Cheap, safe, and easy: altering homes in Philadelphia, 1870s to 1920s
Date
2016
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the shift in American conceptualizations of home alteration between the 1870s and 1920s. During this period, the experience of home alteration shifted from a mundane aspect of everyday life, to a process that was defined in law, regulated by authorities, commodified in the marketplace, and understood as a distinct process. This was in large part due to popular perceptions of old homes as a problem, and a new set of emerging solutions that solved those problems, all of which aimed to make home alteration cheaper, safer, and easier. This shift reflects the material and social changes of the period, during which complicated technologies, new construction methods, increased urban population density, aging housing stock, and expanding standards of living all provoked a reorganization for the ways in which people conducted changes to their homes. Increasingly, home alteration became an identifiable aesthetic, economic, and cultural activity that pulled people into regulatory and economic arenas in new ways. This changed the framework within which most Americans conducted their home alteration. These changes modernized home alteration in America and set the stage for the home remodeling experience of the twentieth century. ☐ To assess the ways in which ideas about home alteration changed, this project relies on conversations observed in prescriptive and trade literature as well as legislation and personal papers, and contrasts that information with the local alteration practices in Philadelphia. Philadelphians’ alteration habits were gathered from building permits, insurance surveys, maps, photographs, and field work. Philadelphia, a city well-known for its single-family homes, but with a majority of renters, embodies the opportunities of new technological systems and cultural ideas with the socioeconomic limitations of urban working-class life. ☐ Chapters explores the new solutions that people developed that ultimately transformed the experience of home alteration. Chapter 1 surveys the economic, legal, and cultural status of home alteration in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it serves as a baseline with which to measure the changes after 1870. Home alteration was mundane and overlooked; so long as people’s building practices and living habits remained relatively consistent, there was little need to give much thought to changing old homes, and the subject of home alteration is absent from craft sources, architectural treatises, personal papers, and laws. ☐ Chapter 2 examines the first efforts to sell home alteration solutions through plans and products. Architects and manufacturers who portrayed the old house as a problem offered cheap and tasteful ways to transform outdated buildings. At the same time, letters reveal that many upper- and upper-middle class Americans embraced a more nuanced understanding of home alteration, and conceived of home alteration projects as something discrete from regular building, and a process that was to be planned, given careful thought, and even shared with family and friends as a matter of social interest. In Philadelphia, few people did the changes prescribed in plan books; rather, most families preferred to expand the footprints of their homes when money allowed, thus gaining living space on tight city lots. ☐ Chapter 3 illustrates the effort to regulate home alteration and make it safer. As modern domestic systems complicated home building and population density challenged traditional building practices, people increasingly endangered themselves and neighbors with unsafe alterations. This chapter illuminates the transformation of home alteration into a matter of public safety. It tests the threshold to which Philadelphians would tolerate government intervention into their personal lives. After accidents, municipal officials, trade leaders, and reformers successfully pushed regulation only after it became an obvious threat to public safety. According to proponents, the new laws would make alterations safer, and prohibit dangerous and hidden projects, encourage proper maintenance, and protect homeowners from unscrupulous builders. ☐ The final chapter illustrates the Philadelphia Electric Company’s (PECO) use of full-service alteration projects to sell house wiring. Reflecting a corporate, vertically-integrated model, PECO offered to design, plan, install, and even finance people’s house wiring projects. In a decade-long effort, marketers and other industry promoters honed their advertising approach to owners of preexisting homes. Wiring an old home was much harder than one in the process of construction. House wiring was expensive, and landlords and owner-occupants needed to balance the capital investment with their potential return. The investigation highlights the economic threshold that technology needed to cross for many practical homeowners. To help encourage wiring, PECO identified and attempted to solve a number of possible apprehensions that kept homeowners from purchasing house wiring. People’s ability to buy house wiring on credit from PECO led to a dramatic increase in house wiring after World War I. ☐ Few scholars have given much attention to people’s home alteration practices, and even fewer have explored the intellectual and political aspects of home alteration—the external forces that complicated people’s private choices. This study demonstrates how the social-construction of home alteration changed in the late nineteenth century for many middle-class Americans amidst rapid material, social, and economic change. This study’s effort to periodize home alteration aligns it with other fields of scholarship, setting out a timeline with which to compare continuity and change within broader frameworks. This study contributes to a large body of literature on the built environment and domestic architecture. It connects the most mundane aspect of building with important broader technological, social, political, and cultural narratives. It also fills a significant gap in the scholarship.
Description
Keywords
Alteration, Philadelphia, Remodeling