Doraville and The GM Plant

Hise discusses Panorama City, California a planned community designed and constructed by Kaiser Community Homes. It was important for the developers for their community to be located next to industries like General Motors, Anhauser-Busch, Lockheed, and Rocketdyne. “The planning commission chose it to illustrate the benefits of modern subdivision and community design. The notice highlighted the project proximity to General Motors and a Jergens plant and the inclusion of shopping areas, church, school sites, and a playground.” (Hise, 197)
Panorama City is similar to the General Motors plant in Doraville, Georgia and the communities that developed around it. There is surprisingly little information about the GM plant in Doraville, except for articles written recently about its pending closing. This is about all the information I could drum up with Google searches.
The General Motors plant in Doraville opened in June of 1947. The company purchased 408 acres from 50 landowners to build the plant. Doraville and its neighbors, like Chamblee, experienced growth after its opening. Other large corporations opened plants along nearby Peachtree Industrial Blvd, including Frito-Lay, Kodak, and General Electric.
On Peachtree Industrial, near where it intersects with I-285, there are several minimum houses and even a few of the garage like houses described in Harris (though it may have been Jackson). I took a few pictures of the minimum houses but wasn’t able to take pictures of the garage like structures because there were people standing outside the homes. The original homeowners of these minimum houses probably went through the same processes that Hise discusses at Panorama City. “At Panorama City, wage earners ‘with slim pocketbooks’ could capitalize on the sophisticated system of insurance and loan guarantees the Federal House Administration and Veterans Administration offered home buyers purchasing minimum housing in a community setting.” (Hise, 187-8)

Kirkwood/Rocky Ford Road

The Kirkwood neighborhood in southeast Atlanta was first established in the 1870s and became a streetcar suburb in the early 20th century. The homes built in this early period tended to be large, often in Queen Anne, Victorian Folk, or Craftsman styles. After WWII, Kirkwood, like many other areas, experienced a wave of minimal tract homes. Although these houses can be found throughout the neighborhood, perhaps the most concentrated examples remain on Rocky Ford Road. 

One side of the street has undergone more extensive recent renovation, with significant changes having been made to many of the minimal homes. The other side, however, retains the tidy alignment of nearly-identical, boxlike residences.

There was a large open area behind this row of houses which was developed ca. 2002. The new homes here, many of which are quite large, recall the earlier, Craftsman style so popular in Kirkwood. Many of the minimal houses are becoming tear-downs, as their residents, mostly older, African-Americans, are priced out of the neighborhood. The view of the new houses looming over the tract homes was particularly striking to me, almost a sign of impending doom.

Pre Fab Housing

I called my grandmother to ask her if she knew anything about the prefab housing connected to the Bell Aircraft plant in Marietta, and I came to find out that she actually lived in them first with her family and then with my grandfather when they first got married. My great-grandfather was in the army which was the reason they were able to live in the housing. I thought it would be interesting to write about her first hand experience in prefab housing instead of the history of it and the plant, etc. Unfortunately, the housing she lived in has been torn down, but she is going to try and find a picture of the apartment that I'll either bring in to class or scan for the blog. The housing she lived in with my grandfather was a one-bedroom apartment in a row of 4 adjoining apartments with a common backyard where the women set up clothes lines to dry the laundry. They were built on cement slabs and were heated with coal furnaces. It cost $47 a month to live there and $48 a month if you had a refrigerator. You didn't have to pay utilities. She described the bug problem they had in great detail, which probably would have been reason enough for me to move out. She told me that the night that she and my grandfather got back from their honeymoon, they spent most of the night killing roaches in their apartment with their shoes. She also told me that when the adjacent apartments were sprayed for roaches, you could see them scurrying across the lawn to their building. The neighbors had "roach killing parties" where they attempted to spray away the roaches from each others buildings with water hoses. She said termites and fire ants were also a problem. It sounded pretty gross to me, but you had to do it I guess. She described to me how small the apartment and bedroom was espescially once my dad and aunt were born and their cribs/beds had to also fit in the bedroom. She said you had to almost back out of the room because it was so crowded. She was very thrifty and had to be creative in storing clothes, linens, etc. She washed clothes in the sink because she didn't have a washing machine. It was a deep sink that most of the units also had so that washing clothes was easier. They moved out when my dad was three in 1959. She was very descriptive, and it was really fascinating getting a firsthand account of something we have been reading about. It adds a human/personal element to what we've been discussing in class.

Lakewood Today

I can easily imagine Lakewood as a post-World War II suburb in the 1950s or at least I can through D.J. Waldie’s eyes but I realized as I continued to read I could not imagine what life is like there today. It is hard to imagine what buyer today desires a 957 square foot house but it is also hard to imagine anything short of a natural disaster as powerful enough to change Lakewood. In many communities aging subdivisions or developments constructed mid century are redeveloped but no one is going to redevelop a community of 17,000 homes. I found an interview with D.J. Waldie online at The Next American City (http://americancity.org/article.php?id_article=101) and he discusses Lakewood today in more depth than in the conversation at the end of the book.

An aging population has changed Lakewood. Waldie appears concerned about the loss of the original inhabitants and the divide that their absence creates between past and present. He still describes daily life as ordinary and eludes in the interview to the future of Lakewood as mirroring the past. Waldie sees the new buyer in Lakewood as a working class, first time homeowner but with a much more diverse ethnic background than the blue-collar families of the 1950s. Waldie asserts that the family moving into Lakewood today is often different in terms of family structure as homes often require two wage earners, more education and smaller families. Waldie appears to suggest despite the contemporary lifestyle the physical plan of Lakewood implies the same social context.

Interested in how people have modified the tract house of the 1950’s, I perused some real estate sites for photos of what is on the market in Lakewood today. The following houses were all built 1950-54.




photo source -
Historic Photo of Lakewood Street - yesterdayla.com
Historic Photo of Lakewood Home - lakewoodcity.org
all other photos - homes.com