Carl Strandlund, above, asked President Truman's Reconstruction Finance Committee (RFC) in the summer of 1946 for $15 million worth of emergency loans to build small houses for GIs returning from the war effort. Strandlund was not an architect, but his idea that metal neighborhoods could be prefabricated and swiftly built persuaded the President's Commission into signing the loan 15 minutes before its emergency powers expired, and the "Lustron" was born. To manufacture the ten tons of steel that went into each two-bedroom Lustron, Strandlund bought a 25-acre factory lot in Columbus OH which had been used during WWII to build fighter planes. Strandlund went back to the government for two more loans totaling another $25 million. A few years and only about 3,000 Lustrons later, the company was repossessed by the RFC in February of 1950 and declared bankruptcy a number of months later.
Other companies producing factory housing at the time.
There was a three-bedroom model along with the two-bedroom Westchester. Strandlund hired architect and MIT professor Carl Koch, later of TechBuilt fame to design the next generation of Lustrons.
This model was never produced. Koch later reflected, "When I leaf back through the records-plans, brochures, contracts, the transcript of Congressional autopsies-I admit to the confusion of feelings between the way we regarded it then... and the way it turned out to be. Seldom has there occurred a like mixture of idealism, greed, efficiency, stupidity, potential social good, and political evil. Seldom, surely, has a good idea come so close to realization, and been so decisively slugged." Lustron also made a smaller Newport model in both two- and three-bedroom versions.
Lustrons were given individual serial numbers. Demonstration House #1 was built in New York City (at 56th street, now destroyed) and house #2 in Milwaukee WI. The first house for public sale was #18 in St. Louis MO.
Lustrons came on a truck as a kit and local builders put them together.
Photo of a Lustron house with all the parts laid out.
Info on the largest concentration of Lustrons in America, now gone. Two of the houses are still preserved on the Base, 23 were destroyed in 2006, one was moved, and remaining 34 were destroyed in 2007.
According to Lustron Corporation documents prepared in late 1949, thirty-nine Lustron Homes were sold within the state of North Carolina. Still unaccounted for in North Carolina: according to Lustron expert Tom Fetters, there is a third Lustron in Nashville NC, #2127; four more Lustrons in Wilmington.
