What Happened to All the Pretty Houses?
On Victorian architecture and John Maass's "The Gingerbread Age."
Nashville, Tennessee is known for many things—the music industry, the rowdy bachelorettes on Broadway, the massive influx of young people over the past decade—but it is not a city renowned for its architecture.
I’ll admit that the boxy high rises in downtown, now overshadowed by one new skyscraper after another, are less than inspiring. But Nashville’s original growth spurt occurred during the late 1800s. Move away from Downtown and into residential neighborhoods, and one will find a wealth of historic homes from the late Victorian period through the 1920s.
These homes increasingly stand beside what locals call “tall-and-skinnies”: cheaply constructed townhomes built within the past decade, two to a lot, whose glossy, modern kitchens and bathrooms often conceal the shoddy craftsmanship behind the walls.
It’s a nuanced topic. The city has grown astronomically, and the only way to avoid the fate that plagues many prohibitively-expensive American cities is to build enough supply to meet the demand. But any time I walk by a Victorian cottage, many of which are painted in vivid colors and decorated with gingerbread trim, my heart hurts. Pepto-pink, mint green, pastel purple—I adore them all. Why can’t we build beautiful homes again? Can’t even the tall-and-skinnies acquire greater pizzazz?
Long-time patrons know how much I adore Victorian homes. The healing winds of time and distance have rehabilitated the Victorian in the eyes of the public, as have the witchy, pop culture hits of the 1990s. (Who wouldn’t want to live in the Practical Magic house?)
During the mid-twentieth century, Americans held a very different perspective. To them, these homes were gaudy, pompous, and emblematic of the Gilded Age—a time of extraordinary income inequality and political corruption, not unlike the times we live in today. As John Maass wrote in his great defense of Victorian architecture, The Gingerbread Age (originally published in 1957):
We have long condemned the buildings of this period because we disapproved of the people who built them… If the nineteenth century was the time of the sweatshop and the slum, it was also the time of reform and emancipation. This harsh judgement is one-sided, as one-sided as the popular image of Queen Victoria as a lifelong old prude who was never amused.1
In other words, Maass’s contemporaries didn’t like Victorian dwellings because, among other reasons, they believed that the people who built these homes were backwards.
(I should include a disclaimer—I love midcentury-modern architecture as well. No disdain here!)
Maass’s book is a treasure-trove of photographs and illustrations of American Victorian architecture, and many of the buildings featured in the book were either demolished, burned down, or abandoned since the 50s. I discovered John Maass through Kendra Gaylord, a YouTuber who produces videos about architecture and its intersection with pop culture. Victorian architecture features in quite a few of her videos, as it is a mainstay of the horror genre.
The Victorian certainly makes sense as a symbol of decadence. How did it become a spooky icon?
As Victorians fell out of fashion, many were destroyed or left to decay:
The centers of gravity in American cities have shifted a great deal since the nineteenth century. Once respectable “downtown” sections often became blighted areas. Stately homes stood empty on their weedy lots or were turned into seedy rooming houses. This is where the cliché of the “gloomy, sinister Victorian mansion” got its start—shuttered houses which have not had a coat of paint in decades naturally assume a mournful look. In popular fiction the Victorian house became a likely background for murder and the preferred haunt of ghosts.2
What Maass is reflecting upon is what we now call the “white flight” to the suburbs after World War II, in which massive numbers of predominantly white Americans abandoned cities all over the country. Their destination? New, car-centric suburbs. This left urban cores with fewer residents, fewer customers to support small businesses, and especially in the 1970s and 80s, a colossal wave of crime. Strict zoning laws in the suburbs separated residential neighborhoods from commercial districts, and walkability became a distant dream.
The midcentury homes of American suburbia were streamlined and far less opulent than their Victorian counterparts. This austerity may have partially been the product of the world wars; a home full of decorative flourishes, wrought-iron swirls, and ornate trim would have seemed downright inappropriate after years of rationing.
Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925), the painting that launched his career, evokes the forlorn isolation of the great Victorian house. This house is in the Second Empire style, named after the mansard roofs that grew popular in France after Napoleon III came to the throne in 1852. (François Mansart designed the first “mansard” roof in the 17th century, but its revitalization during the Second French Empire bolstered its popularity.) Baron Haussmann’s sweeping urban planning projects, which destroyed much of Paris’s rambling medieval neighborhoods in favor of broad avenues and a functioning sewage system, often featured buildings with the mansard roof.
A mansard roof is defined by dual slopes on each side, with the bottom slope being especially steep and punctuated with dormer windows. These roofs allowed builders to squeeze an extra floor into homes, and helped owners to avoid property taxes that were determined by the amount of floors per building. (The floor in the roof didn’t count.)
While inspiration from overseas was a key feature of American Victorians, Maass pushes back against the idea that these were entirely foreign designs. American architects couldn’t fully adopt the use of stone construction found in medieval, Gothic buildings—doing so for most homes would be incredibly costly, especially when building for a middle-class family. Instead, architects used wood to translate the Gothic style, and they innovated lacey, bargeboard trim to spruce up even smaller homes. These houses in later decades were sneered as “gingerbread houses.”
The cartoonist Charles Addams would permanently affix the Victorian with a spooky aura. Chafing against the social conformity of the post-war era, Addams created The Addams Family. While Americans across the country adopted the nuclear family structure and moved into homogenous communities full of cookie-cutter houses, the gothic, Latin-coded Addams family lived with extended relatives in a haunted, Second Empire Victorian.3 They were the anti-nuclear family, and with the stroke of an acid-tipped pen, Charles Addams made his pessimistic view of 1950s family life known. After all, Gomez and Morticia actually liked each other.
Sometimes, I wonder if in a hundred years, writers will look back upon the 2020s’ tall-and-skinnies with kinder eyes, as many do now with Victorians. But what I love (and what John Maass loved) about Victorian homes is their unabashed individuality. In an architectural landscape defined by cheapness and expediency, it seems that most new buildings erected across the country have one goal only, and that is to bring a swift return to investors. Beauty doesn’t matter to them at all.
People are pushing back in their own ways. Not everyone can afford a gorgeous, Victorian cottage, but we do have more control over the interiors in which we live. Maximalism is back. Bright colors, designs, and rooms filled with personal objects and mementos boldly declare the humanity of the people who decorated them.
The Victorians responded to rapid industrialization and inequality with designs that highlighted individuality. In our own Gilded Age, when we are forced to witness the oppressive ugliness of copy-and-paste apartment buildings owned by massive investment firms, of Tesla trucks and AI art, it comes as no surprise that many are asking for human-centered design once again.
Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:
John Maass, The Gingerbread Age (Greenwich House, 1983), 8-9.
Maass, The Gingerbread Age, 173.
Patrick Sauer, “The Cultural History of ‘The Addams Family’,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 11, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/cultural-history-addams-family-180973315/.
Great essay on the topic I love so much
The only thing I've noticed -maximalizm at least what of it I can trace usually preceeds some horrid happennings.
It's almost as if people felt their lives are to be cut soon, and would be in a hurry to bloom
(rather maximalist myself, even though I need negative space...with art on the walls, etc)
Thank you for such a wonderful post
This is a huge topic worthy of a Substack in its own right, Nicole and nowhere more so than in the UK where our attachment to heritage and labyrinthine planning controls have resulted in an unprecedented housing crisis. All of us lovers of beauty mourn the massive losses of historically important homes which took place from 1940 to 1960 in particular (what the Luftwaffe didn't destroy, draconian inheritance taxes took care of.
Almost nothing built after 1945 is of much architectural merit, save the odd savagely beautiful brutalist development (The Barbican in London is a notable example) and the odd skyscraper and yet we continue to build cookie cutter housing developments on the outskirts of towns and prohibitively expensive new tower blocks in major cities which totally lack community, rather than repurpose and refurbish the countless uninhabited buildings across the nation.