Where we live defines us.
This is why we browse the housewares section in the Shopping Centers, pore over house plans, scour real estate ad pages.
For a visual history of who we've been, scan any older residential neighborhood. See the Victorian mansions, the shotgun shacks, the crackerjack duplexes, and, always the next new thing. "Open for Inspection," read the classified ad for a brand-new bungalow on the 1800 block of Collier Street. "If you want to see a real house and cunstruction, look at this."
In 1949, cotton fields bordered the outskirts of towns. "Housing Additions" sprang up like crazy! The scrubby landscapes were becoming suburbs! A post-war housing boom was in process!
Small houses, built with G.I. loans sold as soon as they went up. The classified ads were full of two-bedroom, one bath cookie cutter bungalows. In 1949, rambling ranch houses with attached garages were gee-whiz modern.
More common were the ones like the little houses in the newly-made housing additions. Quirky little hybrids of a homes with one foot in pre-war construction techniques and the other poised to step into the next decade and beyond.
These houses had pier-and-beam construction, instead of the ubiquitous (and cheaper) concrete slab foundations that were about to become the norm.
They had a pitched roofs, unlike a more flattened profile builders began experimenting with post-war, to save on scarce lumber.
They had tiled floors in their kitchen and breakfast nooks, and a tiled baths -- all up-to-date amenities.
Colors were burnt-orange, lime-green (which quickly faded into a sort of grayish green), sky blue; Easter-egg colors. Pink and charcoal interiors, knotty pine walls (real knotty pine, not paneling an eighth of an inch thick) with sometimes two or three wall outlets in the kitchen area for the modern electrical appliances added to the beauty of the interiors.
Americans were just discovering plastics -- plastic toilet paper holders, plastic shower stalls..all in pink and charcoal and the other beautiful new colors. We even had plastic televisions and radios.
These houses, as much as they all looked alike, were "instant homes" for millions of G.I.'s who had just returned from the War and their families -- just add kids and you were set to go!
We've grown, taste-wise, since then. Now we have the much-more-beautiful mirrored tiles and, if we're really lucky, pink flamingoes in the yard!
Isn't progress wonderful?
