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| Eastchester High School, 1940s |
Needless to
say, the members of the board of education were shocked to discover that the
superintendent and his wife and children had been living in the local high
school.
At the end
of each day when the teachers, students, and coaches were gone, when the drama
and orchestra rehearsals had wound down and the custodians had banished the
last banana peel and crumpled math quiz – the superintendent would make his way
to the wing of the school where vocational classes were held.
Warily he
would usher his family into the rooms occupied by the school’s home economics
department. There was a bedroom and
bathroom, kitchen and living room.
Nothing fancy, but furnished and well-lit.
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| Girls learning homemaking in school, 1930s |
Good enough
for the family to relax, prepare and eat meals, complete homework, wash up, and
sleep through the night.
It was the
fall of 1945 in Eastchester, N.Y., a town in the New York City suburbs that
started life as a seventeenth-century English settlement. Within its five square miles, the direst
housing shortage in the nation’s history had come home to roost.
Worst of all
was that the returning veterans had to scramble for places to live. “Dog-tired soldiers can’t come home to Detroit. There aren’t any houses,” according to a
headline in the Detroit Free Press.
A classified
ad in the Omaha World-Herald offered “Big ice box, 7 x 17 feet
inside. Could be fixed to live in like a
trailer.”
The housing famine,
as some called it, preceded the postwar boom in housing and roads. Out on Long
Island, Levittown’s 17,000 houses would go up in a record four years, but the
farmers who sold their land to the builder were harvesting their potatoes until
construction started in 1947.
It was
estimated that the nation would need 12.6 million new dwelling units during the
first decade after the war.
But major shortages
stood in the way of a quick end to the housing crisis: a shortage of labor and
a shortage of supplies, their destinies entwined.
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| From Architectural Forum (1945) |
While the
Army had released large amounts of lumber to industry, the timber remained
standing in the woods of northern California, Oregon, Washington State, and
Idaho. The reason was that 60,000 American
Federation of Labor (AFL) members had struck in nearly 500 lumber camps and
logging mills, asking for $1.10 / hour.
No one held out hope for quick mediation.
Labor was
missing across all manufacturing sectors.
Big American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corp., which formerly
turned out 3,000 bathtubs per day, was now fortunate to produce 3,000 tubs per
week. Steel production had slowed, with
capacity output not expected until spring of 1946.
Keg of
nails? How quaint.
As housing
starts stalled, veterans and labor organizations looked reflexively to the
government for a solution to the crisis.
Three
senators – Robert F. Wagner of New York, Robert H. Taft of Ohio, and Allen J.
Ellender of Louisiana – started work on a bill that would “provide a decent
home and suitable living environment for every American family.” This bill also mandated the clearing of urban
slum areas to create low-rent housing, which created new problems related to
the displacement of poor people.
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| Georgia, 1945: black families displaced by postwar construction lived in tent cities that resembled Eastern European shtetls. |
Meanwhile, private
industry recognized that the time had come to reject price controls and set its
own production goals or else submit to interminable government regulation.
Indeed,
after Congress finally declared a national housing emergency in May 1946,
President Truman took steps to free builders from government constraints on
supplies and construction.
But he met
fierce opposition from veterans’ groups who opposed the government’s removal of
priorities, subsidies and market guarantees.
They worried that veterans would be unable to afford the new
housing. The stalemate lasted several
years.
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| "A home from a Quonset Hut" appeared in House Beautiful (September 1945). |
Back in
Eastchester, Superintendent Ward I. Miller, who had moved his family into the
high school, was not a veteran. Perhaps
he wanted to save money, or his salary did not cover housing costs, or he could
not find just the right home. Which it
was remains unknown.
Despite
their shock, the school trustees did not fire Miller. He stayed on until 1946 and then became
superintendent of schools in Wilmington, Delaware.
One must
admire Miller’s clever choice of a place to live.
Beginning in
the late nineteenth century, as student enrollment soared, U. S. public school administrators
accepted the charge to teach homemaking.
School buildings were constructed or retrofitted with small apartments where
girls learned to cook and clean under the tutelage of home economics instructors
who knew all the best recipes for gruel.
Since the home economics curriculum modeled hygiene, diet and family life, it fit neatly with the overarching goal of Americanizing immigrants. In Eastchester, such an effort would have been directed at the daughters of Italian immigrants who began moving to the town during the mid-1920s.
Since the home economics curriculum modeled hygiene, diet and family life, it fit neatly with the overarching goal of Americanizing immigrants. In Eastchester, such an effort would have been directed at the daughters of Italian immigrants who began moving to the town during the mid-1920s.
Surely the
Millers left the apartment in immaculate condition when they tiptoed out each
morning.
