orleans, I thought they

changed it to the number of rooms. They added that on? Yeah, it's both. OK. And in New Orleans, rooms include hallways and closets. And you're not going to find a hallway or closet in a Shogun house. So it's also another way to, 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 Shogun 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 much property tax. Right. Pretty smart. Yeah, it does. It makes sense. And I also found that the first mention in print, calling them Shogun houses, was in our very own Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Is that right? In 1903, a classified ad may have been the first time that it was actually named that in print. And it was like, Shogun house $12 a month rent. Yeah. 12 bucks. That's not too bad. But you could get a Shogun house about that time,

a kit for $100. Yeah. They also allowed for good airflow too, I wanted 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. And 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. Sure. And New Orleans. Right. So well, it made its way from Haiti to New Orleans because of the, well, indirectly because of the French

Revolution, right? So the French Revolution takes place. And you've got liberty, equality, 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. Right. So as they're figuring this out, they're

trying to figure out what to do, a guy named Toussaint Louverture 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 recognized sovereign maroon nation of freed slaves, revolting slaves, 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. But so this slave uprising that led to 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 12,000 people, and a third of them were slaves, a third of them were white,

and then a third of them were free blacks. So it's this real melting pot. And 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. And it was always associated with African-Americans. And it just kind of spread from there

to where if you came across a working class African-American neighborhood like in Chicago or something like that, you're going to see shotgun houses. Or Atlanta, like I've mentioned many times. If you are local, then you can see these kinds of houses in the Sweet Auburn District, Cabbage Town. And I think Cabbage Town, they were houses for factory workers for the nearby Cotton Mill often factories.

Yeah, it changed hands. Also, you're going to find them directly across the street from Martin Luther King's birth place. That's right. In the King Memorial area, the whole park is there's still people that live in them. Oh yeah, and they've been pretty well preserved over the years. Yeah, it's very cool.

But those were like late 19th 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 row house the same thing, or is a row house just? No, those are side by side, like touching sometimes all forming one large building, but then maybe

different gables differentiating them. So a shotgun house could be a row house, but a row house can't be a shotgun house, because doesn't row house indicate the proximity to one another more than the style of the house, or does it? No, I think it's both. Is it? Yeah.

And then the shotgun house is not supposed to be confused with the railroad house either, which is you enter and there's a long hallway from front to back and then off of the hallway are rooms, like a rail car. Apartments, my friend Meredith in New York in Brooklyn lives in a railroad department, which was always a little weird, because in order

for 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 living room to get to the bathroom. It's always awkward. Or she could go outside through the hallway and then come back in, because she had two doors to her apartment.

Gotcha. It still does. Hi, Meredith. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, we were talking about where else they spread. There's also a lot of them in Oklahoma, especially southern Oklahoma.

Oh, really? Yeah. And one of the reasons why is because southern Oklahoma, the Oklahoma territory, before it became a state, was a free black area. And a lot of blacks traveled to Oklahoma to move to Oklahoma to be free. And a lot of runaway slaves, maroons,

is what they were called, formed and integrated with Native American tribes, like the Seminoles. And when these five civilized tribes are making air quotes furiously, were moved to the Oklahoma territory, a lot of blacks went with them. And shuckin' houses showed up alongside the whole thing. Awesome.

And there's all black towns, or formerly all black towns in southern Oklahoma, where it's like shuckin' houses everywhere. Wow. 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 one.

Well, it's cool. 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 a small house, you're going to congregate on the front porch. And in the evenings, if your neighbors own a 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 overhanging roof. And then if you add the fact that in New Orleans, like you said, they were built off of the ground some. You have to build steps to go up to it.

And then you have a de facto porch, and then you add a bunch of them together, and there you go. So we don't have porch. So these huge wraparound porches on old plantation mansions, stoops in New York, 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, because one of my favorite things is the front porch or the back porch. The good porch, it's very important. You know, shotgun houses started to wane in the 20s. And it wasn't until fairly recently that we knew the history of shotgun houses,

that architects went back 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 couple of decades. And they were like, OK, we found some shotgun houses, and these are really old. And they date them, and they'd be like, OK, New Orleans is the birthplace.

And then somebody'd be like, you know, have you been to Port-au-Prince? Like, they got some of their 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 20s. And like I said, about the turn of the last century,

you could get a kit for about $100, which also made them really good, cheap housing for labor. If you had like a work camp, you probably had shotgun houses. Cabbage down. Yeah, exactly. And they were also really good for disaster relief. Specifically, they made a big appearance in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Well, yeah, they needed to put up displaced people. And when you can build a house for $100, then you do so. Exactly. And when it can be prefabricated and then taken apart in like six large parts, put on a train and send somewhere, and then put back together within like a couple hours. It's like a waffle house. Yeah, it's exactly like a waffle house.

As a 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. You're right. Little pop culture. You already mentioned David Byrne. Cougs, John Mellencamp. My boy Cougs, Pink Houses, was about a shotgun house. Apparently, his legend has it, he was driving

on a busy main road. And he saw this old black guy sitting on the front porch of his little pink shotgun house, gave him a wave. And he said he just looked like he was as happy as could be, sitting out on his porch, and wrote a song about it. That's nice. And the album that I was on, too? Yeah, I think so.

Great song. Elvis Presley was born in a shotgun house. Oh, yeah. Tupelo. Yeah, Mississippi, which is where I have family, actually. And Aaron Neville grew up in a shotgun house. The incomparable and muscly. Man, that guy is muscly.

And moly. Yeah. Mole, mole, mole. But boy, man, that guy can sing. Yeah. Like a bird. Look at his face. Pretty good Aaron Neville.

Yeah. Ask me. It's tough, you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Shocking 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 a house you can afford that grants a very small carbon footprint. Shocking Houses fit that bill. I like the tiny house thing. 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 it happening. Was it Buckley? A few years ago, yeah, Buckley wrote it. You got anything else? No, go seek out local historic landmarks that might be easily overlooked when you're angry in traffic. Yeah, and the 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 them 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 just said, normally, it's the other way around.

And if you were 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, and all of the surrounding area is like a living museum. Preserved houses, just awesome. One of my favorite parts of Atlanta, for sure. 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 HowStuffWorks.com. And that'll bring up this article that I wrote. And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this beastie email. Yes. Hey, guys, did you read this one? No.

I just listened to the Music Sampling podcast. We got a lot of good feedback on that, by the way. Man, everybody loved that. It was a good call, Chuck. And a lot of people offered up people that 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. OK, guys, I just listened to the Music Sampling podcast. Wanted to say how great it was that you featured the Beastie Boy so prominently in the show. Thought I'd share a little story of when I met them during your 1987 licensed ill tour in Las Vegas when I was 15. So this girl must be my age, because I saw that tour, and I was about 15.

Wow. All right. They performed in a concert hall on the UNLV 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 15-year-olds?

Jeez. Well, they were only like 18, 19, 20. Still. Well. I know, but you get to be 40, and you're like, what's the big difference of five years? Man, that's a big difference. 15 and 19.

No, no, no, trust me. I'm just saying, it's not like they were like 15, 20 years older. Right, I'm with you. All right. I'm defending their pedophilia. 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 MCA 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 MCA who remembered me from the night before. I said, howdy.

He said, hi. Very nice. Boy, you were waiting on that one. Yeah. I ended up spending the whole day with the guys chatting, playing arcade games, walking over to a 7-Eleven with a very hungover AdRock, and even helping load their bags onto the tour bus.

There were only 1920 and 21 at the time, 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, MCA offered me a tour of the bus. We got on, and he closed the door, and said, now we can not 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, isn't he? Oh, yeah, big time. Unfortunately, I had not thought to bring a camera with me, so I have no pics. I did get their autograph.

I have no documentation that any of this happened. No, she does. Oh, yeah. I did get their autographs, but the only paper I had in my jacket was old school Snoopy Valentine's. I had brought to give out friends. I still treasure my three Snoopy Valentine's, 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 MCA 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 continued to rise in popularity, and are given the respect of being true innovators in the field.

For sure. This is Allie Smith, and she got kissed on the cheek by a very sweet-sounding MCA. And all your 15-year-olds out there, you better be at home sleeping. Yeah, don't be hanging out with 21-year-old dudes. Especially not the girl talk people, but those guys are girls. I think girl talk's a guy.

Steer clear of that girl talk, dude. Yeah. Let's see, what do you want to call out for? Do you live in a shotgun house? No. I guess, yeah, if you have a house with an interesting history, we did that one. Yeah.

But let's do it again. Oh, boy. 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, let's see, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast, that's our handle. Facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know is us on Facebook. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast

at howstuffworks.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called,

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.