What’s This All About?

Where I live there are tons of older attached houses that were built as affordable housing. And builders would add porches as a way to attract buyers. If you had to share a wall with your neighbor, at least you could have way to sit outside and shoot the breeze with them too.

When I went on my walks, it eventually dawned on me that a bunch of people hung old windows on their porches. What for?

As it turns out, it’s a thing from not too long ago when blogs ruled the earth, and bloggers would talk about how fun they were.

And you know what, the windows are kind of fun. Not everything the bloggers latched onto was bad.

This is a house with three windows on their front porch, and you can easily imagine sitting there with a cup of coffee or a beer and waving to your neighbors through them.

This is a clever example, where someone used a hanging porch window to frame a fish mosaic on the front of the house itself.

And here’s a window which was turned into a mosaic.

But maybe the coolest example is this section of a block. Every house has a window hanging out front.

You can see from the column to the right of this photo that the builder wanted to demonstrate the care that went into these houses. That’s no trivial example of millwork, and it was designed to tell buyers a century past that this was a place of substance.

But in the present day somebody else must have organized everyone else to join in and hang a window too as a way to signal this is a good place to live — they’re all on the same page, but in a friendly way.

It probably cost almost nothing. If they weren’t saved from a window replacement project, they were probably bought from a salvage place for a song. And then for the cost of some paint, hooks, and chain, they were ready for hanging.

The only thing that was left was talking to the other neighbors and getting them to go along. And look at the results!