Norwalk's Prominent Porte-Cocheres

"Porte-cochere" is an elegant name for an architectural feature of some of Norwalk's most prominent buildings. It's "a porch large enough for wheeled vehicles to pass through," according to The Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. James Stevens Curl's Dictionary of Architecture calls this an "erroneous term", preferring to define it as just a "doorway to a house or court, often very grand, large enough to permit wheeled vehicles to enter from the street."

Whatever the details of the definition, Norwalk has a wide variety of them, and anyone who has gone through the elaborate main entrance of the or the more utilitarian main entrance to l has used them. At Lockwood-Mathews and at the the stone porte-cocheres make the entrance look grander. The porte-cochere in wood at the Jesup-Godillot house at 60 Jesup Road in Westport seems to do the same. Some large private homes still use them: A two-story porte-cochere helps lend an air of stateliness to a house on Fox Run Road. A desire to impress may be part of the purpose of the simple but enormous porte-cochere at the on Connecticut Avenue.

At Norwalk and Greenwich hospitals, they protect patients from the elements, as they do at some nursing homes. Even a local house of worship, the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses at 126 Newtown Ave., has one, although it doesn't seem to be there to impress anybody -- perhaps it's just a form of Christian charity for bad-weather days.