Monopoly Houses in Evanston, #2

A few months back I posted about some mid-century Evanston homes on Crawford designed to evoke the traditional housing form (a box with a gable roof) while giving a nod to popular mid-century design.  So in keeping with that investigation here's another grouping of minimal traditional homes on Main and Dewey.



From the 1950 Sanborn Map

My first thought was that these homes represented an early planned development, which would have allowed them to be arranged around a single parcel of land.  But in fact they're all located on individual lots.  The central houses have been pushed back to provide large front yards, while the houses at the ends are rotated and moved forward to create a sort of communal courtyard. One front fence would pretty much spoil the effect, but perhaps there are agreements in place to avoid this. There are two distinct groupings, but for clarity I only drew the one on the east.

The Cook County Assessor estimates the construction date as 1952 for all of these homes, but I found their footprints in the 1950 Sanborn Map of Evanston.  No insult to the assessor, but I'm going to go with the Sanborn Map.  Upon construction all of these homes were nearly identitical, but they've been altered and enlarged differently over time.  Still, even the largest is only around 1,100 sq.ft.