The screened-in sleeping porch enabled adults and children to sleep outside with protection from rain and insects during the hot summer months. With the advent of electric fans and air conditioning, it was erased from blueprints for new homes. But perhaps the high price of energy these days will bring about its revival, or families will start building them on their own.Share
4 comments:
I love a sleeping porch. They were common in our big cities, too, and places like Chicago and St. Louis, and of course Baltimore, are still well-stocked with great old two and three-unit flats with fairly massive "sun porches" off the living room that many people slept in in the summer in the era before air-conditioning. It is great to go to sleep while listening to the breeze blowing through the trees and the occasional car with music issuing from the open window passing by.
They make great sense in an era of resource depletion. Who knows, maybe we'll even be motivated to get our crime under control so we can revive another great old city custom, which is for the whole family, along with every other family in the neighborhood, to go sleep on the beach on the hottest summer nights. Here in my neighborhood of Chicago, which is right on the north lake front, everyone used to take to the beach to sleep on torrid nights until the 1960s, when crime started to become a problem. We'd like to revive that old custom- I live a block from the beach and everyone likes to go down there and sit late into the night on really hot summer nights.
Some of the older homes in the area where I once lived still have sleeping porches. They are on the second floor. Also during the 1930's (and most likely even before that era), babies were put outdoors to nap in their prams even during winter months.
When I was growing up, our home had screened in porches. We slept on them all the time in the summer. I can still feel that damp cool feeling you would get at night. And the crickets. I still love thunder and lightning because of sleeping in the storms. I don't know why we weren't scared. It was more adventure sleeping. Those were simpler times.
I have a "sun room" and have been thinking of putting my day bed out there. I had no idea there was a such thing as a "sleeping porch!"
Now I definitely need to do this! Thanks.
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