Mary McTamaney

Discussion about the urgent need for safe and simple housing is going on in every state of the union. On television, “tiny” homes are often featured as a way to provide shelter to many who are starting out on their own or downsizing at the other end of life. The goal is to fabricate homes that can be easily erected on a small lot and that will be safe and lasting without breaking tight budgets. There are mini-communities where folks like homeless veterans are being housed in the 21st century’s most ubiquitous structure – the shipping container – but with modifications made to open the steel box and create windows for light and fresh air.

Housing crises have happened before. Indeed, many veterans were homeless after every war, but none more than after World War II when millions had served in uniform and all returned simultaneously. A building boom ensued with, not quite tiny, but small, modest houses going up in every state, often in tight neighborhoods where each home was designed on the same basic plan. One of the most innovative of the post-war designs was the Lustron house. Newburgh has a selection of them on the north end of the city on Hampton Place. There are surviving Lustron homes in the nearby towns of Highland Falls, Liberty, Middletown and Croton as well.

Lustron houses were totally innovative because of their materials and construction. They were made of enameled steel panels inside and out and required no wood framing like a traditional house. The external walls provided the steel skeleton that supported the house and so no interior walls were weight bearing. Everything for a Lustron home was pre-fabricated and was delivered to the building site neatly-packed on a specially outfitted truck. A Lustron home could be erected and occupied in less than a month. These houses were advertised as “a new standard of living” impervious to the threats to a traditional home: rodents, rot, rust, fire, lightning. They never needed painting since the exterior and interior walls and ceilings had a baked-on enamel finish, The same was true of the roof; its “shingles” were actually overlapping sections of enameled steel too. Lustron homes still clad in their original materials are distinctive since their exterior walls are sheathed in 2x2 foot panels with finishes of either grey, yellow, blue or tan. Inside, walls were also glossy 2x8 foot enameled panels and ceilings were 4x4-foot eggshell-colored with an option for ceiling-mounted radiant heat within. An incredible option for Lustron owners was a combination clothes and dishwasher, another space and time saver. A Lustron home was the choice for the busy family who wanted no maintenance or worries. Catalogs depicted housewives easily washing down their houses with a garden hose to return it to its sparkling new look.

The Lustron process was not really new. The Chicago Vitreous Enamel Products Company had produced such enameled exterior building panels before World War II. They had made them for Standard Oil service stations and White Castle restaurants. Some of us remember these old businesses with their shiny exteriors clad in square panels. It was the Chicago Vitreous patents and process that Lustron’s founder bought to start his dream of manufacturing pre-fabricated homes.

At 990 square feet, a Lustron house was a small but efficient family home. Most were two bedroom models; some were three. All featured space-saving built-in cabinetry and pocket doors in each room.

Sadly, the company only fabricated homes for two years, 1949 and 1950. Demand outpaced production and sales revenue. The massive borrowing that company founder Carl Strandlund required to re-tool a Columbus, Ohio aircraft plant was more than he could pay with revenues from such a young venture. The political support Mr. Strandlund needed for federal loans to fuel his expansion dwindled as trade unions and concrete companies saw the threat to their market.

Lustron homes had started with great fanfare. A model home, completely decorated by McCall’s Magazine, was erected at the northeast corner of 6th Avenue and 52nd Street in New York City. It attracted 130,000 visitors. Consumer Reports endorsed the Lustron. Emily Post, the arbiter of etiquette, praised the Lustron Corporation for its intelligent planning. In 1949, Bamberger’s department store began offering a complete suite of house furniture for a 2-bedroom Lustron for $1,400. But a company that anticipated manufacturing 100 homes a day found it could only manage an average of 20. At the end of its second year, Lustron had made not quite 2,600 houses. One hundred of those were shipped to New York. Newburgh was lucky to have a few of them to give us a look at what was to be the future of modest, low-cost, quality housing. Hampton Place in the north end of Newburgh – a short street branching off North Street and dead-ending along school district property between NFA North and GAMS – still has a collection of Lustron homes, although generations of their owners tired of the pastel steel “forever” panels and covered them over.