Curlers at the Block Party

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Archie Bunker tries to prettify his look-alike house

Between downtown, with its Promethean towers, and suburbia, with its manicured lawns, are the vast gray areas of the American city. This is where Archie Bunker lives.

Many of these gray areas are abandoned or decaying. But some of Archie's working-class neighborhoods are holding their ground. Most of these were houses built from the 1890s to the 1920s, when chimney-studded industrial plants belched soot over entire neighborhoods. Blue-collar housing consisted of look-alike cottages or row houses. But after World War II, in their own dogged kind of urban renewal, more affluent workers began to alter their monotone dwellings. They painted them in pinks and greens, sheathed them in asbestos shingles, ersatz clapboard or fake stone and brick and punched outsized suburban picture windows into them. This remodeling often led to a complete transformation, to a peculiar, eclectic vernacular that lent variety to the uniformity of gray, Edward Hopper neighborhoods.

Now this Archie Bunker architecture, as it might be called, has been documented in a 31-panel photographic exhibition titled "Transformed Houses." Currently at Baltimore's Peale Museum, it will tour some 15 cities, including Los Angeles, Bethlehem, Pa., and Trenton, N.J., through 1984. Organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, it was photographed by Camilo Vergara, 37, a conservation specialist for the New Jersey department of energy, who first noticed Bunker architecture when he worked in blue-collar Jersey City in 1976-77. I'm not interested in creating artistic pictures. "I did want to document this organic urban change, which no one has investigated before."

Over four years, Vergara drove and walked through neighborhoods in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, as well as small cities in Indiana, New Jersey and Michigan. Working with a research team, he photographed some houses that manage an air of innocent sweetness despite their myriad incongruities. These are the happy accidents of design. But Vergara has also documented many flamboyant temples of vulgarity: a Cape Cod cottage on Chicago's South Side, wrapped in garishly colored stone veneer, white wrought-iron tracery and striped aluminum awnings; a semidetached gilded castle in Bayonne, N.J., concocted from pendages; and the astonishing acrobatic stance of a new room cantilevered from the roof of a bungalow in Birmingham. These transformations are a spontaneous expression of the "complexity and contradiction in architecture" that Robert Venturi, in his famed book of that title, asked postmodern architects to design into their buildings. But no postmodernist would dare produce the assaults on aesthetics that some of these homeowners do. Their houses wear curlers to the block party and are unself-conscious about it. As one Vergara subject cheerfully replied when asked about the style of her renovated house, "Early American Salvation Army."

The elements of house transformation are often functional. Additions provide needed space as the family grows or help shelter automobiles. In Staten Island, one elderly man who had no use for his garage turned it into a glassed-in living room, retaining the sliding garage door. The aluminum or vinyl sidings are supposed to help save on the heating bill or protect deteriorating facades. Picture windows give more light and the appearance of being up-to-date. "If something is old, you should get rid of it and go toward the future," a Hoboken, N.J., homeowner told Vergara. "Time has to go on; we had to modernize our house."

Beyond utility, however, there is also a desire to have a house that is prettier than the neighbors'. In Hegewisch, an industrial suburb of Chicago, one prideful owner < grafted some unlikely fieldstone siding and a bow window on a two-story cottage. Not too far away, in Chicago itself, a small house was rusticated, to use architects' jargon, by applying synthetic stone siding to the entire facade. The result was not unlike that of an Alpine goat-herder's hut. Archie Bunker may seem like a conformist, but he is, a heart, an individualist who rebels against uniformity not of his own making. He considers it his right to paint his house coral or plaid if he wants to, much as he would tattoo his biceps or select an inscription for his T shirt.

There is little evidence that changes were made in the spirit of community design, although a type of siding or a particular color may be selected because "it is the fashion of the neighborhood." Some house renovation, however, does result from neighborhood pressure. When people feel the neighborhood is threatened by nearby empty lots, burned buildings, abandoned cars, cratered streets and sidewalks, they become afraid of further neglect. Cajoling a negligent neighbor to repair or refurbish becomes a matter of self-defense. But much remodeling, good or bad, also is done be cause the family cannot afford to move or hates to move. Amid the anonymity of modern city life, the idea of neighborhood, particularly ethnic neighborhood, is gaining importance. People crave a sense of belonging that no Welcome Wagon can fulfill. It exists only with living in the same place for years, if not generations, and changing that community to meet new needs.

"In some neighborhoods I have documented, every other house has been radically altered since it was built," says Vergara. "Individually, some do not look so good. But when you view them to gether, down the street, the diversity of colors and shapes really can look quite beautiful."

--By Wolf Von Eckardt

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