Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 January 28

= January 28 =

Did Catholic nuns bind their breasts?
See Talk:Breast_binding It seems like something that should be easy to verify if true, but I can't reconcile the lack of solid source with the mention in the first source I linked at Talk:Breast binding. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 04:45, 28 January 2019 (UTC)


 * These sources may be helpful: Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia and Cultural Encyclopedia of the BreastTamanoeconomico (talk) 04:36, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

What are the most popular house plot dimensions of suburban density in different parts of the US?
Some plot dimensions must show up often in some parts of the world right? Like most of the non-13 colonies is uniformly divided into 1320x1320 foot squares (4 of those being a common farm size). This might keep a list of common plot sizes in that area from being unmanageably large. Do other young countries have common suburban plot sizes? Maybe Australia, Canada or Argentina? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:09, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I found this by doing this Google search. By carefully choosing your search terms, you can often answer your own questions, and don't have to involve anyone else in them.  -- Jayron 32 21:07, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I searched for median house lot size before asking and found out it should be in the ballpark of 10,000 square feet but that does not tell what the common x times y's are (though your source holding at 10,000 sq ft for first 4 years then a decline suggests 100x100 might be one of the more common ones) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:57, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
 * For Australia and New Zealand, see Chain (unit) and scroll to the Australia and NZ section. The chain definitely laid out housing subdivisions in farmland and scrub as cities expanded in NZ. Even today, many of the older suburbs in Auckland still have street frontages of one chain and are on the iconic "quarter acre" sections (plots). Akld guy (talk) 21:59, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Sagittarian Milky Way, quarter-quarter sections are way too large for suburbia; at that density, you'd only have sixteen households per square mile, and given today's average household size, that might be 50 people per square mile, or 1800 per survey township. That's quite ordinary density for eastern-US farm country, not suburbia, where an area of the same size is likely to have tens of thousands of people.  Nyttend (talk) 02:06, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
 * But there's only so many ways to cut a quarter quarter section into lots sized in round numbers or convenient fractions of one of the numerous Imperial/olde surveying units and still have street access for all and reasonable street widths. If different municipalities pick from these almost at random that's still a lot of ways to divide it though. Especially since streets vary in width and separation in different places. Jayron's source seems to suggest 100x100 might be common though. Are there others? Maybe 100x66 or quarter acre squares or full acres (~209x209) or 72x100 or.. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:53, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
 * 66x100 could be 5 blocks each 19 houses long and 2 wide and 64 and 66 foot streets. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:56, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
 * One thing to remember is that US suburban planning in the 20th and 21st century does not favor the Grid plan system of laying out development, you really don't see any development newer than WWII laid out that way (if you do, it is from a New Urbanist-designed development, and those are niche and not at all common). Most modern American suburbs are laid out according to the Street hierarchy system, which features lots of traffic calming techniques involving seemingly random, curving streets with lots of irregular shapes and cul de sacs and the like.  Lot size, and especially lot shape, is highly variable even within neighborhoods.  The difference also has little to do with physical geography.  Places San Francisco are hilly and irregular in geography, and yet have very regular grids (being laid out in prior to WWII) while places like Fairfax County, Virginia, mostly flat and feature no recognizable grid systems, instead featuring suburban sprawl-type neighborhoods, because these places were rural well into the 1970s, and have only seen explosive growth since then.  -- Jayron 32 13:35, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Long Island must give the wrong idea of the amount of straight stretches of houses in suburbs then. Some of it's grid or at least haphazard hodgepodges of orthogonal straight streets (even very post-WW2 subdivisions over 50 miles from Manhattan can have straight streets (I saw a massive block a full mile long divided into ~1 acre lots)). The very first postwar suburb (Levittown, Long Island) already had traffic calming though. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:58, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Well, it isn't like magically, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and every developer started laying out curvy streets and cul de sacs that day. But the general idea is that the post-war housing boom created a population distribution built around the car and single-use zoning, as opposed to old urban models, where neighborhoods were mixed use and built to be walked with lots of public transportation designes.  Of course, for some years there's going to be transitional years when designs gradually changed, but most development in the past 50-years in the U.S. has been of the street heirarchy system.  I currently live in a metro area undergoing a population boom with TONS of new construction, and developers still follow the "neighborhood with curvy streets and lots of cul de sacs feeding a few wide boulevards" model that has been the standard in the U.S. for a very, very long time.  Notably about Long Island, it's biggest population boom would have been in the early years of the suburban transition, when old models of grid-layouts were still prevalent.  Compare Huntington Station, New York (to pick a random Long Island town) where the population boom hit mostly between WWII and 1970, and thus developers were just starting to adopt new models of growth.  Since the mid 1970s, there has not been a housing demand in Huntington, so you aren't going to see many large new tracts developed since then.  You can see the transition.  See Here, in Huntington Station, if you look on the east-central part of town: Straight streets, regular grid.  Google Street View confirms lots of identical retangular lots, 1930s - 1950s architecture.  If you look at the northwest corner, however, between Railroad Street and Oakwood Road, you get a more modern layout: cul de sac design, limited entrances and exits to neighborhood, and the architecture is more 1970s and 1980s.  You don't see as much of the latter in Long Island because Long Island has been basically stagnant from a growth point of view since about 1975 or so.  If you compare that to a place which has had a more recent population boom, like say Holly Springs, North Carolina, where the major growth has been the last 20 years or so, see here, there's no recognizable grid at all.  Huntington Station and Holly Springs are of comparable population and area, but they are built on very different models.  Any major development in the U.S. in the past 50 years is going to look much more like Holly Springs than Huntington Station.  -- Jayron 32 16:15, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I would not expect any particular size of lot to be especially common. Although farm lots were laid out in a regular manner as described, the specifics of subdividing them into residential lots would surely be chosen by the company doing the subdividing.  In particular, they would create larger lots if they wanted to build large, expensive houses on them, smaller lots to build a larger number of cheaper houses.  In addition, since grid plans for the street layout have become less popular, the curves and intersections of the streets would lead to many of the lots having different shapes. --76.69.46.228 (talk) 06:01, 29 January 2019 (UTC)