The outside steps of row hours became a distinctive feature of New York City street life only in the nineteenth century, although the stoop was introduced long before by the Dutch (the word means "small platform" or "staircase").
"The high entrance steps," Mario Maffi wrote in New York City: An Outsider's Inside View, "almost give the old New York houses the appearance of small castles." He suggests that they were inspired by Dutch buildings, elevated to evade North Sea floods and flush with the street to compensate for space consumed by canals in cities like Amsterdam.
The stoop was a fixture in Elmer Rice's play Street Scene, was depicted in The Godfather; Part Il, and even survived into television series from Sesame Street to The Wire ("stoop kids" in Baltimore were supervised by their parents, while "corner kids" were not).
Most town houses in the city were originally built with stoops. They led up to the family's private living quarters, which included the parlor and dining room, with the kitchen and service areas accessible from an entrance at street level or below, in what became known as the "English basement" plan. In the twentieth century, many of the graceful and imposing staircases anchoring brownstones were removed as owners divided grand single-family homes into rental apartments.
"The row house with stoop prevailed in New York until the turn of this century, when the concept of living in multiple dwellings began to gain wide acceptance," says Regina M. Kellerman, a historic preservationist.
Now many owners who lost their stoops want them back. "If you can afford to buy a single-family row house now in Manhattan," said Andrew S. Dolkart, director of Columbia University's historic preservation program, "you can usually afford to put the stoop back."
The stoop figured prominently in Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a vital component of energizing street life- "the ballet of the good city sidewalk"-which, in turn, was invigorated by it. "The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window on an empty street," Jacobs wrote (which is why the old popular song The Sidewalks of New York" was the city's unofficial anthem for decades).
Stoops contributed to a culture of gatherings and games (remember stoopball?) and served as ad hoe community centers in many neighborhoods where New Yorkers were, as one reader recalled, "sitting out in the evening talking with neighbors, watching their kids play, taking relief from the heat." Those practices have revived in Brownstone Brooklyn and similar neighborhoods.
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