7405-7427 N. Wolcott, Defense Housing, 1942

On the corner of Wolcott and Fargo there's a collection of eight identitical duplexes arranged around two common courts. The simple massing and limited detailing suggests public housing.  That's not far from the mark, but the story is a bit more complex.

Even though the United States didn't enter WWII until 1941, the writing was on the wall much earlier.  As the country prepared to shift into full-scale wartime production, a huge deficit in housing needed to be addressed.

Let's say you're a government and need to build some housing ASAP or risk losing the biggest war in all of human history.  Here are a few methods you might consider:

1. Buy land and build permanent homes. Or entire neighborhoods.  Or entire cities.
2. Build temporary homes.
3. Prioritize materials for war-related private projects.
4. Provide financial incentives for property owners to create additional units in existing buildings. 

In the end the Federal government did all of these things and more.  Numerous agencies were created to administer these programs, some with Congressional authorization and some without.  It wasn't unusual for the administration of one program to be folded into another, based on funding and legislation.  There must be historians who specialize in Federal housing policy, but I don't envy them. 

The Office of Production Manangement (OPM) was responsible for regulating building materials.  If a project was important to the war effort, it would receive a priority rating.  If it didn't have a priority rating it probably wouldn't get built.  Chicago was one of 275 "defense areas" identified as appropriate for the development of war housing. 

The most important restriction placed on defense housing was a $6,000 price cap per unit.  Chicago's City Council immediately protested this limitation, arguing that the higher cost of land in Chicago would send most of these projects to the suburbs.  The suburbs received their share of defense housing, but many projects did eventually locate in the city, particularly near the city limits where cheap undeveloped land could be found.

Looking East from N. Wolcott.  Behind the trees are the El and Metra embankments.

The cap forced some Chicago builders to vary from the small detached single family residences commonly built as defense housing.  Instead, developers looked for ways to combine units into larger buildings on several lots, allowing them to bring down costs through an economy of scale.  I haven't yet confirmed this, but I suspect the development regulations of Chicago were relaxed at this time to allow greater flexiblity in the placement of multi-unit buildings.  This permitted projects to share common spaces while resulting in a greater overall density.  This treatment would become common with the introduction of planned developments in Chicago's 1957 zoning ordinance, but it must have been unusual in the 1940s. The underlying lot configuration of this area would have allowed six individual buildings with frontages on Wolcott.  Instead there are eight buildings, four of which have no frontage at all. 

Defense Homes for West Rogers Park
(Chicago Tribune, 4/19/1942)

Given the strict cost limits, the design of the buildings is worth noting.  You can't get much simpler than a rectangular box with a pitched roof.  They have common brick walls with simple arched limestone entrances.  Any architectural detail is the result of projecting brick string courses of various designs.  It looks to me like a scaled-down version of  the Art Moderne style.

The architect for this project was Carl J. Kastrup, who had won prizes for his designs of low-cost suburban housing prior to the war.  In 1942 his firm joined four others to collectively address the challenges of designing and administering defense-related work.

I feel like there's much more to be written about the development of defense housing in Chicago.  In particular, it seems that the designs developed under strict economic and administrative pressure had an enormous influence on the look of Chicago in the post-war period.  But this will have to wait for some additional research.

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. 

Monopoly Houses in Evanston

I don't usually write about the suburbs.  Which is odd, since I find myself there so frequently.  Anyway, this row of houses is near the two major institutions of our life as parents- Felix and Theo's pediatrician and the drive-through Starbucks at Central and Crawford.  There are others, but sadly these two remain constant.


2200 block of Crawford, Evanston, IL

These houses always catch my eye.  There are at least a dozen of them concentrated in this area, built in 1952 and 1953 according to the Cook County Assessor.  The gable form is about the most traditional residential shape possible, but there are some subtle modernist touches.  There's no concern with creating a symmetrical facade.  Instead the architect has located small windows higher where privacy was desirable and opened up the front of the homes with floor to ceiling windows for the primary family spaces. 

Interestingly, these homes have become more traditional-looking over time.  Many of the original undivided windows have been replaced with multi-pane colonial-type windows.  The one on the far right was renovated into a half-timbered Tudor Revival knockoff. 


View of the back of the houses, looking West. Note the various rear additions.

Even though these homes are similar in regard to massing there are significant additions at the back.  The shape of these buildings lend themselves to the traditional ways to add space, such as dormers, porches, and wing additions.  The second house from the right even doubled in size, but it's difficult to see that from Crawford.

The arrangement of the homes is a standard technique of mid-century developers.  Find a profitable design, then flip or rotate the plans until there's an impression of variety.  It doesn't fool anybody, but it still often succeeds in creating a subdivision with an interesting use of space.