Doorwall (Off-Topic)

by Funkmon , Saturday, October 17, 2015, 05:12 (3332 days ago)

A few people here know I say "doorwall" for what people call a sliding glass door. This is currently a very good indicator of someone from Detroit. It's now extremely specific to the metro Detroit area.

I had no idea until raiding and saying the word that it was not the universal term, and I was promptly made fun of for it. I then tried to enlist Squid and ProbablyLast in my defense, but they also haven't heard of it, which is dumb since they both live stupid close. I visited my cousin and said "hey, did you know that doorwall is a regionalism?" He had never heard of it. My friend Jon was there and had never heard of it. I considered that I had gone crazy.

I hadn't though. Here's something from The Oakland Press a few years back.

BROWNSTOWN TWP. -- A woman baking Christmas cookies Monday evening was shocked by an intruder who broke in and grabbed her purse.

James Slater, the township's director of public safety, said the 65-year-old woman made a frantic 911 call to police at about 6:45 p.m. after a man shattered the doorwall of her condo on South Quail Ridge Drive, off Racho between Pennsylvania and Sibley roads.

I then went on a mission.

I spent hours in a university library trying to find its first appearance in print how I would use it. The earliest I can find is from the mid 1950s in a journal of architecture describing the "sliding glass doors" that don't yet have a name. They mentioned a California company called Steelbilt calls them "doorwalls" and they're still trying to classify them.

Wallside Windows, a major window company in southeastern Michigan also uses the term doorwall. Their local competitors use the term as well, but in such a manner as to suggest it's not a real term for the "sliding glass door." This leads me to believe that Wallside took the doorwall name which was common in the 1950s, and used it for their glass doors.

And here's a Wallside instructional video using the word.

Wallside has such a presence in the local area (I bet everyone knows their commercials around here), I would not be surprised if the term doorwall came from antonomasia with Wallside's marketing term.

I could probably come up with something definitive if the university didn't have a huge gap in searchable archived Detroit Free Press articles, but between the 1920s and the 1990s, there's nothing. My city library also doesn't have it. Hence, between 1958 and 1989, I have no reference of the use of "doorwall" to mean sliding glass door in news or periodicals. Somehow, it jumped from California-only references to Michigan only references in that time.

In fact, by the late eighties, it was definitively part of the Metro Detroit lexicon. I read an article from an Oakland County business magazine that described something "as large as a doorwall." So, by then, we knew it so well that it was a common reference point.

I did look into it a bit more in book searches.

We have 1956 references to doorwalls from Steelbilt, and then it jumps 20 years to 1976 when insulated doorwalls start appearing in, you guessed it, Suburban Detroit's Home Hunter's Guide. Wallside Windows started doing windows in the 1970s. There's a reference to a company in the 60s who made something for mobile homes, but I don't think it's relevant.

I also reached out to architecture professors at my university and Oakland University and Anne Curzan at University of Michigan. Professor Curzan is usually willing to help me in these weird searches of mine, but she just suggested I go and search what I already searched, linked to a few things I already found, and she had no special information for me. I got one response back from an architecture professor saying basically that he had no idea the history of the term. (edit: I did also call Wallside and left a message with some executive I was told would know the history. He did not call me back)

After this long search with few results (though definitely not my longest or most fruitless, an award I have to give to my 'research' into the history of Troia, Italy), I decided to call it off, and pull an explanation out of my ass.

So, I have a hypothesis. Doorwall was a term invented by Steelbilt, which soon went out of business. It was an unpopular, but still used, term through till the 1970s (though I can find no record of this), when Wallside used it for their sliding glass doors. From day one, Wallside advertised heavily on TV (still do, too; I was watching Last Man Standing tonight and saw 3 ads for them), and they probably advertised their doorwalls, introducing them to the Metro Detroit lexicon. Soon, we were using the term as if it had always been there.

Hence, I am not crazy. It IS a real word.