Or, why Second Empire gives you the creeps.
On an autumn walk in the 6th District of Budapest, moments before the gloaming triggered the streetlights, the charm of the 19th century boulevard turned decidedly to the creeps. The street was quiet, but not too quiet, as I was near Heroes Square and the National Museum of Hungary, the muted bustle of the city just a few blocks away. There was nothing among the cast iron gates and moribund cars hugging the curb to explain why the hairs on my arm were standing at rapt attention. Nothing, that is, but the houses. As I would later discover these handsome, stately homes were inspired by the French but turned macabre by the Americans and our great October traditions of the haunted house.
In the middle of the 19th century Paris was “an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate,” as the French social reformer Victor Considerant noted at the time. Louis Napoleon, nephew of Bonaparte, ruled France from 1849 to 1870 and directed his prefect of Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891) to rebuild swaths of medieval Paris, to aérer, unifier, et embellir Paris (to give it air and open space, to connect, beautify and unify the different parts).
Louis Napoleon, first elected president by virtue of his name, became Emperor Napoleon III following a coup d’état in 1852, thus launching the Second French Empire. Between 1853 and 1870 Haussmann tore out overcrowded tenements and the narrow streets between them in what would later be called “slum clearance” in the United States. He laid out wide boulevards complete with parks framed by tall buildings in an elegant style typified by elaborate, bracketed cornices and dormers projecting from the double-hipped roofs named for the 17th-century French architect François Mansart (1598–1666). The lower pitch of these so-called mansard roofs tended to be almost vertical and was covered with patterned, multi-colored slate tiles. The upper pitch was unseen, either flat or slightly sloping, and often trimmed with a cast iron widow’s walk.
The Second Empire style was popular the world over until the late 19th century. Those who do not know Haussmann’s Paris may otherwise be familiar with Second Empire through that classic American domestic horror setting of the haunted house: Norman Bates’s home in Psycho (1960) along with the houses in other movies like The Changeling (1980), Beetlejuice (1988), House (1986), and Hocus Pocus (1993), the television program The Addams Family (1964), and children’s Halloween decorations that often feature the familiar outlines of mansard roofs and dormers. The iron spikes of the widow’s walk on top lend themselves nicely to horror. My walk in Budapest was a personal introduction into the fear these old houses inspire.
Steven Kurutz explored the haunted house in a 2012 New York Times article, “No Rest for the Eerie.” He portrays the house as a sanctuary and an intrusion on the security of the home as the source of terror. He cited the Paranormal Activity franchise, as an example. These films don’t use blood and gore to frighten. Oren Peli, the creator of the movies, is quoted in the article as saying “the gasping [of some unseen being] confirms that any kind of evidence that something is inside your house is a very unsettling feeling.” It should be no surprise that we in the United States recognize the common law practice of the Castle Doctrine, which allows a homeowner to use deadly force on an intruder for just such a breach of the homestead.
A home invasion is scary; it is almost a cliché that after being burgled a homeowner feels “violated” and no longer safe at home. But I think there is a reason so many of these haunted houses stick with a particular architectural vernacular. The Second Empire style became synonymous with the reign of Louis Napoleon and even as he fled to England after his disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prussian Army, Second Empire houses were still gaining popularity in the United States. Then came a succession of disasters for these old homes: the Panic (what we now call a depression) of 1893 led to nearly 20% unemployment, with another panic in 1907, then World War I stressed the economy, and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 limited immigration (big houses needed lots of staff). Worst of all, tastes changed in response to these forces and the small craftsman bungalow became America’s preferred style in the early 20th century, roughly from 1905 to 1930.
By the time Wall Street crashed in 1929 the U.S.’s Second Empire homes (along with other Victorians) were at or nearing their 50th birthdays and America was broke. These are precious, intricate, wooden buildings that require tremendous upkeep and as the 1930s and the Great Depression wore on, and then as the U.S. entered, fought, and won World War II, the old houses fell into terrible disrepair. After the war we wanted new stuff. While the Germans and Japanese rebuilt their war-torn cities, the United States went in a different direction.
One of the great ironies of American life is that the automobile-oriented—and usually automobile-dependent—land use we call the suburbs was created by public transportation. In 1888 Frank J. Sprague invented the first commercially viable electric-powered urban railway car in Richmond, Virginia. Early urban rail used horses for power or were pulled by underground cables as in San Francisco’s famous trolleys, but animals were expensive and often mistreated in the eyes of the public and cable car lines were difficult to expand and repair. Lines for Sprague’s streetcars, however, were relatively inexpensive to build and operate. In just a few years land developers and utility companies were operating electric streetcar lines in cities large and small from Tampa (first operated in 1892), to Texarkana, AR (1885), Clinton, IA (1890), Battle Creek, MI (1887) to Cincinnati, OH (1889), all the way to Los Angeles (1887) and Medford, OR (1914). By 1900 there were 30,000 streetcars in service in the United States. This golden age of transit lasted from 1890 to 1920.
Transportation systems consist of three components: the vehicle, the right-of-way, and the terminal capacity. For the “tractions trusts,” as the owners of the trolleys were known, those elements were streetcars, tracks, and car barns, and the owners of these rail systems were on the hook for the capital costs of all three plus operating expenses. Federal charters locked transit fares at a nickel and 30 years of inflation had eroded the ability of the traction trusts to fund their networks of rails and cars. World War I placed demands on steel and labor right as most of these systems were turning 25 and needed repairs and new vehicles.
By the 1920s, however, streetcars were already an afterthought. Ford started rolling automobiles that middle-class families could afford off production lines at the Highland Park assembly plant in 1913. Parking minimum requirements were first instituted in 1923 in Columbus, Ohio, and became common in the 1940s and 50s. And governments at all levels “picked a winner” as we say now and built roads on the public dime. Detroit had plans for the first expressways as early as 1923, but the section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Carlisle to Irwin opened in 1940 as the first limited access highway. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 would create the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways that cemented the automobile as the primary means of transportation in the United States and the suburbs the preferred destination.
The great advantage of the automobile was that the three components of the system were widely shared: private citizens bought the vehicles, the governments (local, state, federal) built rights-of-way (roads, bridges, and highways), and the terminal capacity—parking—was diffused throughout the economy: driveways, parking lots at retail shopping, business parks, and apartment complexes, on-street parking, and parking decks. Huge swaths of American downtowns, including many old homes, were demolished for the needs of America’s drivers to park. The highways themselves bisected city centers and first-ring suburbs, cutting residents on one side of the new interstate off from the other as surely as a tourniquet keeps blood from the heart.
In many cases interstate construction was used for destroying neighborhoods when the residents were black, a practice known as slum clearance, as noted above. Examples abound but the experience of the Paradise Valley community of Detroit has available photographic evidence. The two photos below show a before and after comparison of the I-395 construction; note the red boxes showing a house that is visible in both images.
In another notorious example in South Carolina, the Columbia black community organized to keep the planned Bull Street Expressway from cutting through an African-American neighborhood, trying to direct the highway department to an alternate, empty piece of land available nearby. They failed, the homes were destroyed, the Colonial Heights neighborhood was divided, and the highway was eventually named for Isaiah DeQuincey Newman who was (wait for it…) a civil rights leader. Amid the abandonment of downtowns and the construction of automobile infrastructure the old Victorians that remained were often divided into cheap apartments or simply left to rot.
While the immediate post-war years were hard on Italianate, Gothic, Queen Anne and other gingerbread houses, the Second Empire style had a unique problem: its origins were decidedly urban. Paris is a Second Empire city. Virginia Savage McAlester in her compendium A Field Guide to American Houses notes, “Second Empire styling, along with the related Italianate style, dominated urban housing in the decades between 1860 and 1880. The mansard roof was particularly adapted to town houses, for it provided an upper floor behind the steep roof line and thus made the structure appear less massive than most other styles with comparable interior space.”
Like the members of a popular clique in high school, Second Empire buildings are powerful in groups but seem exposed when alone. As the author John Linley wrote in The Georgia Catalog, “In rural settings the elegantly fashionable [Second Empire] architecture was likely to seem out of place, like an overdressed lady on a picnic.” It is no surprise then that the ailing Second Empire house sitting awkwardly by itself became Hollywood’s ideal house of horror.
Edward Hopper—perhaps best known for his painting of lonely diners in a city cafe in Nighthawks (1942)—may have single-handedly set the pattern with his isolated House by the Railroad from 1925, seen at the top of this essay. McAlester, author of the Field Guide, observed that 30% of Second Empire houses have a tower like the subject of the painting, a real house in Haverstraw, NY, as well as Norman Bates’ home in Psycho. Hopper’s painting was the first work acquired, in 1930, for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and perhaps Alfred Hitchcock saw it there. Doing publicity for his upcoming film, the famous director told the New York Post in 1960, “[I]t may interest art lovers to know that the old house in ‘Psycho’ was inspired solely by Edward Hopper’s painting of the house by the railroad.”
Things have changed and as the saying goes, the kids are alright. The relics that survived the 1960s and 70s found their champions in This Old House on PBS (season 44 airing now in October 2022), and the show’s partner magazine of the same name. Old House Journal was there to help too, along with niche publications like Victorian Journal and American Bungalow (yours truly is a contributor). Renovators were supplied by Van Dyke’s Restorers starting in 1984. That house from the Hopper’s painting? Fully restored. I spent 8 years rebuilding an 1890 farmhouse Victorian in Thomasville, Georgia, so I have the bug. Old houses are so popular now that The Atlantic must now play the scold. A recent article is headlined “Stop Fetishizing Old Homes.”
About the only place one can still find a truly creepy Second Empire house is in an amusement park, completing the circle that began with Napoleon and Haussmann in 19th century Paris. Phantom Manor was designed in what was the urban, French Second Empire style but expressed as a dilapidated single-family American home in the French iteration of an American theme-park chain. That’s right: The Disney Haunted Mansions in both Orlando and Anaheim are not Second Empire but the one in Disneyland Paris is.
