Budget-Minded Rows Marketed as Dodgertown Eased the Postwar Housing Crunch in East Flatbush

These petite East Flatbush homes won’t get the eye for any architectural extravagance, but the builder arrived up with an interesting marketing and advertising hook and a finances answer to the housing crunch in Brooklyn following Entire world War II.

The title has dropped out of use, but the rows of brick properties on East 45th and East 46th streets among Winthrop Street and Rutland Street were as soon as acknowledged as Dodgertown.

A 1949 advert for the new dwelling growth with a checklist of the promised amenities. Graphic by way of Brooklyn Day-to-day Eagle

Created by builder Milton Steinberg, Dodgertown (spelled Dodger City in the earliest advertisements) was officially introduced in September of 1949 with a very first batch of households that would at some point develop to a micro nabe of much more than 150 a person and two-loved ones homes. It was just just one of the postwar developments by Steinberg, who was fast paced setting up in Queens and Lengthy Island as perfectly as at another Brooklyn growth, Atlantic Houses in Bath Beach.

At Dodgertown, households with constrained incomes had been promised a roomy residence on a budget and a reasonably prolonged listing of amenities in a large ad positioned to boost the new growth in September of 1949. Properties were crafted on poured concrete foundations, experienced insulated roofs, screens in all home windows and “daylight” basements. On the inside there were constructed-in hampers, hardwood or parquet floors, venetian blinds and kitchens with dinettes. Driveways at the rear of the properties offered obtain to hooked up garages.

Driveways driving the properties lead to the connected garages

A row of homes with the smokestack of the hospital in the qualifications

The properties had been FHA inspected and accredited, according to the adverts, and veterans were equipped to set a $1,250 down payment for a $12,000 home compared to the $2,500 for civilians for some of the initial properties made available in 1949. Irrespective of the adverts touting uncomplicated financing and very low prices, the properties likely would not have been an available housing solution for all. The just lately introduced 1950 census documents present the earliest citizens all determined as white. Occupations included manufacturing facility personnel, taxi drivers, plumbers, mail carriers and nurses. That exact same calendar year a child girl was celebrated as the very first arrival of the new neighborhood yet another possibility for a bit of push by the developer.

Crafted in at least 6 sections between 1949 and 1954, distinct brick products ended up introduced, while all remained rather very simple in exterior detailing, though the amount of rooms and amenities on the inside different. In 1950, the new two-tale products arrived finish with metal and concrete bomb shelters in the basement that have been substantial enough to keep a group of 16.

The Dodgertown identify built for a wonderful advertising and marketing ploy but the improvement was not precisely in the shadow of the Dodgers’ dwelling at Ebbets Discipline, positioned extra than a mile to the west, but most likely that provided a more notice-grabbing title than nodding to a closer neighbor, the Kings County Medical center. The Dodgertown title doesn’t appear to have trapped much earlier the 1950s. Undoubtedly the departure of the crew hastened the death of the neighborhood moniker.

[Photos by Susan De Vries]

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