American Small House

This is my American small house. I live in Decatur on a street that originally only had small ranch style houses. At this time many of the houses have had extensive renovations including rear additions and second stories. There has also been some infill housing, but not as much as other streets. There are only 4 (ish) new houses on the street. I happen to live in one of the few nonrenovated houses. It is a simple four sided brick ranch. It has 2 bedrooms and 1 bath. The only "improvement" is the original owners finished the attic space so now it can be considered living space.

Cleveland Georgia as Jackson's Almost Perfect Town

While reading J.B. Jackson’s essay “The Almost Perfect Town” I could not help but think about Cleveland, Georgia. Cleveland is located in the far northeast corner of Georgia and is the county seat for White County. The town is best known as the location of Babyland General Hospital and the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Jackson discusses Optimo City and how it represents thousands of cities in rural America that most simply drive through without noticing and only stopping to fill up their gas tanks. He talks about how proud Optimo is of its title of county seat. A title Cleveland, Georgia holds as well. He describes the rivalry between Optimo and the next largest settlement, Apache Center. I imagine the same rivalry exists between Cleveland and tourist filled, Oktoberfest celebrating Helen, Georgia. The non-descript, vernacular courthouse located in the town’s center is in Cleveland too. Jackson says, “The countryside is that close to the heart of Optimo City, farmers are that much part of the town….But this is what make Optimo, the hundreds of Optimos throughout America, so valuable: the ties between country and town have not yet been broken.” (p. 35) Only minutes from the courthouse square in Cleveland are open fields for farming and spectacular views of the North Georgia Mountains. When passing through Cleveland while making my way up to Helen, I’ve sat in “the brief congestion of mud-spattered pickup trucks that slows you down before you hit the open road.”(p. 31)
There are many similarities between Optimo City and Cleveland, Georgia. But this is no surprise… “As I said to begin with, there is another Optimo City fifty miles farther on. The country is covered with them. Indeed, they are so numerous that it sometimes seems as if Optimo and rural America were one and indivisible.” (p. 42)

The pictures below are of the Courthouse in Cleveland and a typical view of open land for farming or raising animals with the North Georgia Mountains in the background.

Parking Lot Beauty

In Landscape in Sight there is talks about the beauty of parking lots and how suburban places have a different type of beauty my mind immediately went to the new Target in Atlantic Station (AS). Target is well known as a low cost, big box store that has cultivated a chic-ness due to its marketing and merchandise. More importantly it is also a store that is primarily found in the suburbs. By putting a Target in AS, which is in midtown, Target knew the traditional format would not work. Because land is more expensive, there is less parking, and the parking that is there is mainly under the building, not around it. The exterior was given a new look to blend in more with the surroundings. It was built in a style to be an eye catcher and to remind people that they are clearly in the middle of a city.

Say what you will about AS, but it can not be denied that AS does an amazing job of playing to the suburbanite idea about what should be included in a city center.
By clustering together stores, services and restaurants and marketing them as a one stop pedestrian friendly space, AS gives the feel of what modern day people think an early 20th century retail space was like. A place where you can walk to your different errands, and not depend on a car for you basic necessities. However AS makes the experience more comfortable by filling it with familiar stores like Gap, Express, California Pizza Kitchen and Target. Most of these stores are found in mall settings and therefore do no look their AS location looks the same as their others, except for Target.

Martians Landing

Conceived in the late 1960s, Martin’s Landing represents one of the first Community Unit Plan subdivisions to be constructed in the City of Roswell. The development was initiated by Spratlin Associates, whom Harold Martin identifies as metropolitan Atlanta’s largest developer of residential subdivisions in 1966. (Atlanta and Environs, Vol III) The neighborhood occupies just over 1,000 acres of land that was annexed from Fulton County into Roswell in 1975. Twelve neighborhoods contain 1, 964 residential units divided among single family residences, town homes, condominiums, and garden apartments.
The community contains numerous amenities; a lake, open space, trails, pools, tennis courts, a baseball field and elementary school. The house types are representative of mid-century trends including the Split-level, Neo-Colonial and Ranch. Vernacular styles represented are the California, Neo-Colonial Revival, Neo-Dutch Revival and Neo-Georgian.
What brought this development to mind this week was reading the Gans article and his discussion of the suburbia’s susceptibility to the dangers of mass society. This neighborhood is established and vibrant and involved yet criticized for exhibiting some of the characteristics discussed in Gan’s section entitled Levittown and Mass Society (pp 193-196). I don’t post the following website to endorse its message but I thing it represents an interesting take on this subject and neighborhood. www.martianslanding.com

On my search for examples of the American Small House architectural type, I quickly learned that in Atlanta, wherever you find minimum housing, you find infill housing. Below I have pictures from four different Dekalb Country neighborhoods. Each picture juxtaposes an American Small House with its much larger, much newer neighbor. The first picture is of the Starlight Drive in located on Moreland Avenue and built in 1949.

Rocky Ford Road in Kirkwood

Lynwood Park area in Brookhaven

Lynwood Park area in Brookhaven

Lawson Heights neighborhood in Chamblee

North Druid Hills neighborhood - between Clairmont and N. Druid Hills, south of Briarcliff Rd.

A Lustron Home, 513 Drexel Ave, Decatur, GA

Apparently the mass production of two by four balloon frame houses built in Levittown and Lakewood were not the only attempt by American developers and the federal government to overcome the housing shortage crisis characteristic of the post- World War II years. In 1946, Carl Strandlund, Swedish native turned vice president of the Chicago Vitreous Enamel Products Company, consulted with officials at Standard Oil concerning their need for more prefabricated service stations built of porcelain enameled steel wall panels. During the meeting, one of the officials from Standard Oil suggested that Strandlund pitch the use of these panels in supplying inexpensive and quickly produced quality dwellings to returning GIs and their families to Washington bureaucrats. Immediately, Strandlund sketched out the concept of the Lustron home.

Strandlund presented the idea of the Lustron home to Wilson Wyatt, President Truman’s housing administrator, who immediately saw the structure as the panacea to the impending housing crises. Working with George Allen, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Wyatt helped secure a war time factory for Strandlund to produce his idea, over $35 million in federal money and unfettered access to the scarce supply of steel from 1947-1949. Strandlund promised to produce 100 homes a day at an average cost of $7,000, solving the housing crises within 9 months.

The first Lustron home design had two-bedrooms and one bath in the 1,000-squre foot space. The small space was made workable and efficient by space saving built-ins in each room. All of the interior and exterior surfaces were porcelain-enameled metal (like a bathtub) including the roof, gutters, downspouts, walls and cabinets. The design was purported to require minimal up keep and could be wiped clean with soap and water inside and out. Large picture frame windows provided views of the outdoors and natural light. Because of the construction materials, the homes were marketed as being fire-proof, rodent proof, lightning proof (the house was grounded by large cables) and rust proof. Additionally, the Lustron home was advertised as being three times stronger than wood frame houses.

Strandlund received over 20,000 pre orders for the Lustron homes between 1946 and 1948. Fewer than 2,500 Lustrons were built by 1950 when the company claimed bankruptcy. There are many theories about the demise of the company in spite of the high demand for housing. The production of the homes lagged behind Strandlund’s previous estimates. The scarcity of steel also might have factored in the failure of the project (a Lustron house used 12 tons versus the 1-1.5 steel components in Levit homes). More seedy conspiracies of government undermining Lustron production and sales has been put forth in the documentary: Lustron the House America’s Been Waiting For. In the end, the bottom line cost of producing the porcelain-enameled structure pushed retail prices to $10,000-$12,000 not including the land much higher than the average pre-fabricated home price. Writers for Fortune Magazine in November of 1949 used the Lustron failure as added evidence that a government has no business financing consumer driven projects.

The Lustron homes that were completed proved structurally sound, energy efficient and attractive especially for a prefabricated structure. Owners of extant Lustron houses feel a special bond with their homes as attested by the many grassroots sponsored websites on the Internet. One such site retells the stories of Lustron homeowners who traded their small house for a larger space only to miss the idiosyncrasies of their previous home to the point that they repurchased a Lustron. Decatur has a Lustron home which maintains much of its original integrity including the pastel color of the exterior porcelain panels, the decorative downspout of the gutter and the picturesque windows. It seems like the advertising claim that the homes are rust proof is false.

Resources

http://members.tripod.com/~Strandlund/index-14.html

http://www.piranhagraphix.com/Lustron/FactsandLinks/factsandlinks.htm#odd

http://lustron.org/film.htm

Ponce de Leon Avenue: A Strip?

What is today known as Ponce de Leon Avenue, or Highway 23-29 to Decator, began as the City of Atlanta’s first horse-car line in 1870. Then in 1874 the Atlanta Street Railway Company extended its streetcar line, making Ponce “Atlanta’s Charming Suburban Resort” with parks, picnic areas and ball fields that connected the downtown business district to the city’s first “comprehensive suburban development,” or the Druid Hills neighborhood. As already discussed in previous posts, Frederick Law Olmsted designed the landscaping along Ponce de Leon, which was lined by a series of curvilinear parks and larges estate homes.

However, Ponce de Leon began to change in 1907 when the railcar line was sold to the city and paved for vehicular traffic. By the 1910s, apartment buildings, including the Georgia Terrace and Ponce Apartments, commercial buildings and industrial structures began to appear. The highlight of this development was the opening of the Ford Factory in 1914 and the Sears building in 1926. By the 1920s streetcar use was in decline and vehicular traffic was congesting the road.

Despite having slowed during the Depression, development picked up in 1940 with the opening of Briarcliff Plaza, or the city’s first strip shopping. Strip development, which marks the third phase of the street, was directly tied to the automobile and culminated with the end of streetcar service in 1948. By the 1950s neighborhoods began to decline as the city’s white middle-class began moving north and east to the suburbs of Buckhead and Dekalb County. (See the Fall 2003 Senior Urban Design project for more detailed analysis. www.coa.gatech.edu/arch/ms/ud//students/ponce.htm)

It is this third phase of Ponce de Leon that I believe provides insight into the Ponce of today. Since graduating from Georgia Tech I have lived in two different condominiums along Ponce de Leon and weekly make the drive into Decator for Dekalb County Junior League meetings. I can think of never better word to describe this congested street than “strip.” Grady Clay explains in Close-Up: How to Read the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) that beginning in the 1960s a literature appeared which treated the strip as a “urban/suburban scapegoat.” However, Clay goes on to explore the strip for significant patterns. He writes, “All strips are by no means alike. Some specialize and thus give us clues to the neighborhoods they serve. New forms are developing, old ones decaying. Hence the essence of urban forces is revealed” (p. 85-6). For Jackson the vernacular landscape is best explored via the strip. He explains that “roads and streets and alleys and trails can no longer be identified solely with movement from one place to another. Increasingly they are the scene of work and leisure and social intercourse and excitement” (p. 251). While Clay sought to delayer the history of a city via the development of strips, Jackson challenges the notion of a street as merely leading to places. In modern landscape strips have become places. Jackson’s description of the highway in “Other-Directed Houses,” with its use of lights and signs to please and attract the automobile driver (and now so much the aesthic or architectural appeal) explains the Ponce de Leon of today. Revitalized shopping strips in the historic Ford Factory or the Whole Foods at the former baseball field, along with both converted and new lofts and condominiums mix with the shocking signs and lights of the Plaza Theatre, Majestic Diner, Zesto’s Drive-In, Eats, and Mary Mac’s Tea Room demonstrate that Ponce de Leon is a place and not merely a route for traveling from Downtown to Decator. Rather the way in which we spend our time and entertain ourselves has changed. Beginning in the 1940s we have, through the automobile, transformed how we organize and use the strip. Ponce de Leon shows “how the street in the average American town or city has been transformed, how it dominates its immediate environment, how complex it is in design, how many functions it now serves, and how it constantly creates new anciallary spaces and structures: parking garages, underground parking, parking lots, drive-in facilities and skyways and overpasses and interchanges and strange little slices and islands of greenery. In its most inclusive sense, the streets has taken over the role of making landscapes, changing them and destroying them” (p. 73-4).

Atlanta Drive-Throughs - Old School

As suggested in class I went and took pictures of The Varsity, located on North Aveune, just east of Georgia Tech and overlooking the downtown connector. The Varsity was established at this location in 1928 and has become an icon of the City of Atlanta. During my time at Georgia Tech I ventured up to The Varisty on a few occasions. Mainly during my freshman year when it was a short walk from my dorm room. A few years later when I was co-oping at Delta a small group in the department I worked with would go to the Varisty on a Friday every other month or so, despite the 20 minute drive. Since then I've heard stories of other people making a 20-30 minute drives on a random day at work to get out and visit The Varsity. No wonder it has been one of Atlanta's busiest restaurants for 80 years. To find our more about The Varsity check out this link: http://www.thevarsity.com. Be sure to view the history section and timeline you interact with by moving a hot dog across the screen.



A favorite drive-through of mine in Atlanta is Zesto. During college my friends and I would enjoy a nice cheap pasta meal at 'Eats' along Ponce De Leon Blvd, just east of Zesto. On the way back we would most likely swing through the Zesto drive-through and pick up some ice cream. The Zesto chain was first opened in Evanston, Indiana in 1949, but became very popular in the City of Atlanta. The location photgraphed below is on Ponce De Leon and was supposedly opened in 1949. The Zesto chain does not exist anymore and the restaurants are now individually owned. I do not believe the outside facade has always had the 1950's old diner look. I think in the past few years it was updated to look the way it does now.

Ranch Houses

In the 1950's, many single-families moved into the suburbs in similar ranch style houses. They all have basically the same floorplan and look. As we've seen, these neighborhoods are still around and now provide excellent first homes for people looking to buy their first home. I lived in this type of house growing up. My grandparents bought their ranch house in 1959 (the year it was built) after moving from the prefabricated housing I talked about in my other blog. They paid $14,500 for it, and my grandmother lived there until 2003 two years after my grandfather died. She sold the house for over $200,000. Their house was added on to over the years which added to the value of the house, also. They closed in the carport to make a bedroom for my dad. They also added a porch off the back of the house and closed it in as well. A few years before she sold it, she added a huge front porch with columns. It looks a little out of place in the neighborhood, but they weren't the only ones to add on and change the original houses over the years.

The house we lived in was built in 1958, but it wasn't purchased until 1984. The second picture is of that house. Once again, the carport was closed in to make a side porch. Both houses had similar floorplans, except our house had a basement. You walked in the front door into the living room. There was one bedroom on the front also, and another right across the hall. There was one bath in the hallway. There was one more room next to the kitchen that was on the far end of the house. Both of these houses are located off of South Cobb Drive in Smyrna between Cooper Lake Drive and Concord Road.

The third picture is another house we lived in that was built in the early 1960's. That house is off of Austell Road near Windy Hill in Austell. The carport was still intact, I imagine because the house was bigger than the others. The floorplan had stretched out to an extent. It was still similar, but the rooms were a little larger. This was the trend in architecture as these houses were built to accomodate the city's growth. It is interesting to see the differences between these houses and the "McMansions" nearby across South Cobb Drive, for instance. John Wieland Homes has tapped into the market in the Smyrna/Vinings area because of it's proximity to I-285, Cobb Parkway and Cumberland Parkway. They have torn down many of these older homes and areas to put in huge high-end subdivisions that look out of place because of the huge disparity between old and new.

Mount Vernon Woods

Mount Vernon Woods is a subdivision in Sandy Springs. This subdivision is just north of I-285 and it is surrounded by three major thoroughfares, Abernathy Road to the north, Glenridge Road to the west, and Mount Vernon Highway to the south. Due to its close access to Georgia 400, Roswell Road (Hwy. 9), and I-285, Mount Vernon Woods and surrounding neighborhoods have convenient access to downtown Atlanta, shopping, entertainment, and public infrastructure.

Mount Vernon Woods was developed in the 1950’s and most of its 239 homes were built within this decade. The vast majority of residences are one story ranch-styles homes; roughly half of these homes are brick. Almost all of the ranch-style homes have carports, which shows a residential embrace of the automobile, stereotypical of 1950s Atlanta homes.

As implied by the subdivision’s name, the neighborhood is surrounded and swallowed up by trees. Tall, full grown hardwoods, magnolias, and a scattering of lodge-pole pines paint the horizon, while petite flowering trees and hedges dominant the front yards. Two creeks run within its boundaries and the neighborhood hosts a community pool with a wooded path that leads to nearby tennis courts. The streets and driveways in this neighborhood are neither straight nor flat. The average view encompasses a dozen houses or so before one’s vision is interrupted by a hill, a twist or the road, or patch of trees.

In order to maintain its quiet charm, Mount Vernon Woods has had fight an interesting battle. A combination of Mount Vernon Wood’s streets connected to make a shortcut from Roswell Road and Abernathy Road. Due no doubt to traffic, this shortcut proved too tempting for drivers who turned this neighborhood into a cut-through. Mount Vernon Woods fought off the invasion of non-residents by closing roads and constructing cobblestone roundabouts and speed humps.

On a personal note, Mount Vernon Woods is the neighborhood that I lived in from the age of eight through the age of fourteen, at which time my family moved out of state. My family resembles the type of Levittown resident Gans called the “transient.” We were driven by the job prospects of my family’s breadwinner, my father. But, through our many moves, I always remember Mount Vernon Woods as truly a welcoming place to us. We joined the neighborhood association and belonged to the pool. I swam for the neighborhood swim team. We have even maintained lifelong friends from this neighborhood, which is a difficult feat for a “transient.” Mount Vernon Woods provided a community for us to be a part of and feel welcomed in. This picture below is of my old suburban home in Mount Vernon Woods.

Mount Vernon still maintains many of its original homes, but change is in the air. I counted three new "Mc-Mansions" within the neighborhood. They stuck out like a sore thumb and were rather pretentious in size and style. Let us hope that some of the original beauty of Mount Vernon Woods will remain.

Drive in - Drive up - Drive through

Although I generally think of my hometown as more "small town" or "beach town" than suburban, when reading about the American drive through culture, many examples from there came to mind. Pensacola, FL certainly had its share of the typical examples of drive through culture over the years: restaurants, liquor stores, drive-in movies, even a drive through convenicence store on the way to the beach...as in, "I'll take a case of beer, a pack of gum, and a bag of chips"....really!

Two instances in particular come to mind though, as the epitome of drive-in or drive-by culture. The first is the (historic) Pensacola beach sign. It is probably 75 feet tall and is a prime example of large scale signage that is not geared toward pedestrian traffic. It is focused on the cars and the highway and anouces (loudly) a scenic detour along the gulf coast. The first picture is of the sign. It is actually new, the original was destroyed during Hurricane Ivan a few years ago. The second picture is a google map showing the sign's location. It is right in the middle of the large triangular space carved out on each side by roads; no pedestrian could get close if they wanted.

The second instance of Pensacola's drive through culture really is the lowest of the low. If I didn't know it existed I wouldn't believe it. Pensacola had at one time (it closed just a couple years ago) a drive through funeral home. If there is ever a time to get out of the car and go inside I would think it would be for the funeral of a loved one, but at the Junior Funeral Home this is no longer neccessary. Visitors could drive by a large window and the decedent would be wheeled over close to the window so occupants in the vehicle could pay their respects. The first photo here shows the window from the outside. The second shows the view from the inside, past a casket and out the window.

An interesting website on bizarre drive-ins: http://fogonazos.blogspot.com/2007/02/weirdest-drive-thrus.html