Dan Rafter

Douglas Knerr's childhood home in Mansfield, Ohio, was, as he describes it, "extremely ordinary," a basic 1950s-era brick two-story colonial. And most of the other houses in his neighborhood merited that same description. But two homes stood out among the ranch houses and colonials. They were Lustron homes, and like every home made by the Lustron Corporation, they looked like they'd been dropped into this western Ohio town from outer space.

It's no surprise that the Lustron homes stood out. Every home the Lustron Corporation built was made entirely out of porcelain-enameled steel. Whenever Knerr's dad drove past the small metal houses, he'd share with his son the history of the Lustron Corporation and its grand, ultimately failed experiment to build hundreds of affordable homes every day, ones that looked just like those steel homes in Knerr's neighborhood.

"I was fascinated by those houses," Knerr says during a telephone interview. "I think it was just the way they shined. They were so bright and colorful. That really catches a child's attention, and they caught mine."

Knerr is far from the only one fascinated by the Lustron home. These odd homes have inspired a cult following, inspiring books, a documentary and dozens of Web sites. The Lustrons' lure is strong enough that fans of the homes--and many of the owners of the 2,000 or so Lustrons still thought to be standing across the country--run their own Yahoo! group and hold semi-regular conventions.

While this mania is strong across the country, the Chicago area is one of the hottest hubs of Lustron fanaticism. Knerr, for instance is a resident of Glen Ellyn and a teacher at Roosevelt University. He achieved Lustron historian status by recently writing a book about Lustrons and their history. Chicago's suburbs, and several towns in Northwest Indiana, are home to several existing Lustrons. The founder of the Lustron Corporation was a Chicagoan. And, most importantly, the local office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation is creating a new web site designed to help owners preserve and care for their Lustron homes.

Knerr is not surprised at the strong following Lustrons have gained. He, after all, became instantly fascinated with the homes when he finally gained the chance to explore a Lustron more intimately, a chance that came long before he wrote his book, "Suburban Steel: The Magnificent Failure of the Lustron Corporation," published in 2004 by the Ohio State University Press. Knerr's cousin from the farming community of Convoy, Ohio, married the boy who lived in the house next door to her, a house that happened to be a Lustron. So Knerr, then a teen, was able to walk inside an actual steel home, this one a three-bedroom model totaling no more than 1,200 square feet.

Knerr instantly noticed that his cousin's new family had no use for nails, or for a hammer. They hung all their photos and artwork directly to their home's walls using magnets. And maintenance? That was minimal. Nothing chipped or faded. Floorboards never needed to be replaced because they didn't exist. And the owners didn't have to paint their home's exterior walls; they simply washed them down with their garden hose when the mood struck them.

"It was extremely different inside that house," says Knerr. "I was so intrigued by all that metal, by all those smooth surfaces. Just the fact that you could hang pictures with magnets seemed so strange to me."

Knerr hopes his book will bring even more attention to these homes and, most importantly, boost efforts to save them.

"These homes are an important part of our history. They reflect an effort by the government to help provide affordable housing on a mass scale, something that we are still wrestling with today," Knerr says. "The Lustron idea was a challenging one. It was challenging to the real estate industry. I mean, how do you price an all-steel home? It was a challenge to the construction industry. The unions, too, wondered about it: If there were going to be millions of these houses going up is anyone ever going to need a carpenter again?"

The history

Of course, millions of Lustron homes never did go up. The goal of the Lustron Corporation, and its founder, Chicagoan Carl Strandlund, was to produce 100 houses each day and ship them across the country on specially designed tractor trailers. The business operated from a facility in Columbus, Ohio, that had formerly served as a war-production plant. Lustron fell far short of this ambitious goal, producing about 2,500 houses before going out of business in 1951.

The Lustron concept may sound farfetched today, but at the time federal government officials, including President Harry Truman, looked at it as a way to provide affordable housing to soldiers returning from World War II. Given the mission to solve this housing crisis, the Lustron Corporation was once the largest industrialized housing company in the United States. Starting in 1947 the corporation, fueled by $40 million in federal funds, began manufacturing its porcelain steel-enameled "homes of the future" in a one-million-square-foot plant in Columbus.

Lustron made its first big splash in April of 1948 when the corporation erected one of its prefabricated steel houses in New York City and invited the public to experience it. According to Knerr's book, more than an estimated 130,000 visitors toured the home. Many of these visitors, Knerr adds, offered to make a down payment on the spot. One family told newspaper reporters that they had made the tour of the Lustron home the centerpiece of their New York vacation, allowing, as if an afterthought, that the Empire State Building was pretty impressive, too.

Structurally, the Lustron homes consist of exterior and interior enameled steel panels bolted to a steel skeleton and fixed to a concrete slab foundation. The homes' interior panels are grooved to resemble wood. Porcelain-enameled window frames, doorjambs, gutters and roofing tiles guarantee that the Lustrons would remain nearly maintenance-free. The company, in fact, guaranteed that the homes were rustproof, termite-proof, rodent-resistant and fireproof. And to allay the natural fears that a metal house would act as a lightning rod, Lustron engineers made sure the homes they produced were grounded.

Inside, Lustron houses--and there were several varieties--represented a 1950s-era vision of the future. Think of the Jetsons, but a bit more low-tech. Lustrons don't have robot maids, of course, but they do boast a variety of features that would seem futuristic to 1950s-era buyers. For instance, the homes feature loads of built-in storage including kitchen cabinets, bookshelves and china closets, while the doors between rooms are all pocket varieties, a space-saving necessity. The homes' all-electric kitchens included a combination dishwasher/washing machine, a contraption dubbed the "Automagic." This became an excellent selling point; few homes in the late 1940s featured dishwashers.

So why did the Lustron concept fail? There were many reasons, Knerr figures. The homes might have been too revolutionary for a majority of buyers, for one thing. But Knerr admits that the main culprit was probably money. The average cost of a Lustron home came in at $10,500. That figure would have gone down had Lustron been able to manufacture more homes and perfect its mass-production methods, but it was too high for most families of the time.

Eventually Lustron collapsed in bankruptcy in 1951.

The Chicago connection

Knerr and other Lustron fans, though, are loath to call the Lustron experiment a failure. For one thing, the Lustron homes performed as advertised. They are tough, and most of them are still standing.

Tom Fetters, a Lombard resident who has written his own Lustron book, "Lustron Homes: The History of a Postwar Prefabricated Housing Experiment," has spent years hunting down existing Lustrons across the country. He estimates that there are about 150 still standing in the Chicago area. He's especially proud that his hometown of Lombard boasts several of these homes, thirty-two in all.

Owning a Lustron, though, is not always easy. Owners, for example, often struggle to find replacement parts for their homes, Fetters says. To solve the problem, Lustron owners scramble to salvage parts from other Lustrons that, unfortunately, are slated for demolition.

As an example of how this process might work, Fetters points to an existing Lustron house in Mentor, Ohio, just northeast of Cleveland, that was recently demolished. Fetters says Lustron owners from Ohio and Michigan traveled to the site to salvage the home's bedroom doors, wall panels, cabinet doors and other parts.

"There are things even in these houses that become disabled over time," Fetters says. "If a house comes down and you can save a door, well, that's great. Now you have a new door to replace the old door."

There is more help for Lustron owners hoping to preserve their all-steel homes. The Midwest region of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, fueled by a $30,678 grant from the National Council for Preservation Technology and Training, is currently working on www.lustronpreservation.org, a new Web site that will provide Lustron owners technical information on how to maintain and repair their homes.

Jeanne Lambin is the project manager for the Lustron grant with the National Trust. She hopes that the site, along with the rest of the publicity Lustrons are getting, will help save the remaining all-steel homes.

"The Lustrons are one of the finest examples of prefabricated postwar housing," Lambin says. "They reflect many things that architects, engineers and planners were trying to do at the time, which was trying to create affordable housing for masses of people."

A continuing problem

The Lustron Corporation's efforts to solve the country's affordable housing crisis back in the 1950s are interesting mainly because the United States still, more than fifty years later, suffers from the same crisis.

It's true that more U.S. citizens than ever now own a house. The latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau say that the country's home-ownership rate stands at a whopping 68.6 percent, a historic high.

But that number tells only a portion of the tale. Home-ownership rates for minorities, for instance, are far lower: 49.3 percent for African Americans and 47.3 percent for Latino buyers. At the same time, housing prices across the country are rising rapidly. The National Association of Realtors reports that the median price of an existing single-family home came in at $191,000 in April of this year. It's even more of a challenge for home buyers in Chicago and its suburbs to find an affordable home: The median price of a home in the Chicago area stood at $220,000 last year, up 6.25 percent from 2003, according to the Chicago Association of Realtors. In a documentary called "Lustron, The House America has been Waiting for," one former plant worker tells the story of seeing Strandlund walking along a beach years after his Lustron Corporation collapsed. Strandlund had always been a larger-than-life figure, a man whom admirers called a genius and a promotional whiz, always laughing, constantly puffing away on a cigar.

But this Strandlund, the one walking rather aimlessly on a beach, was different. The employee greeted his former boss. And instead of launching into a joke, or reminiscing about the Lustron Corporation's heyday, Strandlund simply said "hello" back, a little sadly, and quietly went back to his lonely walk.

"When we show this film to people there is almost always the same reaction: People are outraged that this effort was just allowed to crumble," filmmaker Ed Moore says. "People are outraged that the company wasn't somehow saved. There was no fortitude in Congress to save this company. We as a society really lost something here. It's a shame. This was such an innovative house we were robbed of. The Lustron really could have made a difference in providing affordable housing. But that effort was wasted."

(2005-07-05)

Also by Dan Rafter

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