Duluth Deep Dive #7: The Duluth Garage

A friend of mine is putting her childhood home up for sale<, a house in one of Duluth's older neighborhoods with an attached garage. She realized that she wanted her next home to be a similar-style house with that same convenience of not having to go outside to start the car in the winter, but the options in Duluth were very limited. This post places the changing role of the home garage in the context of Duluth history to explain why.

The cultural geographer J.B. Jackson specialized in writing complex histories of the commonplace. In 1976, he published The Domestication of the Garage, an essay that explored how the relationship between the garage and the home has changed over time.

Jackson describes how the first garages belonged to the people who bought the first cars around the beginning of the 20^th century, the ultra-wealthy who had the money to create garages that matched the architecture of their homes. These garages were at some distance from the home, sometimes in converted stables, as the car was a messy machine that required near-constant maintenance. For this reason, quarters for a professional mechanic were often built into a second story of the garage (in both the somewhat anachronistic 1954 version and the very anachronistic 1995 version of Sabrina, the title character is the daughter of a wealthy family’s mechanic, growing up in the house above the garage). A garage of this type can be found at Salyards Mansion on the east side of Duluth.

But after the introduction of the Model T Ford in 1908, the number of people who were able to afford a car grew dramatically, and that decrease in cost created changes in who used cars and how they stored them. For farmers and country doctors, agents, repair professionals, and delivery people, a cheap and reliable car became an essential tool, and where to store it became a practical problem that needed to be solved.

In many cities, people found space in the alley. Garages line the alleyways of Duluth, but these alleys were not created to solve the issue of car storage. The alleys that form a key part of Duluth’s city-grid structure are a relatively recent design form but one that still predates the car. While the alley as a concept has a long history, the specific form and function of Duluth’s alleys have a direct link with James Thompson’s 1830 plan for Chicago, a design copied throughout the Midwest. While Duluth’s 430-foot street lengths are shorter than Chicago’s standard 660-foot streets, both cities have block widths of 330 feet that are divided by 16-foot alleys.

As noted in an extensive history of the alley, these alleys served the household activities that most families preferred to keep out of sight. Stables for the horses were accessed through the alley, kept at a distance from the house because of all the manure the horses produced. Service workers used the alley to deliver firewood and later coal, as well as to empty out the latrines that lined the alleys before indoor plumbing. The alley worked in conjunction with the backyard, a place to access water through wells that also made the backyard a place for laundry and cooking. The alley and adjoining backyard were the spaces that made the work of running a household possible.

It was only much later that the alley became an access point for car storage. Most of the older neighborhoods of Duluth were built with an entirely different form of transportation in mind, constructed in conjunction with the extension of the tram lines. A basic outline of the old tram map still reflects the fundamental layout of the city and its central traffic arterials. The houses were built close together on narrow lots because transit works best along high-density corridors.

The garage was a late addition to the alley — often little wider than the car itself. It was the establishment of the Federal Housing Administration and the rules it created in conjunction with the auto industry that led to a fundamental change in the relationship between the garage and the home. Two of the three rules necessary to get a mortgage and support from the Federal Housing Administration, created as part of a government backlash against urban row houses, resulted in a rapid proliferation of large, attached garages: (1) the house needed to be a single-family free-standing home in a peripheral area and (2) it had to come with a garage (the third rule, unrelated to garages but having a more profound social impact, was that the owner needed to be white).

These new garages were no longer simply places to keep the car protected from the elements; they were an extension of the home in every sense — a place to store frozen food, keep the washer and dryer, set up a workbench** or a workout space, and store everything, including a second car. The average garage in 1915 was about 8 percent of the house’s floor-space size. By 1960, that number had risen to 45.

But Duluth’s population peaked in 1929, and when people moved out of the city, their homes stayed. Duluth had an excess of empty houses and no influx of middle-class white families to take advantage of FHA grants — factors contributing to the city still having the oldest housing stock in Minnesota. In Duluth, 44 percent of housing units were built before 1940, compared with 16 percent statewide. Most neighborhoods in Duluth are still built around a streetcar system that ended in 1939. With the tram lines gone and 80 percent of trips to work in Duluth now made by car, these neighborhoods have been retrofitted for automobility. Some have small garages or a few open parking spaces behind the house, and the sides of most residential streets now serve as car storage for the many instances when no garage was ever built or was so cheaply built that it didn’t last (many of the first garages were prefabricated and portable). There may be a market in Duluth for a three-car garage that also serves as the main entrance to the house — as it now does in 71 percent of U.S. homes — but there isn’t a lot of room to put one on a 25-foot lot in the Central Hillside.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find a house with an attached garage in Duluth. Even if the population has never rebounded past its numbers in 1929, old housing stock has been torn down and new housing additions have been built. The easiest way to find a home with an integrated garage is to compare an aerial image from just after the war, when the relationship between the garage and the home started to shift, with a current aerial image. Any homes found only in the second image will likely have an attached garage.

But if you want a house with the charms of the streetcar suburbs yet the convenience of never having to step out into the cold before your drive to work, the best you can hope for is an owner who found a way to squeeze an attached garage on to a narrow lot, like my friend’s childhood home, built in 1919 with an attached garage added in 1933 with an attached garage added in 1933.

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This month’s Geoguessr Challenge has five rounds starting from the garage in a Duluth alley.

PDD Geoguessr: Garages

More information on how to play Geoguessr can be found here.