How Quonset huts helped solve the post-WWII housing crisis in the Twin Cities
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Hundreds of Minnesota families lived in corrugated steel sheds called Quonset huts after World War II — an economical but temporary solution to the era's housing crisis.
The "ugly but necessary" curved structures appeared "like huge, half-buried pipe sections," the Minneapolis Tribune wrote in 1949.
Reader Dori Marszalek, 77, of Zimmerman, Minn., lived in a Minneapolis Quonset hut until she was 5 years old. She wrote to Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune's reader-powered reporting project, wanting to learn more about other families who lived in the huts and what life was like in these pop-up neighborhoods.
Another reader wanted to know: "Where were they and what happened to them?"
The U.S. Navy designed Quonset huts during the war as portable shelters that sailors could quickly assemble with minimal building skills. They were named for the Quonset Point, R.I., naval air station where they were first manufactured. Sailors hastily built them on U.S. bases and in the Pacific.
As veterans returned home to a housing shortage, the federal government divvied up the disassembled huts to Minneapolis, St. Paul and other cities nationwide. The government also provided some to colleges — including the University of Minnesota and St. Cloud State University — for married students on the G.I. Bill.
The Twin Cities was home to at least five Quonset villages containing more than 600 huts starting in 1946. The huts provided housing for veterans — including some who had torn them down in the Pacific — as well as many young families. The hut neighborhoods disappeared after the city began selling off the structures in the early 1950s.
A short-term housing fix
The huts were a much-needed option for Marszalek's father, Navy veteran Clarence Dubuque Jr., and other veterans tossed by the country's rough postwar housing market.
Dubuque joined the Navy in 1943 and returned to his young family in Minneapolis in late 1945. Soon, the Dubuques moved into a Quonset hut on the city's North Side.
The Twin Cities' Quonset huts were clustered in Minneapolis at: Buchanan Street and 14th Avenue NE.; Highway 55 and Lyndale Avenue N.; 42nd Street and Bloomington Avenue; and Como Avenue SE. and 29th Avenue SE. In St. Paul, there was a Quonset neighborhood at Oxford Street and Carroll Avenue.
School boards, City Council members and neighbors fought over their placement, and women's clubs beautified them with donations of flowers.
Each hut contained two 480-square-foot apartments, each with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a combined living room and kitchen. When the first huts opened, residents paid the city up to $50 a month in rent, depending on their household income.
Quonset huts were always intended as a short-term housing fix. Families knew they would have to find somewhere else to go.
"These places are temporary," a veteran's wife wrote to the Minneapolis Tribune in 1951. "They weren't permitted in nice locations. We can't buy, and we can't stay here forever."
In a 1947 column headlined "Heaven Has Curving Walls," Minneapolis Tribune columnist George Grim described the areas as "an unattractive mixture of mud, garbage cans, boxes, boards and the sameness of the rows of metal shelters." He had to use wooden boardwalks to cross the muddy terrain.
Grim wrote in another column that residents were "happy to have a quonset hut or a trailer, but yearning for more than dust or mud outside the door."
Then came tragedy.
A fire hazard
In February 1949, a fire swept through a hut and killed three young children as their parents looked on.
"The flames were red and close in the front apartment, and the firemen outside were tugging and chopping at the metal of the quonset," bystander Richard Korns wrote in an eyewitness account in the Tribune. "They tried to pry it back and it wouldn't come far enough."
The city's housing administrator told incensed residents after the fire — the third of its kind in three years — that the two layers of drywall separating the adjoined apartments were easy enough to kick down. Residents countered that children could hardly be expected to do so.
As officials inspected all 616 Quonsets then in Minneapolis for fire hazards, residents demanded the installation of second exits.
Quonset life had other challenges, too. There were no laundry facilities, so residents had to hang dry their clothes inside their huts in the winter. Some parents bought leashes to keep their kids away from busy streets in front of their homes.
Still, demand for Quonsets was great. Applications for the metal homes in Minneapolis reached a peak of 3,000 in 1947, according to a city official. By mid-1952, when the city began to urge families to leave the Quonsets, there were still 350 pending applications.
Patricia Medley wrote to the Minneapolis Star in 1952 about her family's troubles finding "something decent and livable" to replace their unit in one of the city's Quonset villages.
"Months of looking have showed us there is nothing," she wrote.
Pop-up homes disappear
Twin Cities' governments began selling the Quonset huts, and the land beneath them, in the early 1950s.
The city of St. Paul proclaimed the prefab structures were "ideal for farm buildings, cottages & etc." in an ad that ran in the Tribune.
Quonsets at the U, known as "University Village," lasted into the 1960s, as increased enrollment required additional housing.
Minneapolis built permanent housing at the site of the Northside Quonset huts where Marszalek lived, near Highway 55. The housing projects in that area were later torn down in the 1990s, following a civil rights lawsuit arguing the city had illegally concentrated low-income housing.
The Northside address of 608 Bassett Place where Marszalek and her family lived until 1953 no longer exists. It was once wedged between Minneapolis Knitting Works, the old Olson Highway and Lyndale Avenue. Today, the site is part of the mixed-income Heritage Park development.
On a recent visit, Marszalek could still point out the building that housed the Snoboy distribution center where her grandma, aunts and uncles packed produce.
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