When I first read The Big
Sleep back in England, back in the day, I must certainly have read the
passage below, but just as certainly I must have skimmed over the term "porte-cochere." As follows:
“There was dim light behind
narrow leaded panes in the side door of the Sternwood mansion. I stopped the
Packard under the porte-cochere and emptied my pockets out on the seat. The
girl snored in the corner, her hat tilted rakishly over her nose, her hands
hanging limp in the folds of the raincoat. I got out and rang the bell. Steps
came slowly, as if from a long dreary distance. The door opened and the
straight, silvery butler looked out at me.”
(“Silvery
butler” is just stupendous, isn’t it?)
When I moved to
Los Angeles I reread the Chandler novels and I remember it was time to get serious, and so I looked up
porte-cochere. Merriam Webster offers
two definitions:
1: a passageway through a building
or screen wall designed to let vehicles pass from the street to an interior
courtyard
2: a roofed structure extending from
the entrance of a building over an adjacent driveway and sheltering those
getting in or out of vehicles.
I guess it's an American thing, and I think the latter is more common - you’ll find version at
thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of American motels. However if, as many people think, the
Sternwood Mansion is based on the Greystone Mansion (aka the Doheny
estate), then it’s more likely to be the former, though of course the
two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Here’s the porte-cochere at Greystone, through which I have walked:
I’d have thought the term was fairly rare in
British architecture although Wikipedia offers this image of the one at Nottingham station - though I'm not at all sure that anybody in England would refer to it by that name:
You know, off hand, I can’t tell you whether a porte-cochere
appears in the Bogart movie of The Big
Sleep, but anyway, here’s a picture of Martha Vickers – the snoring girl, here
fully awake, with the silvery butler in the background.
So, the reason I mention this now is because the other day I was walking in the edgelands of Beverly
Hills where, compared to the rest of LA, there isn’t so very much building and redevelopment going on. But there was one
lot where a house had been demolished and a new one was being built. And there was this sign on the fence
describing the project as a “NEW 2 STORY SFR WITH PORTE COCHERE” (SFR stands
for “single family residential” – keeps out the riff-raff).
I knew I was out of my comfort zone, and I'm also pretty sure you'd have to go a very, very long way in
England before you saw a sign like that.
