The American front porch is said to be making a comeback; it never really left

The front porch of our 1931 bungalow in Hershey, Pa., was the bane of my existence a couple of summers ago.

While we knew we had years of renovation ahead of us when we bought the house, we were unaware that rain habitually leaked through the original tongue-and-groove decking into our basement storage below. The fresh coats of paint I added to the layers already present did nothing to curtail the problem.

For our second summer in the house, I bought heavy tarps to cover the decking when rain threatened and to buy some time until I figured out a solution. I grew weary of anticipating Mother Nature’s fickleness and, longer term, worried about the prospects for our porch.

We were the home’s new caretakers, and preserving as much of it as possible was our top priority. The porch was a big part of the allure for us to buy the house in the first place.

‘Making a comeback’

New-home builders apparently are yearning for the front porch’s warm embrace, too: “Porch-building is on the rise across the country, up 23 percent on new homes from two decades ago,” Pacific Standard magazine reported in 2017.

And that was pre-Covid.

“The forgotten front porch is making a comeback,” The Wall Street Journal hailed in 2020, noting that it was “finding a new role in the age of social distancing.”

Indeed, our covered front porch was perfect for those contactless delivery days. While our bungalow is modest, the porch is grand by today’s building standards: 26 feet wide, seven feet deep.

And that’s the issue I take with proclamations of the front porch’s comeback. Most often, what I see is new homes that give a wink and a nod to a porch that is too small to be of any real value.

Twenty years before moving into downtown, Sara and I built a house in a development on the outskirts of Derry Township. The house sat toward the back of the lot, which meant that we had a larger front yard than back — and that our tiny L-shaped front porch was 50 feet from the street. You had to half shout to speak with someone on the sidewalk.

If you live in an old house as we do now, odds are that you have a front porch proximate to the sidewalk. Every residence on our block was built 90 or more years ago and has a covered front porch as wide as the house.

In that sense, the front porch never went away even if many of us headed out back or stayed inside.

Form and function

The Pacific Standard article suggested that the “porch-building boomlet” owed much to the New Urbanism movement, specifically the building of the model community known as Seaside, Fla., in 1990, chock full of front porches as it was.

But a Florida State study three decades hence concluded that porches are more of a design element than a functional place.

To which I say, the front porch, properly executed, celebrates form and function. It’s a nostalgic and pleasing adornment, of course, but it can be so much more than that.

The advent of automobiles, air-conditioning and television may have made the front porch less necessary for cooling and entertainment, but it remains an important bridge between our private and public lives.

Historian Michael Dolan, author of “The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place,” uses the term “liminal space” to describe this between-worlds aspect of the porch.

“You are in your space, but you are available to the outside world,” he said on the podcast “Shaping Opinion.”

Truth be told, sometimes Sara and I have to remind ourselves of the treasure that is our front porch and choose to sit there.

From our metal glider, we can plainly see four Kiss-topped streetlights a block away on Chocolate Avenue. We can watch the soaring yellow Sky Rush rollercoaster make its 200-foot ascent, anticipating the screams as its riders fall at 75 mph.

On our porch, we might enjoy a cold beer or glass of wine, greet pedestrians passing on the sidewalk, read a book, talk about the workday completed or the home projects to come, keep a watchful eye on our neighborhood.

There we greet trick or treaters at Halloween and watch for Santa atop a firetruck at Christmas, when the porch is adorned with colorful string lights and vintage blow molds.

It is cold then, a sharp contrast with those five hot summer weeks in 2021 when, donning a respirator mask and protective eyeglasses, 1,000-degree heat gun in hand, I removed all those layers of paint from the porch decking and stopped the leaks by applying coats of liquid rubber before repainting.

That hard work was so worth it.