The Old House as a Social Problem

The subject of this paper is an invocation to the muse of elo- quence.&dquo;About the old house clusters tender memories and dear associations,&dquo; or again, &dquo;Home life in America is lacking in flavor because our houses are too new and without setting.&dquo;Here the muse departs for she learns that we are not interested in the old house from the standpoint of its years, but that for the purpose of this paper we are classing some houses of less than twenty-five years as old and some of more than fifty years as new.As a matter of fact, the mere passage of time has as little to do in determining the age of a house as it does in determining the age of an individual.Much more depends upon the material with which the years have to work and upon environment.The two types of old houses that we are interested in are, first, the small, poorly designed and cheaply constructed house that later becomes a miserable shack, and second, the large substantially built house that has outlived its usefulness as the residence of its owner and is transformed into a makeshift tenement

Sociology · Urbanization and City Planning

• Urban Optimism and Reform Thought in the Progressive Era

  Open Access•Michael P Mccarthy, Michael Mccarthy•Historian•1989

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