shotgun shack, shotgun house, railroad flat, etc

[Barbara Need]

At 22:36 -0400 22/9/05, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 06:58:36PM -0400, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>  >
>>  Is "shotgun" really used for a building with a central hall?
>>
>>  I think the dwellings which I've heard referred to as "shotgun
>>  houses/apartments/etc." generally had rooms in a row from front to back (no
>>  hall at all).
>
>Yes, I agree with this too. I was merely pointing out that the
>entry is there. Our revision file already has notes that we need
>to correct these defs.
>
>Jesse Sheidlower
>OED

Actually, I most recently had the image of a central hall in my mind
from some book I read as a child about migrant workers. But now that
I think about it, I think the description in the book was of doors
all in a line, not the same thing! I do know that when the pictures
of the shotgun homes appeared in the paper I surprised by the floor
layout, which does NOT have a central hall.

At 23:06 -0400 22/9/05, sagehen wrote:
>
>  >I agree with Doug. Same for "railroad flat," should the question arise.
>  >
>>JL
>>
>>Surely the lowliest "shotgun shack" cannot be typified by any sort of long
>>hallway ... or any hallway ... or anything very long ... I wouldn't think.
>>
>>-- Doug Wilson
>
>  ~~~~~~~~~~
>There is this description  of what I have always thought of as a "railroad
>flat" taken from a memoir of life at the end of the XIX Cent:
>
>"In that district of Chicago's South Side that lay near the Exposition
>grounds the blocks ran twelve to the mile and the flats ran back to the
>alley.  Allow twenty feet behind for a cinder yard to beat carpets in, and
>fifteen feet in front for grass, and  you can calculate the length of the
>corridor that ran from front to rear of each flat and joined its single
>line of seven rooms, bath, and lumber-room like beads on a string."
>/Family Crisis/,  S.B. Gass,  1940
>
>The "beads on a string" is a bit ambiguous, since apparently the corridor
>ran alongside the rooms.

They are still there! I have lived in them. In general the hallway
runs along one side of the rooms (like the corridor in some
compartment trains). Sometimes there is one room off to the other
side (where there is no stairwell running up the building).

Barbara Need
UChicago