Portland’s Most Popular Houses: Side-Hall and the I House: How Traditional Vernacular Houses Adapted to a Crowded City
This illustrated talk presents Portland’s late 19th and early 20th-century housing by focusing on two of its most popular houses—the Side-Hall and the I-House. By 1900, both house types had achieved densities of 60 to 80% of all dwellings in most neighborhoods. They also provided flexible accommodation for all classes of the city’s population—upper, middle, and working classes—a rare occurrence for single-house types.
Hear Professor Thomas Hubka, author of Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn, describe how Portland builders creatively adapted Maine’s traditional types of rural houses to an increasingly dense and crowded urban environment. Hubka traces the continuous development of these houses as they merged into modern duplexes and Three-Deckers in the early 20th century.
Hubka’s research focuses on the development of the city’s most popular types of houses that have rarely received detailed analysis or scholarly investigation and interprets the complex reasons for their extraordinary longevity and popularity.
