In American English, a stoop is a small staircase ending in a platform and leading to the entrance of an apartment building or other building.
In American English, a stoop is a small staircase ending in a platform and leading to the entrance of an apartment building or other building.
Originally brought to the Hudson Valley of New York by settlers from the Netherlands, the word "stoop" is part of the Dutch vocabulary that has survived there from colonial times until the present. Stoop, "a small porch", comes from Dutch stoep [1] (meaning: step/sidewalk, pronounced the same as English "stoop"); the word is now in general use in the Northeastern United States and is probably[ original research? ] spreading.
New York stoops may have been a simple carry-over from the Dutch practice of constructing elevated buildings. [2]
It has been well documented that the stoop served the function of keeping people and their homes separated from horse manure, which would accumulate in the streets at high rates. Horses were the main transport means in New York for decades, and thousands of them were kept in the city by common citizens. [3]
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Traditionally, in North American cities, the stoop served an important function as a spot for brief, incidental social encounters. Homemakers, children, and other household members would sit on the stoop outside their home to relax, and greet neighbors passing by. Similarly, while on an errand, one would stop and converse with neighbors sitting on their stoops. Within an urban community, stoop conversations helped to disseminate gossip and reaffirm casual relationships. Similarly, it was the place that children would congregate to play street games such as stoop ball. Urbanites lacking yards often hold stoop sales instead of yard sales.
In her pivotal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities , Jane Jacobs includes the stoop as part of her model of the self-regulating urban street. By providing a constant human presence watching the street, institutions such as stoops prevent street crime, without intervention from authority figures. In addition, they motivate better street maintenance and beautification, by giving it social as well as utilitarian value.
Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
A street is a public thoroughfare in a built environment. It is a public parcel of land adjoining buildings in an urban context, on which people may freely assemble, interact, and move about. A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, but is more often paved with a hard, durable surface such as tarmac, concrete, cobblestone or brick. Portions may also be smoothed with asphalt, embedded with rails, or otherwise prepared to accommodate non-pedestrian traffic.
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other. Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one or two room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
A city block, residential block, urban block, or simply block is a central element of urban planning and urban design.
A mews is a row or courtyard of stables and carriage houses with living quarters above them, built behind large city houses before motor vehicles replaced horses in the early twentieth century. Mews are usually located in desirable residential areas, having been built to cater for the horses, coachmen and stable-servants of prosperous residents.
A veranda or verandah is a roofed, open-air hallway or porch, attached to the outside of a building. A veranda is often partly enclosed by a railing and frequently extends across the front and sides of the structure.
Astor Row is the name given to 28 row houses on the south side of West 130th Street, between Fifth and Lenox Avenues in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, which were among the first speculative townhouses built in the area. Designed by Charles Buek, the houses were built between 1880 and 1883 in three spurts, on land John Jacob Astor had purchased in 1844 for $10,000. Astor's grandson, William Backhouse Astor, Jr., was the driving force behind the development.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a 1961 book by writer and activist Jane Jacobs. The book is a critique of 1950s urban planning policy, which it holds responsible for the decline of many city neighborhoods in the United States. The book is Jacobs' best-known and most influential work.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is a museum and National Historic Site located at 97 and 103 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The museum's two historical tenement buildings were home to an estimated 15,000 people, from over 20 nations, between 1863 and 2011. The museum, which includes a visitors' center, promotes tolerance and historical perspective on the immigrant experience.
Mixed use is a type of urban development, urban design, urban planning and/or a zoning classification that blends multiple uses, such as residential, commercial, cultural, institutional, or entertainment, into one space, where those functions are to some degree physically and functionally integrated, and that provides pedestrian connections. Mixed-use development may be applied to a single building, a block or neighborhood, or in zoning policy across an entire city or other administrative unit. These projects may be completed by a private developer, (quasi-) governmental agency, or a combination thereof. A mixed-use development may be a new construction, reuse of an existing building or brownfield site, or a combination.
Hudson Street is a north–south oriented street in the New York City borough of Manhattan running from Tribeca to the south, through Hudson Square and Greenwich Village, to the Meatpacking District.
On a residential area, a front yard or front garden is the portion of land between the street and the front of the house. If it is covered in grass, it may be referred to as a front lawn. The area behind the house, usually more private, is the back yard or back garden. Yard and garden share an etymology and have overlapping meanings.
Cliff Dwellers (1913) is an oil-on-canvas painting by George Bellows that depicts a colorful crowd on New York City's Lower East Side, on what appears to be a hot summer day. Its dimensions are 40+1⁄4 by 42+1⁄8 inches, and it is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1916.
Cedarcroft is a distinctive residential neighborhood in the North district of Baltimore, bordered by Gittings, East Lake and Bellona Avenue avenues and York Road. According to Baltimore City's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), the houses in Cedarcroft are in the Dutch Colonial Revival, Federal Revival, Tudor Revival, Georgian Revival, Cape Cod Revival, Bungalow, and Italianate styles of architecture.
Maiden Lane is a pedestrian mall located in San Francisco, California, United States. A former section of the city's red light district, Maiden Lane is now home to high-end boutiques and art galleries. The street also serves as the location of San Francisco's only Frank Lloyd Wright designed building.
The Kirkland Hotel is located at the corner of Main Street and Clinton Avenue in Kingston, New York, United States. It is a Tudor-style building dating to the end of the 19th century.
The Walter Merchant House, on Washington Avenue in Albany, New York, United States, is a brick-and-stone townhouse in the Italianate architectural style, with some Renaissance Revival elements. Built in the mid-19th century, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
The Knox Street Historic District is primarily located along one block of that street in the Park South neighborhood of Albany, New York, United States. Its contributing properties are several groups of attached rowhouses. The area was recognized as a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
Porch sitting, i.e., sitting on a front porch or stoop, usually of a private residence is a leisure activity which can be a direct or indirect form of social interaction. The activity is a staple of most urban areas in the United States and helps contribute to a lively atmosphere for those sitting and also for those passing by. It is most common during good weather, especially on warm summer nights and weekends.
A porch is a room or gallery located in front of an entrance of a building. A porch is placed in front of the façade of a building it commands, and forms a low front. Alternatively, it may be a vestibule, or a projecting building that houses the entrance door of a building.
