British immigrant and new American citizen Laurence Brown, who recently bought his first house, shows us some features of his 1942 home that are not seen in houses built today. These include a basement toilet, a coal chute, and a phone nook. But they need some further explanation.
A basement toilet is often accompanied by a sink or a shower or both, but rarely this much privacy. Sure, these were used by workmen who wanted to get clean before entering the living area, but that's not what they were originally built for. These are often called Pittsburgh toilets. An extra toilet in the basement was handy because when the municipal sewer system backed up, which was often, sewage would flow into the concrete basement, where it could be washed down the floor drain with lots of water once the sewer was functional again. Without that release, the backup would occur upstairs, flooding the living area where it would ruin wood floors, carpets, and your family dinner enjoyment. Once the plumbing was available in the basement, sinks and showers could be easily added for cleaning up after work.
The "coal chute" he pointed out looks a lot more like a septic tank cover to me. But this is an urban area, and many commenters pointed out that it is a sewer access point called a cleanout. Coal chutes were built into the foundation of the house, and had much lighter covers of wood or metal for easy access.
Wednesday, February 01, 2023
3 Weird Quirks of My American House
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
> sewage would flow into the concrete basement
AKA the Pittsburgh Steamer
The "phone niche" would be perfect for a three-foot-tall translucent plastic statue of Mary with a red light bulb inside right where her heart would be. If that were my mother's house I would buy her that statue, install the socket and bulb, wire the niche for power for it to be on all the time, it wouldn't even have to pulse, and she would be thrilled. Thrilled!
When I was a little boy in the early 1960s my Uncle Pat and Aunt Honey and their four kids (two boys, two girls) lived in a house in Ohio that Pat built just after World War Two. The basement had the furnace, a washing machine (the dryer was ropes across the back yard), a deep freeze, a separate room for musical instruments (they had drums, a bass guitar and amplifier, and an air-powered chord organ, and there was a shower in the middle of a long wall, with the drain in the concrete floor, that I was horrified to find out was expected to be used by man and boys all together when we came back from the hunting cabin in Pennsylvania. I couldn't believe it. Pat said, "Whatsa matter, we're all boys here." I understand they cleaned meat animals there too, in hunting season.
Sixty years later I can still smell that basement. Mostly it's laundry soap powder and damp concrete, but since I'm thinking about dead animals now my imagination inserts stale blood and ammonia.
My father built his first house starting in 1950 the cinder block cellar had the boiler with copper tubing in the concrete floor for heat. It had a toilet, shower stall, washing machine, fireplace that was on the plans for the living room but my mother didn’t want the dirt so they sunk it down a floor. It also had a quasi-kitchen consisting of a sink, refrigerator, stove, and a couple cabinets.
Above the cellar was the first floor... no walls just the floor. the floor was sealed with tarpaper and tarps (not a whole lot of plastic around in those days) so we lived in the cellar for about a year and half while he earned the money to build the upstairs which was brick outside plaster inside and had copper tubing in the plaster ceiling for heat.
After the house was done and we moved upstairs when I’d come home after working on a farm in CT all day, filthy as a coal miner, right into the cellar to take a shower and leave my clothes in the wash. If the weather was bad the laundry got hung on lines in the cellar. Need something in a hurry? Stoke the fireplace to dry stuff quickly.
In the summer I’d go with my buddies to the stock cars races every Saturday night but in the winter we’d be in the cellar building model cars or shooting archery at the three bales of straw against the end wall. The cellar fridge was used for soda and things like a half carved turkey or roaster of baked beans. The stove was used to cook buckets of tiny potatoes for the pigs and later to cook the pigs
A great place to do messy things without the Wrath of Mom raining down. Had to clean up after but a great place to learn how to minimize mistakes. Every kid has a learning curve and for some of us it’s long. LoL
Post a Comment