Shotgun, Side Hall & Side Gallery Cottages

Shotgun, Side Hall and Side Gallery Cottages.
The shotgun cottage and its related forms with side halls and side galleries are the single most dominant 19th century house types in New Orleans, with literally thousands being built between 1840 and 1910. These cottages are rectangular in shape, from four to six rooms in depth, with the rooms arranged one after another. Shotgun cottages are the simplest of the three forms, with no

interior hallways. As their names imply, side hall cottages and side gallery cottages are built with alternate means of passage from one room to another. Side hall designs feature an enclosed hallway, while side gallery designs feature an open gallery set under the main roof of the house. Often these house types had a second story, set at the rear of the house, known locally as a camel back due to its odd appearance.

External Features and Characteristics.
Shotgun, side hall and side gallery cottages are set on rectangular lots with narrow street frontages. These cottages are most often set back slightly from the front property line, behind an ornamental cast-iron fence. In the Faubourg Marigny, Esplanade Ridge and Treme districts, many of these cottages are constructed on the front property line, thereby perpetuating a tradition which began with Creole cottages in the early years of the 19th century. Virtually all of the specimens of these house types are of wood frame construction, with only a handful of masonry examples surviving today.

The facades of these houses received the most attention in terms of their stylistic decoration, with the side elevations which most often faced onto narrow side alleys remaining rather plain in comparison. With the exception of examples which were built on the front property line, a shallow front porch is generally the major exterior feature of these houses. On early examples dating from the 1850s through the 1870s, the porch is covered by the hipped roof of the cottage. This section of the roof is supported on square wooden columns, with the roofline concealed behind a substantial entablature. During the 1880s and 1890s, the most common form of porch overhang changed to an exposed roofline, supported by a series of ornate machine-cut wood brackets. A more ornate version, popular in the 1890s, used turned wood porch columns to support the front edge of the roof, with additional millwork ornament set between the tops of the columns. On these later facades, the roof design shifts from a hipped roof to a small gable section at the peak of the roof, with a sloping apron beneath it that extends over the porch. The front porches of these houses were always fitted with railings, either set between the porch columns, or between newel posts on those houses without porch columns. The railing balusters were either of cast-iron or turned wood.

The facade openings of these houses are organized on the basis of the placement of the principal doorway. On single shotgun cottages and side hall and side gallery cottages, the door is set to one side of the facade. On double shotgun cottages, the doors are placed at opposite ends of the facade, with two window openings set between them. Facade window openings can be either the standard size, with six-over-six pane sash, or they can be full length, fitted with six-over-nine pane sash. The wood siding applied to the front facades of these houses is most often more decorative than the standard overlapping siding used on the sides. The most common form is the wide board 'rustic' siding, with recessed joints between each of the wide boards.