The Shotgun House in New Orleans: Survey of an Endangered Cultural Asset, Part 1

Fred B. Kniffen Cultural Resources Laboratory, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University; Edwards, Jay; Kennedy, Barrett

This report...has several purposes. The first is to provide an overview of a seriously neglected component of the cultural landscapes of the city of New Orleans. Despite the fact that the shotgun house in all of its variants comprises approximately one half of all of the domestic wooden houses in the city, there is no architectural history nor has a survey been conducted to establish the significance of this important American vernacular building type. In the summer of 2009, Barrett Kennedy and Jay Edwards undertook a survey of portions of the city. That survey will be completed in the present grant year. The survey was conducted by conducting vehicle-based digital video recording of transects of Orleans Parish. These survey transects will be continued in the 2009-2010 grant year, and a complete report will be provided in Part II of this report. Another purpose of the report was to provide an intensive look at one New Orleans neighborhood. We selected a neighborhood which was both endangered and rich in shotgun house history. Holy Cross, in the Lower Ninth Ward was completely surveyed and also documented using historical resources such as the Sanborn Insurance Maps. Portions of our findings are described in this report. A final purpose of the report was to provide a new kind of architectural history, appropriate to the subject of urban vernacular architecture. In this, we had to rethink the principles, indeed the very foundations of the methodologies and presuppositions of architectural history. We strove for a more socially and human based approach to explaining the great transformations which occur in traditions of architecture. The early history of the shotgun house as a new form of history is presented in this portion of the report. This report is not complete. Part II, to be submitted in 2010,will expand our survey of the city of New Orleans. It will also expand the history of the shotgun house by examining in greater detail dramatic developments which occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. This history will end with the attempts to reconstitute and restore the shotgun tradition in New Orleans. (From "About this Report.") This report was funded in part by a fiscal year 2008 Historic Preservation Fund grant to the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation (grant number 22-08-21723) and a subgrant to Louisiana State University (project number LA-08-001). In the copy provided to the National Park Service, the total page count should be 142, but page numbers 115 to 117 are assigned twice, in succession, such that what should have been pg. 118 is printed as pg. 115 (with pg. 119 printed as pg. 116, and so on).

The Shotgun House in New Orleans: Survey of an Endangered Cultural Asset, Part 1

Collections