When A Hut Was A Home

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #166

For this piece I have to credit Brownstone Detectives, a blog/social media account that tells the stories of various, seemingly nondescript buildings in New York City. In one of their latest posts, they wrote about Quonset huts in Brooklyn.

Typically, when we think of postwar housing, we think of Levittown and other developments featuring small but modern houses. However, in the immediate postwar period, there was an acute housing crunch, and Brooklyn, under the reign of Robert Moses, found a quick, temporary, stopgap solution.

The city erected neighborhoods of Quonset huts—the simple metal domed-roof structures commonly used as storage sheds, barracks, and offices, which were in surplus following the war—and set them up with doors and windows to be little homes. As odd as they might look, it’s basically the same concept and floorplan as a trailer or mobile home.

Go look at the pictures in the blog post. Here and here are a couple of other pictures. It’s a really neat bit of historical trivia, and there’s even the uncanny use of the seemingly modern term “housing crisis” from a 1946 newspaper article. We understood in that time that obviously the solution was to get new and more housing units online, fast. Today we shrug.

In Brooklyn, after much heated debate as to what to build, where, and for how much, acres of land in Canarsie, Jamaica Bay, and the area along the Belt Parkway in the south of Brooklyn, were all selected upon which to build temporary public housing in the form of the Federal surplus quonset huts.

More:

The huts lasted until about the mid-50s when more permanent housing or parks replaced them, but not before the veterans housed in them began to complain of their dilapidated conditions. Most concerning to the men and their families – from the litany of issues that were realized – was the fact that the buildings leaked and that they were difficult to warm in the winter.

When the housing shortage began to be alleviated and the former military families started to move out, the quonset huts started to come down. Moving out of this form of public housing, though, presented its own series of problems, chief amongst them a cost of living that these servicemen did not remember from before the war. As a result, many of them began to decamp from the city for parts west. (Ironically, when a reunion of the families that had lived in one Brooklyn quonset village took place, only 7% of them still lived in Brooklyn.)

Read the whole thing.

They note that a number of these are still extant, but I couldn’t find any other ones on my own Google Maps exploring, so here’s the address the blog gives where there are a couple of these surviving huts, presumably—though not with absolute certainty—from the World War II era, and perhaps even once residential homes:

However, that imagery is from 2014. Here’s the same corner today:

They were likely just torn down, but perhaps they were picked up and moved.

Here’s the view right across the street, today:

I’m sure there are many more of these, scattered around the city, some of them probably obscured or even enclosed in other structures. You never know what’s behind a facade.

When you think about it, a big part of cities, cultures, and traditions is really something like temporary things ending up permanent. No problem there.

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Related Reading:

Land Your Plane for Pizza

Can You Find My House?

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #28

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #20

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