Why Stoops?

A long time ago, the combination of my speaking quickly, my accent, and the word “stoop” got me in trouble when some acquaintances thought I was calling their house stupid. In any case, there’s a picture of a fairly normal late-nineteenth-century stoop on a New York brownstone. It’s in good but not great condition.

So, why stoops? Rowhouses were built at this time in every major city on the east coast and in a fair number of houses elsewhere in the country. Usually the front door is up one to four steps, creating a first (“parlor”) floor slightly above the street. That makes sense, as it gets the big front parlor windows out of the line of sight of passers-by. If the first floor is elevated, you can sit and look out without everyone being able to see back in. Rowhouses in London – arguably the greatest rowhouse city in the world – follow this pattern. So why does New York have these very high entrances?

The typical New York stoop is so high that the basement floor is only two or three feet below sidewalk grade. This makes the basement a real floor, as opposed to being used just for storage and the building’s mechanical equipment…which is why so many of these houses have a cellar underneath the basement. Gotta put that stuff somewhere. So why that pattern here?

The popular theory for years was that they were some form of architectural echo from the Dutch colonization period, and they were built to prevent the flooding that was a concern in Holland but is far less of one here. There are two holes in that theory that are so big that you have to search to find a shred that’s not hole: first, contemporaneous Dutch houses didn’t have such high stoops; second, the stoops got so tall in the second half of the 1800s, after a relatively low-stooped first half of the century. The new theory is less romantic: the stoops are there to keep the nice portion of the house, including the parlors, well above the tide of horse manure. But there were horses elsewhere. Another possibility is that it became a local fad, like wearing ridiculous hats, and served no real purpose at all, as again can be seen by looking at houses in other cities.

Short answer: we don’t know.