What place could be more agreeable than the great American porch?

BY DWIGHT YOUNG

My house sits near the end of a block of 11 row houses. Stretching to the right and left from my front door is a long vista of near-identical porches. Kids play on them. Adults read the paper on them. Flags, flowers, and For Rent signs adorn them. On rainy days, mail carriers step over the railings from one porch to the next and make their deliveries without getting wet. You get the idea: A porch is a good thing.

When I say "porch," I mean front porch. A back porch is something else altogether. A back porch is where you can, if you're of a mind to do so, take out the garbage in your underwear. A front porch, on the other hand, is where you spend time doing things that are good for you: hangin' out, chattin' with people, watchin' the world go by. (One of the best things about a porch is that a final "g" seems totally out of place there.

We Americans certainly didn't invent the porch, but over time we refined it and turned it into something that, perhaps more than any other architectural feature, is quintessentially American. I mean, what's more American than Mount Vernon? And when you look at a picture of Mount Vernon, what do you see? A great big white-pillared porch, that's what.

Washington was ahead of his time in stretching a porch across the front of his house. For the most part, porches in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were pretty puny things, functioning mostly to keep the rain off your head while you fumbled for your door key or waited for your host to answer your knock. Our national love affair with the porch didn't really go into high gear until the second quarter of the 19th century, when the Romantic Movement swept through and taught us that nature was something to be enjoyed, not avoided. Combining the best features of indoors and outdoors, a porch was the perfect place from which to gaze upon, and interact with, the wide, wonderful world.

Practically overnight, porches got big enough to have furniture on them: From coast to coast, rocking chairs creaked, plant stands groaned under the weight of ferns and aspidistra, and porch swings staked their claim to the title of Best Invention Ever. Reflecting that commodiousness, porches were often called piazzas. Firmly established as an essential fixture of American social life, the porch briefly sent a cooling breeze through the stuffy chambers of politics when William McKinley conducted most of his 1896 presidential campaign from his Ohio front porch—leading to the inescapable conclusion that he may have been the smartest candidate in history.

In the 1950s and '60s, porches fell out of fashion: Postwar suburban houses didn't have porches, they had air conditioning and patios. But now they're back: In the so-called new urbanism communities that have sprung up in recent years—Seaside, Fla., is probably the best known—almost every house has a porch. That's cause for celebration, especially now that summertime is here.

Some years ago I learned that "porch" can be a verb as well as a noun. One warm day I overheard a passerby call out "How y'all doin'?" to some of my neighbors who were sitting on their front porch, enjoying the late-afternoon breeze. Their languid reply was, "We're fine. We're just sittin' here porchin'."

Go and do likewise. Find a porch (or a piazza or veranda, if that's what's handy—but not a stoop, which is what houses had before they grew porches, and don't think for a minute that a deck is the same thing), settle into something comfortable (it's nice if there's a rail to prop your feet on, but if not, you'll definitely need a footstool), wrap your hand around a glass with ice and something else in it, and read Michael Dolan's 2002 book, The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place. It'll make you grateful for the unsung hero who first realized that having a place for porchin' is the blessedly breeze-washed bedrock of a civilized society.

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