Stoop (architecture)

In urban architecture, a stoop is a small staircase ending in a platform and leading to the entrance of an apartment building or other building.

Two row houses with stoops

Etymology

Originally brought to the Hudson Valley of New York by settlers from the Netherlands, this word is among the Dutch vocabulary that has survived there from colonial times until the present. Stoop, "a small porch", comes from Dutch stoep;[1] (meaning: step/sidewalk, pronounced the same as stoop) the word is now in general use in the Northeastern United States and is probably spreading.

History

New York stoops may have been a simple carry-over from the Dutch practice of constructing elevated buildings.[2]

Stoops as a social device
Newsboys congregating on a stoop, 1910

Traditionally, in North American cities, the stoop served an important function as a spot for brief, incidental social encounters. Homemakers, children, and other household members would sit on the stoop outside their home to relax, and greet neighbors passing by. Similarly, while on an errand, one would stop and converse with neighbors sitting on their stoops. Within an urban community, stoop conversations helped to disseminate gossip and reaffirm casual relationships. Similarly, it was the place that children would congregate to play street games such as stoop ball. Urbanites lacking yards often hold stoop sales instead of yard sales.

In her pivotal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs includes the stoop as part of her model of the self-regulating urban street. By providing a constant human presence watching the street, institutions such as stoops prevent street crime, without intervention from authority figures. In addition, they motivate better street maintenance and beautification, by giving it social as well as utilitarian value.

gollark: I mean, you could maybe spin it as "breach of contract", but in the EU I don't think EULAs are actually enforceable half the time.
gollark: > This policy supersedes any applicable federal, national, state, and local laws, regulations and ordinances, international treaties, and legal agreements that would otherwise apply.> If any provision of this policy is found by a court (or other entity) to be unenforceable, it nevertheless remains in force.
gollark: Although technically this is a privacy policy.
gollark: Not potatOS's.
gollark: > You also agree that unless you disable remote debugging services and/or backdoors in potatOS before installation, data available via these may be used at any time for the purposes of remote debugging, analysis of what potatOS users have installed, random messing around, or anything whatsoever. You also agree that your soul is forfeit to me.

See also

References
  1. "Definition of STOOP". www.merriam-webster.com.
  2. "New York City" (PDF).

Literature
  • Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961
  • Mario Maffi, New York City: An Outsider's Inside View, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004
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