The doors of our neighborhood

Come on a walk with us

Our neighborhood is quite small. At least, what we consider to be our neighborhood. It’s not like we’re living at the end of a cul de sac or a development here. How do you know where a neighborhood ends and begins? This, according to us (including Josie!) is our neighborhood.

The neighborhood is circled in blue. The blue pin is our home. To give you an idea of scale, Rua do Passadiço is .25 miles / .4 km long.

It is not a fancy part of the city, by any means. It feels older and less gentrified.¹ We thought that sharing some pictures of the doors in this small area would give you an idea of the part of the city that we’ve landed in.

We will start with the door to our building. They kept the exterior walls and gutted the interior. Naturally, they did not rebuild the front door to match the existing,² and so we have this boringly new treasure.

A couple of features to point out here. The post on the right is one of the many metal posts in our neighborhood that prevent cars from parking. There are a few places where you can park, but not many. It’s not a car-friendly area of the city. The metal plate on the wall to the right is the keypad to get in and out of the building. The 7 beeps it makes as you enter your code drive Josie up the wall. The 11? That’s exactly where all building numbers go- the center of the top. The vent above the door is very common in the area. You’ll also see many doors with vents in them.

Ah, but it has an unusual feature that the whole building enjoys: noise! Many appeals to the builder have resulted in this much quieter affair. People in units from the bottom floor to the top report being able to be serenaded by the Slamming Door.

How loud you ask? Worth waiting til the end of this audio clip:

How many such new doors does this neighborhood boast? About 10% would be our guess, although we’ve not seen any with something like this design.

Also, there’s a cute guy who just celebrated his 26th Anniversary in front. He’s not a camera hog, far from it, but he gamely agreed to help show you the size variation of doors in the neighborhood. - this paragraph written by Amy

Thanks to Josie for pausing a moment on her walk to show you the variety of door sizes here.

Those of you who live in New England know that if you have a barn, you paint it one color only: Barn Red.³

Well, there’s a similar thing here with doors. What color do you paint your front door? Why forest green, of course.⁴

A look at the slant of cobblestone sidewalk against the building gives you a hint of the pitch of the road here. The vent on this door may be Amy’s favorite.

We’re pretty jealous of these folks with the blue door. They have a mail slot! In our case the mail carrier rings our bell. If we answer, we get mail!

Doors open directly onto the sidewalk, which is often just barely wide enough for a person. We’re glad a few people go ahead and use the space for plants. This is also home to one of the black and white cats that torment Josie, and the dog who vigorously defends the region from dogs coming down the hill, but doesn’t worry about those coming up the hill.

The long street at the bottom of the hill that makes up our neighborhood is a lively commercial area. And home to the church whose bell we enjoy.

Igreja de São José dos Carpinteiros. The church steps are very high, and blocked a gate. When the gate is open (at noon every day, plus Sundays), the doors are open as well. Thus you have the photo taken from street level.

Also from this street, one of the many frutarias.

Just a sampling of the rest of the many doors we enjoy on our walks.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Amy & Scott

1. Our Portuguese is not even close to the point where we can start digging into things like the age of the neighborhood, the types of people who lived here. You know, all the fun stuff.

2. Our so we assume. They are hard to reach and not very interested in stuff like the history of the building.

3. Why?, you ask. In the 1700s farmers got tired of the elements wearing on their barn. Who wants to keep repairing a barn? So they figured out the cheapest paint they could (farmers are not impressed by fancy). Milk plus lime, and maybe a bit of clay gives you milk paint. Who knew, huh? Turns out, though, that adding a pigment to paint makes it more protective. The cheapest pigment (there’s that farmer cheap again) is iron oxide, so they used that. That gives you the nice, deep red with a bit of brown color. Once pain became easier to get, everyone was so used to barns in barn red, Farmer Dan would walk into his paint store and say, “Ayup, I’m a gonna paint my barn.” And Paint Seller Joe would hand over the barn red.

4. No, we don’t have great information on WHY green doors. We need more Portuguese language classes to figure that out! A slightly educated guess suggests that aged copper flakes (which would be cheap) mixed with lamp black (which is, as its name suggests, made from soot), and you’ll likely end up with the doors here.