Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 9, 2006

A modest shotgun house in New Orleans

The shotgun house is a type of house that was the most popular style in the American South from just after the Civil War until the 1920s. The style was developed in New Orleans, but these houses can be found as far away as Chicago and California. Shotgun houses are characterized by their narrow rectangular structure, usually no more than 12 feet (3.5 m) wide, three to five rooms deep, all connected to each other with no hallways, with doors at each end. The term "shotgun" is usually said to come from the saying that one could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would fly cleanly through the house and out the back door. Initially popular with the middle class as much as with the poor, shotgun houses became a symbol of poverty in the mid-20th century. Opinion is now more mixed, with some becoming the targets of bulldozing due to urban renewal, but others the recipients of historic preservation and gentrification. They remain the most prevalent housing in many southern U.S. cities and towns. (More...)

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