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University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
querencia
()
Date: May 29, 2011 10:40PM
Does anyone remember the temporary post-World War II married student housing at the University of Chicago, the Army Surplus "prefabs" (little one-story houses) and the "barracks" (two-story walkup garden apartments)---this was in the early 1950's. They were laid out wherever the U of C could find an empty lot---south of the Midway from Drexel to University, north of the Midway scattered here and there. A furnished prefab rented for $44 a month including utilities. This was not luxury housing: the kitchen had a 2-burner hotplate and an actual icebox with a chunk of ice in it, and heating was from a space heater for which the University made weekly deliveries of fuel oil to a tank that sat at the front door. The floor sat about eight inches off the ground. Story was that the prefab community generated more PhD's and more babies than anywhere on earth. Explanation given for the latter was that students were poor and couldn't afford to go to the movies so found entertainment at home.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
davey7
()
Date: May 31, 2011 11:23AM
My dad lived in one with his first wife - probably mid to late 50's. It produced two PhD's and a baby, so I guess that's apt. They were VERY cold in the winter.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
WayOutWardell
()
Date: May 31, 2011 11:54AM
If you go to Historic Aerials, use 6000 S. University as the address and 1952 as the year, you can see them everywhere!
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/31/2011 11:55AM by WayOutWardell.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/31/2011 11:55AM by WayOutWardell.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
davey7
()
Date: May 31, 2011 12:28PM
Cool maps - My dad was north of the midway. I'll have to get details. There were lots of artists and boho types in them (beatnicks perhaps?).
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
jak378
()
Date: May 31, 2011 02:04PM
For a time in the late 40's we lived around 59th and Ellis. I seem to remember going for walks with my mother and seeing these things actually in the middle of the Midway. Am I crazy or did they have them there? I also seem to remember being told that they were there for returning vets.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
Elaine W
()
Date: May 31, 2011 11:26PM
jak--you're not crazy. I remember them on the Midway as well (in fact, that's the only place I remember them, not all around the neighborhood). At the time, my parents & I lived in an apartment at 55th & University (subsequently demolished to make way for Pierce Hall, a U of C dorm). I think my parents knew a couple of families living in the pre-fabs, and I remember going over there to visit, just like going to regular apartments and houses to visit friends and relatives in the neighborhood.
davey--to the best of my knowledge, the pre-fabs were strictly for U of C students, especially married students, not for a more general population of artists. Married college students were a new concept in the post-war years and there was no plan on how to house them--mostly veterans who were eligible for college or grad school on the GI Bill, who were generally older than the typical college student.
davey--to the best of my knowledge, the pre-fabs were strictly for U of C students, especially married students, not for a more general population of artists. Married college students were a new concept in the post-war years and there was no plan on how to house them--mostly veterans who were eligible for college or grad school on the GI Bill, who were generally older than the typical college student.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
davey7
()
Date: June 07, 2011 03:35PM
I need to ask my dad, the impression I've gotten from him was that it was very bohemian (of course, U of C was very much a "student life" university at that time - a lot of older students who'd had to put off college due to the war were there, more so than today, lots of bars and clubs on 55th street pre-urban renewal) and artsy.
Funny that you mentioned Pierce Tower, my parents were married there (my dad was a resident head there in the early 60's - he had the unofficially, but notoriously, gay house as I understand it).
Funny that you mentioned Pierce Tower, my parents were married there (my dad was a resident head there in the early 60's - he had the unofficially, but notoriously, gay house as I understand it).
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
davey7
()
Date: June 08, 2011 05:13PM
So I talked to my dad about them; they were originally married veterans housing and were quonset huts. This was in the early/mid fifties - they didn't live there very long. The heat was from a central stove which actually got red hot which made him rather nervous. The group they lived in was across from Lying-In Hospital (maternity wards of U of C hospitals at the time) just east of Cottage between 58th and 59th streets which is now the site of the parking garage for the hospitals. I gather they were friendly as a community, but not particularly safe, as there were petty thefts in the area.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
kgbeast
()
Date: December 22, 2011 10:01AM
I do not remember this, however, I lived there as a newborn in the 50's when my father was a resident physcian at the hpspital. My mother remembers it well. it was a pretty challenging living situation with 2 kids. I believe the place was located around 61st and Woodlawn.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
querencia
()
Date: June 21, 2012 01:09AM
To get a 1-bedroom prefab you just had to be a married couple and at least one of you had to be a student at the University of Chicago. To get a 2-bedroom prefab you had to have at least one child or a pregnancy confirmed beyond the 3rd month. I am laughing about the posts claiming that the prefabs were full of partying hippies---what they were full of was married graduate students, either on the GI Bill or some kind of university fellowship, and everybody was working their behinds off and was very serious of purpose. The huge population of older married students was because of World War II, which had ended just a few years before. Most of the men were veterans. All of us were dirt-poor---my husband had a $2000 fellowship from which the University subtracted $1200 for tuition and fees and gave us the other $800 to live on. Along with taking care of our children,to make a little money I took care of little kids whose mothers were working; my husband juggled his courses, his research, ran another research program for salary, and worked as janitor in a church. Our neighbor had a night job in a cereal factory---that cereal that was "shot from guns", he threw the switch that shot it from guns. In those days it was almost universally the husband who was in school. They spent their days and nights in classes and seminars, libraries and labs, and burned up the books at home. By about 1955 the city had started condemning the prefabs as substandard housing (which God knows they were) and was buying up apartment buildings. It was not an easy life, by a long shot---definitely not party time. We were in the prefabs from June 1953 until November 1956 then in a student apartment until June 1960. By then most of the prefabs had been torn down, if not all of them. These hard-working married students came out of this with PhDs, MDs, JDs, DDs. Not party time.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
davey7
()
Date: June 26, 2012 02:32PM
They did both and the hippies were long after these were torn down. Both my father and his then wife were doctoral students with a child at the time, and certainly did lead a bohemian life.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
tomc
()
Date: December 12, 2012 02:37AM
The prefabs that everyone is talking about were actually constructed during the Second War War to house military personnel and their families. I would often sit on the slopes of the Midway and watch the soldiers doing close order drill. Then up the street on Drexel at 61st they had an obstacle couse set up for the men to run through.Supposedly hese soldiers were being trained to become officers. Then some years later I found out that Fermi and hisCrew were constructing a nuclear reactor nereby and I often wondeered if those troops might have been there for another reason. Of course, sfter the war, the university had the descretion of using the prefabs for whatever purpose they desired. As for prefabs right in the middle of the Midway, yhese were warming houses for ice-skaters as the Park District flooded the Midway every winter for ice-skating. To sit next to a pot belly stove and absorb the heat was quite a delight on a winter's day. Tom C (The Kid From Woodlawn).
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
querencia
()
Date: February 02, 2013 03:30AM
I just came across interesting information online. It's relevant because in the 1950's one of the areas of prefabs was between E 60th and E 61st just east of Drexel. Turns out that's the same land that, after the 1893 World's Fair, was developed into an amusement park called Sans Souci Gardens, beginning at Cottage Grove. This lasted from 1899 to 1913 then, not a financial success, the park was sold to new owners who removed the rides and redeveloped the land as an indoor-outdoor year-round beer garden called Midway Gardens---and the designer was Frank Lloyd Wright. This lasted from 1914 to (one website says 1925, the other one says 1929). The land was again redeveloped, this time as an apartment house at 727 E 60th, also named Midway Gardens. I remember this building---it's west of Cottage Grove, and the first prefab we lived in (1953-1954) was near E 61st between Drexel and Ingleside.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
Paul Petraitis
()
Date: June 16, 2013 12:17PM
Leo Lightner, my choir instructor at Elim Lutheran church lived in an "improved" one of these prefabs in the early '60's thathe converted to a Japamese garden type structure with rice paper walls indoors, very trippy, burnt down eventually. Chicago Midway Labs, a Govt "satallite instrumentation" facility my Dad worked in from Sputnick till John Glen was at 61st and Dorchester...a parking lot now.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
querencia
()
Date: November 15, 2013 12:26AM
It's a little spooky to realize how the same piece of land is used for very different purposes, sequentially, so that one "civilization" disappears into the mists of time as another appears. The spot where our block of prefabs stood, along E 60th running westward from University Avenue, previously had held the Moorish Palace and Turkish Village of the 1893 World's Fair (Columbian Exposition). I read recently that the Ferris Wheel stood where the ice skating rink is now, and that's just out on the Midway opposite where the prefabs were. So, first, open land, I should think sand flats running down to the lake. Second, the Fair (see old pictures online---all crowds and bustle). Third, whatever use the land was put to until World War II (I don't know---maybe somebody else will post about this). Then, the prefabs for the war and post-war years. Now the University's law school is on that site. Our prefab faced on University and we had a little fence around it that we got free someplace---we planted morning glories on the fence. My husband always said that for years to come, the landscape people would be picking morning glories out of the lawn and cursing them. Every time I go to Hyde Park and pass that spot, I look for illicit morning glories in the grass, evidence of the Atlantis where we lived so long ago.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
WayOutWardell
()
Date: November 15, 2013 02:31AM
There were two little-known but important attractions just off the Midway between the Fair and the First World War.
First is Paul Boyton's Water Chutes, at 61st and Drexel, which is considered by many to be the first 'modern' amusement park (the first park to rely on purely mechanical attractions). He moved the chutes to Coney Island in 1895.
Then, in 1907, Cap Anson built a ballpark at 60th and St. Lawrence for his team, Anson's Colts. From what I can tell, the ballpark was built on land vacated by the Washington Park Racetrack, which closed in 1905. The homes there now (such as the Hansberry residence) were built in the teens.
First is Paul Boyton's Water Chutes, at 61st and Drexel, which is considered by many to be the first 'modern' amusement park (the first park to rely on purely mechanical attractions). He moved the chutes to Coney Island in 1895.
Then, in 1907, Cap Anson built a ballpark at 60th and St. Lawrence for his team, Anson's Colts. From what I can tell, the ballpark was built on land vacated by the Washington Park Racetrack, which closed in 1905. The homes there now (such as the Hansberry residence) were built in the teens.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
Paul Petraitis
()
Date: November 15, 2013 12:03PM
Does pre fab mean before the Beatles ha ha I guess so. The pre fabs would've housed people that might've gone to all the bars and nightclubs around the University that were torn down in 1957/58 as part of "Urban Removal" ...photographs of the activities going on in the Midway west of the World's Fair proper are pretty strange...Thomas Pychon's novel "Against The Day" explores an alternate history of Chicago and starts with a scene of a Tesla-powerd hot air balloon descending with "The Chums Of Chance"onto the Midway as the sun sets and the 1893 Worlds' Fair is in full swing. Also heck out the crime history "The Gem Of The Prairie" for the seedy side of the Midway...
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
Elaine W
()
Date: January 11, 2014 06:01PM
I recently got the book "Chicago's Historic Hyde Park" by Susan O'Connor Davis. I haven't really started to read it, but on p. 276 there's a photo of some of the pre-fabs on the Midway. The photo seems to show only the one-story buildings, but I also remember two-story buildings with exterior stairs to the second-floor apartment.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
mkmcclure63
()
Date: January 19, 2014 02:06AM
Where would that have been between Drexel and Ingleside? U of C married student housing is on the north side of East 61st between those two streets since WWII. Maybe east of Ingleside, but not west where all the buildings date from before WWII. And I lived in one.
Re: University of Chicago Prefabs
Posted by:
Bruce Kelleher
()
Date: February 10, 2014 08:54PM
If you want to see what a similar village looked like checkout our Facebook group for one I lived in on the NW side. Thatcher Homes of Norwood Township, IL - temporary WW11 veterans housing Our units were all duplex corrugated metal barracks & Quonset huts.
