Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
^^OK, so it wasn't really "a house a day", but parts of many houses to average a house a day. That makes sense. Still, those steel worker houses went up pretty fast. They're not the "custom" homes of old that people on this forum like to wax rhapsodic about.
Yeah, built at a rate of one house per day. 600 houses in 600 days would be a rate of 1 per day. At any period you'd probably 100 or so homes in some phase of construction. Maybe not as many back then, labor probably wasn't as specialized as it is today. My parents neighborhood was one that was still actually built by a builder/developer. Most of the new homes now the developers nowadays (Meritage, KB Homes, Pulte) will bring in a general contractor for a subdivision which is how they're able to build so fast. Like D.R. Horton does something like 70 homes a day now, probably around 100 during the boom. Same thing but even greater scale. My parents neighborhood the builder never had multiple developments going on at once like they do.
What are you talking about? What proof do you have for cops stopping the kids for being alone? and also, why do you assume the kids are usually alone?
Montgomery County is a very progressive, inner suburban region, where you would think allowing kids some freedom would be encouraged, not criminalized.
Montgomery County is a very progressive, inner suburban region, where you would think allowing kids some freedom would be encouraged, not criminalized.
Homes were built much smaller in the 50s and 60s than in the teens and 20s, and often built with lower-quality materials and less attention to detail.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
I agree/understand. Homes in the early 20th century were built for the upper middle class, where by the 1950s, they were being built for everyone up to and including the wealthier members of the working class.
Many single family houses built in the 1910's -1940's in the Midwest were small in size and were not built for the upper middle class. For example,
These houses are smaller (900 to 1500 sq ft), not very ornate, and were made for the working class/middle class. To say that all or even the majority of single family houses built in cities in the early 20th century were large and for the upper middle class is questionable.
Montgomery County is a very progressive, inner suburban region, where you would think allowing kids some freedom would be encouraged, not criminalized.
I don't think you can generalize from that situation. There's a lot we don't know. These parents have had a number of "interactions" with the police regarding their kids.
These houses are smaller (900 to 1500 sq ft), not very ornate, and were made for the working class/middle class. To say that all or even the majority of single family houses built in cities in the early 20th century were large and for the upper middle class is questionable.
Houses shrunk in size and became plainer pretty much steadily from 1900 to the 1950s. But even the typical modest bungelow was indeed a bit larger and significantly more ornate than a 1950s ranch. It's just that many of the decorative elements have been lost to remuddling over the years - particularly on frame houses.
Houses shrunk in size and became plainer pretty much steadily from 1900 to the 1950s. But even the typical modest bungelow was indeed a bit larger and significantly more ornate than a 1950s ranch. It's just that many of the decorative elements have been lost to remuddling over the years - particularly on frame houses.
This is just simply not true. Ornamentation and detail (and even housing size) did not decline until the mid-to-late 1930's. See below the 1910's-1920's bungalows of Highland Park, MI, and the 1920's Tudors of Rosedale Park neighbhorhood of Detroit.
Highland Park
my photo
Rosedale Park
credit zwallpix.com
credit northrosedaleparkhometour.org
While the detail of these houses may not be QUITE as intricate as the gingerbread Victorians or those painted ladies in New Orleans, they are way, way, way more detailed than 1940's/50's houses.
I would go so far as to say that the 1930's houses had slightly more details than 1910's/1920's houses. See below 2 houses on a beautiful block of 1930's Tudors in Russell Woods.
credit zillow.com
credit realtor.com
Notice the stained glass, the leaded windows, the herringbone brickwork, the half timbering, the curvy carved fascia trim, the cast stone and concrete masonry, the turret in the 2nd house
Finally, concerning the interior details of 30's houses, please see the below link to a 1930's house in Bagley. You will see all kinds of fantastic details that would rival similar size homes in 1880/90's. Click on the photos and on the link to enlarge the photos, you will see.
Photos 1 and 2: Notice the brickwork, half-timbering, cast concrete, and the intricately detail around the front door.
Photos 3 and 4: the carved fireplace mantel and the crown molding (the sorry photo doesn't capture the detail of the crown molding)
Photo 5: the different pattern of crown molding in the dining room and the rope detail on the ceiling.
Photo 7: the tiled archway leading into the breakfast nook.
Photo 8: the CRAZY wood ceiling and crown molding of the office/library; hard-to-see built-in shelving on the right
Photos 910,11: the coved ceilings in the bedrooms
Photo 12: the original plastered finished basement and the Tudor-esqe fake fireplaces
Photo 13: the arch above the shower
Rest of the photos: duplicates of the previous 12 pix
Note: this is NOT nearly the top of the line 1930's house. Other neighborhoods have larger houses of greater detail. So even modest single family houses were badazz into the mid-1930's.
Last edited by usroute10; 07-15-2015 at 06:14 PM..
I don't think you can generalize from that situation. There's a lot we don't know. These parents have had a number of "interactions" with the police regarding their kids.
Yeah, every time for letting their kids walk somewhere in their own neighborhood, mostly the park.
When I was a kid, I rode my bike all over town. MILES from home. Nobody arrested my parents for it or threatened to take me away - that's what bikes were FOR.
The park was over a mile from home and we kids walked their regularly to play on the equipment or use the public tennis courts.
Here are other examples of this particular stupidity:
This is, of course, disproportionately directed at poor people of color.
Illinois just passed a law stating that a 13 year old may not be left at home alone for even a short period of time. So if you run to the grocery and your 13 yo is safely ensconced at home, they can STILL grab the kid and toss you in the slammer.
I was babysitting other kids when I was 12! Heck, when I was 13, a 13 yo could get a DRIVER'S LICENSE. Not that I'm suggesting either is a good idea for the general run of kids these days ... but come on. Kids should be able to walk home or to the park or to school or to the grocery by themselves without fear of getting scooped up by Johnny Law. I was running errands to the drugstore, grocery, etc when I was SIX. Of course I could count change and read quite well by the time I was 4, but regardless.
Even if there wasn't the danger of some overzealous cop grabbing my kids from the local park, I still wouldn't live somewhere where I didn't have a yard and a reasonable distance between my house and the ones next door. What is the use of having windows that just look directly into somebody else's windows?
So yeah, suburbia for me, or as close to it as I can get.
Note: this is NOT nearly the top of the line 1930's house. Other neighborhoods have larger houses of greater detail. So even modest single family houses were badazz into the mid-1930's.
No, they weren't. Those were not "modest" homes at the time. They were homes owned by professionals, craftsmen, doctors, etc.
Modest homes of the times seldom survived to the present day, as they were tiny little boxes or shotgun style homes where you had to walk through each room to get to the next, or down a narrow dark crowded hallway. They were dark and cramped and laid out oddly. They often lacked proper ventilation.
I remember those houses very well because nearly all of my relatives lived in them. There was barely room for a child to walk between one house and the next, the lots were crammed so close together. They were nearly always wood frame with wood lap siding (constantly in need of scraping and painting) or that siding that looked like roofing shingles. May have BEEN roofing shingles, in fact, at the time. The rooms were small and usually had a gas fireplace in each room for heat. Some were heated by coal - I still remember the dark eerie dusty black coal bins and the chute the delivery trucks used to deliver the coal.
Truly "modest" homes at the time would be looked upon as little better than shacks today. Many of them WERE little better than shacks.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.