Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830 (review)

Town House presents a rich, detailed picture of the spatial, material, and cultural life of American cities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Unlike most studies of the architecture and form of early American cities, which focus closely on individual cities, Bernard Herman's far-reaching work examines the domestic architecture of early American cities in general, from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the north to Charleston, South Carolina, in the south. Similarly, rather than focus on one particular type of house, Herman covers housing from the meanest boardinghouse and hovel to mansions with extensive servant quarters. His book is structured around different types of city residents, including merchants, burghers, servants, widows, artisans, and travelers, with a chapter treating the housing of each of these groups, plus an introduction and brief conclusion.

The book is synchronic. Rather than tell a story of change during the fifty-year span he covers, the author focuses on the continuities, providing a rich snapshot of a time period. The one exception is in the chapter titled "The Burgher's Dilemma," which looks in part at the organization and style of houses in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during the early nineteenth century. In this period, many people of the middling sort remodeled their houses, shifting them away from the older Pennsylvania German three-room plan of Küche (kitchen), Stube (stove room), and unheated Kammer. The newer plans, more similar to housing throughout the northern Atlantic, included a separate hall, a sorting out of service spaces, and more specialized rooms such as a parlor. A shift in the outward presentation of the house was also common, as half-timbered exteriors were clad in brick. However, the change was not simply from a local form to a national one, but rather a negotiation between local and national norms, with aspects of the older form, such the use of stoves rather than fireplaces in the parlors of Lancaster town houses, integrated into the newer houses.

Because of the geographical breadth of the book, building systems are not addressed in technical detail; rather, they are discussed as one aspect of the negotiation between local and national norms, a theme throughout the book. While in Lancaster a brick house was a sign of respectable modernity, in New Hampshire elegant houses were much more likely to be built in wood, yet both shared a similar "interior landscape," including the organization of space and how it was to be used. The use of stock decorative plasterwork in the early nineteenth century furthered the resemblance of interiors within otherwise quite different houses.

Herman argues throughout the book that a central function of houses is as a symbolic representation of the people who live in them. In the context of the early republic, outward show and the performance of refinement were particularly important, and houses, as well as clothing and the accoutrements of refined behavior, helped to express one's social and moral standing. Widows, for example, were often given rooms as their dower which were not the most convenient, but did express their rank and status. These rooms were often at the more prestigious front of the house and furnished with genteel belongings.

A particularly important theme concerns the limitations and possibilities of material culture as evidence. Architecture is not studied alone, but rather in the company of other scales of material analysis, from the city plan to interior finishes, furnishings, and belongings. Looking at smaller-scale objects enriches our understanding of how people used the spaces. For example, while a one-room, twelve-by-sixteen-foot frame dwelling seems beyond the realm of refinement, the tea caddy and tea tray be-longing to the Grants, who lived there in 1800, show that this one room could at moments...