Photo post: Wartime housing tract

[weofodthignen]

I mentioned in a previous post that there's a tract of houses in the neighborhood that were put up in the early 1940s and may therefore just possibly be the first use of the "California method" that was widely applied after the war: it was an assembly line, with a sawmill on-site and the same components for a group of houses left at each so that a team could go from one to the next and do the same stage of work that day. They must have been war workers' housing, and are larger than many from the first flush of post-war tracts: they all seem to have been built with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. Anyway, I thought I'd document them before any more get replaced by multiple-unit dwellings or mini-mansions.

First, houses like this 1920 one may have served as a model:




because there are houses in the tract like this (1942):




But most, including some at one end that were built in 1943, seem to have been built looking like this:




and in a few cases like this (except for the shutters):




Here's what they look like after some updates:














Then there are various levels of personalization, including mainly to the yard:








various styling changes:








with this being extreme




and this taking the grand prize; amazingly, still listed as a 1943 house.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Rather better than Britain's pre-fab housing solution... also looks like they survived better too.

[weofodthignen]

Yes, despite all the cracks about the suburban tracts, the people who first moved into them mostly loved them, and the big tracts almost all had parks and schools designed in, so the majority have been resold to people who are also happy to live in them and take care of them. They also tended to get bigger from the 40s through the 50s as the builders competed for increasingly well off and choosy buyers; many late tracts have houses done up in a variety of styles and some with more bedrooms than the rest. Here the big difference is that although it's a very early tract, the area has become wealthy in recent decades, so some of these have been expanded back and/or gutted and transformed inside in ways you can't really see from the street, like the one that's for sale that I had a picture of last week.

But the real comparison should be to the huge semi-detached developments in the London suburbs, especially for these to the pre-First World War ones. And there they don't come off so well: the vast majority of houses in the US are lightweight timber frames, so the US suburban tract houses are really overgrown huts, while even the shoddiest UK semi-detacheds, the ones where they forgot a damp course, were brick except for the bay windows. So I don't know how long these houses were intended to last, and the builders might be surprised how well they've worn, while some of the postwar tracts were slapped up pretty carelessly and probably no one intended them to last more than 50 years. Then of course you have the Eichlers; we have several developments of those and I photographed one a few years back, but the photos don't look like much because an important part of the style is the house is closed off from the street.

[siliconshaman]

Not all of them were brick built

There was pre-cast concrete, corrugated iron, waffle board [like corrugated cardboard crossed with plaster board or sheet rock] and whole slew of other methods. Some of which fared better than others. [the waffle-board dissolved slowing in rainy weather, sheet iron even galvanised, slowly rusted.]

The defining feature is that they were all small. Which was meant to save on building materials apparently..

[weofodthignen]

Yes, pretty bad after the war, that looks awful and clearly wasn't intended to last. And then they warehoused people in tower blocks. And destroyed what was left of the high streets in the name of progress. I don't think Americans have any idea of how the UK and Europe were clobbered by wartime bombing or what a pig's ear the planners made of the rebuilding in the UK; the only comparable cock-up here, I think, is the intentional levelling of black neighbourhoods to put through the freeways, followed by wholesale replacement of what remained by public housing apartment projects, some of them grim and leading Americans to associate brick with prison-like housing. But post-war suburban tracts were the normative experience for a huge number of white Americans, so many of them just don't know about that, while my impression is that most Brits have grown up loathing what the planners built.

On the other hand, I have the impression the London interwar semi-detacheds were unique to London and that elsewhere the post-First World War housing shortage never got fixed, one of the causes of the drain of people to London. Whereas for a while in the 1960s we lived in a nice brick house on a suburban slum-clearance estate in what's now a notorious area of Greater Manchester. The first of the tower blocks was going up at the end of our garden when my dad had to bring us back to London for work, but we were 2 streets away from a play park and I walked to my first school, which had those coloured panels on the front and a lot of grass and hawthorne hedges as well as the playground. Beyond it was a little shopping parade including a branch library where I got my first card. I've found the house and the school on Google Street View but can't find the shops where the library was. I think that was very well done at the time, and although I ought to investigate exactly how bad those slums were because I've found that in London as in the US, the planners often destroyed well functioning communities and dumped people out where they couldn't get to their jobs or share childcare as they had; but I remember a couple of pupils in my intake class who were obviously very poor.

And there is almost no equivalent in the US to the council houses in the UK. Too socialistic ... The closest I've found is that some suburbs have maisonettes and 4-plexes that appear to be "social housing". I've avoided photographing those in the past for the privacy of those living in them, but may put up a pic if I can get one where you can't even see the building number (Photoshop is way beyond me, so I try hard to avoid showing licence plates.)