The yellow building set back from the east side of Whidden Place was built in phases starting around 1890 as a stable for a nineteenth-century house which once stood on Jefferson Street. The red garage standing on the west side of Whidden Place was built about 1920 as a garage for Penhallow house which faces outward onto Washington Street. Together, their stories show us the degree to which transportation shapes cities and urban life.

The stable represents the end of a long tradition of travel by foot, horseback and by horse-drawn vehicles. Though part of a sprawling Atlantic economy, most of Portsmouth's residents found their daily needs within walking distance from the 1600s through the 1800s. For distance travel they favored smooth water-borne travel, especially in the early period. These patterns contributed to the formation of an extremely compact waterfront urban core. By the end of the colonial period this core extended back from the river only six blocks to Middle Street where the landscape abruptly opened to country side with scattered farmhouses. Inland travel in the first two centuries was by foot, horseback, or long coach rides on rugged roads.

The 1800s brought several consecutive changes in transportation, each with its impact on the shape of cities. At the opening of the century new commercial turnpikes and toll bridges, improved carriage design, and the growth of inland towns encouraged vehicular travel. In the mid 1800s the railroad linked many northeastern cities, reaching Portsmouth in the 1840s. For distance travel the railroad was faster and smoother but less flexible than horse-drawn vehicles. Steam factories and laborers' houses sprang up along the tracks, bringing Portsmouth's West End into existence. Meanwhile, an elite taste for fashionable suburbs of widely-spaced homes emerged by the year 1800. At first limited to walking distance, these later expanded along trolley lines, a Portsmouth institution from 1898 to 1926.

Throughout the first centuries horses and iron-tired vehicles made cities noisy, dusty, redolent of manure and buzzing with flies. Urban traffic included hay and manure carts. Urbanites who couldn't afford a horse, or needed one only occasionally could rent from downtown livery stables.

In the 1920s the automobile and buses brought an abrupt end to trolleys and horse-drawn vehicles alike and later drove passenger rail service toward extinction. The garage on Whidden Place, built around 1920, is a reminder of the dawning of this new way of life in America. The auto transformed American life. An infrastructure of commercial gas stations, repair shops and paved roads developed. Americans travelled freely, rapidly and regularly to distances never dreamed of before. But the auto brought problems as well as convenience. Commuters needed a place to put cars while working or shopping. Ancient streets were too narrow for cars.

After World War II, the auto and Veteran's Administration loans unexpectedly combined to propel suburban sprawl. Mobile white upper and middle classes abandoned old downtown residential districts to the elderly, poor, black and unassimilated ethnic Americans and blue-collar workers. Downtown businesses procured and demolished neighboring buildings for parking. Federal interstate highways were routed through city centers.

Urban renewal was undertaken to adapt downtowns to commuter auto culture with wider streets and much parking. Portsmouth adopted urban renewal, envisioning three phases to eradicate virtually all of its waterfront residential downtown. The first was only partially realized and inadvertently set the scene for the creation of Strawbery Banke Museum. The second swept away the North End's historic buildings and scattered its predominantly Italian population. The third was abandoned by 1970 in response to grass-roots objection, re-evaluation of the wisdom of the method, and economic changes. In the last several decades peripheral growth has given rise to "edge cities" of malls, strip development and professional offices providing suburbanites with needs once found downtown. Portsmouth's downtown has carved out a new economic niche based in waterfront historic ambiance and cultural life.

Thus, while many forces shaped the city, transportation has always been one of the most powerful. This role is suggested by these two adjacent modest wood-frame buildings. Today, the Stable houses the restoration carpentry shop, and the garage houses Landscape Department storage.