Why Every Old Berkshire House Used to Have Awnings on the Windows

Ever notice how old photos of Pittsfield and other Berkshire towns are full of houses with striped awnings hanging over every window? It wasn't just a style choice from a hundred years ago, they were doing real work. I have always wondered what this was about.

Before air conditioning, awnings were one of the best tools people had for keeping a house cool. Awnings showed up over nearly every window of buildings back then, from small houses to places as big as the White House.

They were built to block the high summer sun from pouring into a window and heating up a room. Because the sun sits lower in the sky during winter, a well-placed awning would still let that light in when people wanted the warmth. It was a passive heating and cooling system built right into the house, decades before anyone had a thermostat to fiddle with. -artsandcraftshomes.com

Awnings really took off in American homes in the 1800s as industrialization made materials like canvas and iron pipe cheap and easy to get. They also protected furniture, rugs, and wallpaper from fading in the sun, and they gave houses a little extra style.

You can still see evidence of this around Berkshire County if you look at old postcards and photos of North Street in Pittsfield (especially on the Berkshire Antheneum facebook page), or homes in places like Lenox and Stockbridge from that same era.

Once air conditioning became more common in the mid-1900s, most of those awnings came down and never went back up!