A Porch or a Tower?

The older houses on the street have porches, which serve two purposes: they welcome visitors and they become extensions of the living area into the public sphere. When porches were actually used—as they were in the hot New Jersey summers before Air Conditioning—they were areas where one interacted with one’s neighbors as they passed by on their ordinary errands and where some would be invited to share a bit of conversation without any of the fuss involved in a visit to the actual house. But this house is clearly marked not as a part of the neighborhood community, but as a refuge from the outside world. It looks like a tower. Its public entry is narrow, and there is no space where one might sit with neighbors or even share a word with those passing by. It is clearly meant to be entered as a rule from the carport and then only by its own residents. The house is attractive in its own way, but the message it sends about how Americans now live—isolated, cocooned, cut off from their neighbors, interacting only with communities of their own choosing—is troubling.

What is most troubling for me is that this house would be more suitable for me than are the welcoming houses with their large porches. I have occasionally said that most Americans live apartment-shaped lives on half-acre lots. As the buffer between my apartment-shaped life and the rest of the world is even bigger than that—and not because of any great affection for deer and ground-hogs—I should admit that while I admire the vision of community imparted by a porch, I would never sit out one one. Like my fellow citizens, I am “bowling alone.”