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Reviews
THE SEATTLE BUNGALOW: PEOPLE & HOUSES, 1900–1940
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by Janet Ore
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| University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2007. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index. 211 pages. $24.95 paper. |
| Janet Ore set herself a rather daunting task. Noting that the large number of books about bungalows published in the past few years has focused on an elite group of designers and affluent patrons, Ore's "goal became to connect the people who used and constructed the built environment with the bungalows that resulted from their efforts" (p. x). In other words, Ore wished to explore how the lower middle class related to the bungalows they bought by the thousands in the first forty years of the twentieth century. |
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To achieve her goal, Ore utilized a remarkable trove of assessor's records in the King County archives, enabling her to create a statistically plausible sample of eight hundred houses in four north Seattle neighborhoods — Wallingford, Green Lake, Fremont, and Ballard. She fleshed out those records with an impressive number of occupant interviews and oral histories. This, by itself, could have provided an adequate basis for a worthy monograph. But she added to those sources two others that move her book far beyond the ordinary. |
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To highlight the differences between the people in her selected neighborhoods and the elite who are commonly studied by historians, she analyzed the founders of Beaux Arts Village, a small Arts and Crafts planned community across Lake Washington from Seattle. She then demonstrated how "Idealizing the Seattle Bungalow" (detailed in Chapter 2) conflicted with the mundane realities of budgets and technological developments. Using a variety of trade publications and government reports in the tradition of Reyner Banham's Architecture of the Well Tempered Environment, Ore demonstrates how such Arts and Crafts ideals as naturalness were compromised by the costs of plumbing and wiring. |
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Asserting the triumph of hardware over cultural idealism could run the risk of technological determinism, but Ore avoids that trap by returning throughout her book to the evolving history of the Orrill Stapp family. Not only does Stapp's Wallingford bungalow ornament the cover of the book, the story of his family "reveals how ordinary people constantly negotiated the relationship between the embedded social ideology and their actual use of space" (p. 111). |
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Stapp, who used his home to house his occupations as music teacher and publisher of a neighborhood newspaper, scarcely typified most occupants of Seattle bungalows. Nevertheless, when combined with briefer references to a number of other residents, this family history persuasively makes Ore's case that "for ordinary families, 'home' was a dynamic, ever-changing process, not a static construction" (p. 112). Consequently, her detailing of the costs of kitchen and bathroom appliances adds intriguing specifics to readers' understanding without suggesting that people's use of bungalows was dominated by those considerations. |
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My only caveat with this book arises from the title. Perhaps it should have been The Bungalow in Seattle. Having some thirty years ago supervised a city-wide inventory of historic structures in Seattle, I know from experience what many may suspect from casual observation — Seattle has a far greater percentage of bungalows than can be found in most other western cities. What was there about bungalows that made them particularly appealing to Seattleites? Jud Yoho, realtor and builder, published Bungalow Magazine long enough to demonstrate it had a substantial audience. Why didn't similar magazines appear in Salt Lake City or Denver? Ore thoroughly researched Yoho's career and used it effectively in her accounts of the construction and marketing of bungalows in Seattle, but she made no attempt to explain why the bungalow was so popular in Seattle. She offered a tempting lead when she noted that the Scandinavian immigrants in Ballard were less likely to favor the bungalow. Did the bungalow embody something distinctly American not shared by recent immigrants? We will have to wait for some other study to answer such questions. |
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Ore's book is a valuable addition to American cultural history. It is based on imaginative and wide-ranging research, is clearly presented, and is illustrated with a large number of photographs drawn from contemporary assessor's records. |
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