Sunday, March 07, 2010

Old Shotgun House Full Moon Cards

Old Shotgun House Full Moon Cards http://ow.ly/1ffVp

Here is another shotgun house but with full moon. I need to go back and add in the Black Cat too.







From Wikipedia:
"Shotgun houses were most popular before widespread ownership of the automobile allowed people to live farther from businesses and other destinations. Building lots were kept small out of necessity, 30 feet (9 m) wide at most. An influx of people to cities, both from rural areas in America and from foreign countries, all looking to fill emerging manufacturing jobs, created the high demand for housing in cities. Shotgun houses were thus built to fulfill the same need as rowhouses in Northeastern cities. Several were usually built at a time by a single builder, contributing to their relatively similar appearance.[4]
The New Orleans housing taxation structure contributed to the design of the shotgun in its region. The shotgun utilized a minimized lot frontage, when taxes were based on lot frontage, then when that was subverted by untaxable second floor additions of space AKA the "Camelback", the tax was shifted to number of rooms, which equalized the taxation per square footage within a property. Consequently, neither design contains closets or hallways, which were counted as rooms.
Folklorist and professor John Michael Vlach has suggested that the origin of the building style and the name itself may trace back to Haiti and Africa in the 1700s and earlier. The name may have originated from the Africa's Southern Dahomey Fon area term, to-gun, which means, "place of assembly." The description, probably used in New Orleans by Afro Haitian slaves, may have been misunderstood and reinterpreted as "Shotgun."[5] Another, frequently repeated theory suggests that the term "shotgun" is a reference to the idea that if you open all the doors to the house, the pellets fired from a shotgun would fly cleanly from one end to the other (though the origin of this description is unknown). Also a common understanding of the name is that they were built of discarded crates, i.e. shotgun-shell and other crates."

Wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house

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