Quote:
Originally Posted by thomas_zul
Wonderfull and peacefull photos! Great 
I have to ask you one stupid question: those colourfull homes were like that in the past or it is a new "thing"? Sorry if it's obvious but I don't know  |
It's not a stupid question at all.
For the most part, the answer is no. I remember going on a city tour with my mother just for the fun of it and the tour guide explained that the houses were colourful to help fishermen see the city if they were returning through fog - and my mother mumbled under her breath, "Bullshit. When I was a girl, they were all white and grey."
But, in reality, there still was a lot of colour. Many of the wealthier homes (which here basically means they have bay windows) were colourful for the time - red, blue, yellow, green, etc. but without any of the highly saturated, even neon colours we have today.
As the lower classes with flat-front homes became our middle class, they started copying the styles and preferences of the upper class. They would add elaborate wooden details to the fronts of their homes and, yes, paint them in colourful designs.
All this happened after we joined Canada in 1949. Prior to that we had extreme wealth inequality, worse even than America today, with an obscenely rich merchant class and much of the rest of the population living in a form of indebted servitude (taking out loans one year to buy the supplies they needed to work the next, then paying that off and taking out a loan for the following year, etc.).
Here are a few shots from Vintage St. John's on Facebook.
This is an upper class area in 1925, so these homes would have been colourfully painted even then:
Here is a poorer, downtown residential area in the 1960s. You can see how they've started adopting the colours and some of the accents of the upper class homes:
And here is an example from the 1980s. These towers are built where the Central Slum once stood, one of the largest and most densely-populated slums ever to have existed in the English-speaking world. You can see the poor, residential neighbourhoods that were once adjacent to the slum are still mostly white. They're colourful now, because they've only recently reached a higher standard of living:
