A New Idea of Home: Closter's Lustron House

Here at Hidden New Jersey, we’re big fans of lemonade makers – entrepreneurial spirits who make the most of what some less creative folks might find to be a problem. Edison’s Portland cement business, for example, capitalized on crushing technology that had been used in the inventor’s ill-fated iron ore mining venture, eventually leading to an outstanding, durable concrete product. As you’ll recall from our previous travels, Edison extolled the virtues of the product for use in everything from road surfaces to inexpensive and quickly-erected housing developments.

Another example of ingenuity stands at 421 Durie Avenue in Closter. The one-story enamel-clad home and garage is one of a handful of still-extant examples of a company’s efforts to overcome one post-World War II crisis by attempting to solve another. Originally owned by the Hess family, the house is one of the 2680 prefabricated housing units made by the Lustron Corporation, a division of Chicago Vitreous Enamel Company. It would be no surprise if it puts you in the mind of mid-20^th century prefabricated structures like gas stations – Chicago Vit made those, too. Expanding into the post-World War II housing business was one executive’s means of keeping the company in business when the supply of steel was scarce and regulated by the federal government.

Before we get to the business end, though, let’s take a look at the Lustron House that’s been lovingly restored by dedicated friends and the Closter Historical Society. I checked it our on a pre-COVID weekend afternoon during one of its monthly open houses, announced on the Friends of the Hess Lustron House Facebook page.   

The Lustron’s enamel-clad panels and boxy form make it easy to spot among the other homes in the neighborhood. A distinctive zig-zag metal pillar holds up the corner of the roof over a small concrete porch that leads to the front door. Walk through that door, and you’re already in a small living room, tastefully decorated with 1950’s era furnishings. You’d expect that a metal house would feel antiseptic, but it felt cozy despite the metal walls and ceiling, and the linoleum flooring underfoot. As manufactured, the house was equipped with radiant heat, which oddly worked through the ceiling panels, rather than the floor.

Just to the left of the living room, there’s a dining area with a pass-through opening in the adjacent wall.

Step through the doorway and you’re in a small but well-appointed kitchen whose cupboards are stacked with Boontonware tableware and 50’s era grocery items. A mid-century range/oven and refrigerator stand ready for use.

An adjacent laundry room still holds a rotary clothes press on a desk with matching chair – the perfect setting for a mid-century homemaker to continue with her chores even as she rested her feet. The only thing missing from the Hess domestic executive’s original domain was the Thor Automagic, a space-saving combination clothes washing machine, dishwasher and kitchen sink. Yes, you read that right! The same innovative device could wash your clothes and your dinner plates, though not at the same time. Like many other Lustron homeowners, the Hess family eventually discovered that the Thor left much to be desired. Perhaps they grew weary of having to change out the machine’s drums; in any case, they replaced Thor with a standard sink that remains today.

Two bedrooms and a full bath make up the remainder of the house, each with a space-saving pocket door to afford privacy.

The master bedroom feels fairly spacious, with plenty of built-in storage that brought to mind an oversized office cubicle, but without the cloth wall panels. Metal-doored closets stood on either side of a long, built-in vanity backed by counter to ceiling mirrors that lend depth to the room. The second bedroom, decorated with vintage toys, games and a typewriter, probably would have been cramped living quarters for siblings to share. A Fort Lee High School banner was stuck to the wall with magnets, a reminder that interior décor in a Lustron couldn’t rely on the typical hammer and nails to hang pictures or keepsakes. You could, however, decorate your bedroom wall with refrigerator magnets!

Apart from the large enamel tiles lining the walls, the sole bathroom in the house is pretty typical for a mid-century house. The only replacement seems to be the sink and vanity combo, which ironically seems the most worn of anything in the home.

The entire house is less than 1100 square feet: tight quarters for today’s McMansion families but pretty much the standard for starter housing in postwar America. A Lustron would have felt spacious for young couples relegated to living with their parents and in-laws due to post-war housing shortages.

It might have been just the ticket for recently-married Harold Hess. Lustron caught his eye during a 1949 visit to Palisades Amusement Park, where a model was displayed by the company's local dealer, Better Living Homes of Maplewood. For less than $10,000, the dealer promised that a team of his workers could build the house in less than 360 man hours.

The house purchased, Hess needed a place to put it. He originally hoped to build in Fort Lee but found local planning and zoning boards less than receptive to an enamel-clad house. After a six-month ordeal, he found building codes to be more lenient in Closter, where he got clearance to build at the corner lot at Durie Avenue and Legion Place. The company delivered all the parts for its Westchester model home to the site in one of its trademark tractor trailers, ready for assembly, complete with an optional garage and enclosed connector corridor.

The Lustron Corporation promised a low-maintenance house, and apparently that’s what they delivered. Aside from the problematic Thor Automagic and some predictable wear on light switches and some of the cabinetry, the place looks pretty darn good. The walls and ceilings could be rubbed down with a little wax when they needed touching up.

With all of these advantages, why isn’t Lustron still in business today? A litany of issues arose fairly quickly, due to poor planning that couldn't be overcome by the extensive sales campaign that had gotten so many people excited about the future of prefab steel homes. In fact, Hess reportedly felt fortunate to get his house at all, given that the company was headed into bankruptcy.

In creating a national sales network, the Lustron folks apparently didn’t consider the expense and complications of shipping their product from their Ohio factory to building sites throughout the country. The interstate highway system was yet to be built, and shipping by train would still require transport from railyard to the ultimate destination. The Lustron Corporation was left to create its own shipping infrastructure, using specially-designed trucks that could accommodate the full weight of an entire house. Needless to say, it was neither easy nor inexpensive to ship individual homes. Tract homes could be built much less expensively and were.

Then there were the financial issues. Lustron executives had relied on substantial government assistance to get the business going, securing a $37 million loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Depression-era federal entity that made loans to banks, railroads and other businesses. Delays in getting the business up and running, however, meant that the company had missed the peak of the housing crisis. After 20 months of production, Lustron was still losing money on every house it produced, leaving it unable to repay its loan. The RFC foreclosed, and Lustron declared bankruptcy, leaving 8000 contracts unfulfilled.

Still, with luck and love, some of the homes the Lustron Corporation did manage to build are still standing today. One has even been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. Harold Hess lived in the Closter house for half a century, satisfied with his purchase but for the occasional need to find handymen with the creativity to repair things in a metal house.  

History revised, Cornwallis redirected: Closter Landing and the times that try mens' souls

After a visit to the State Line Lookout hawkwatch in Palisades Interstate Park, we took an exploratory drive literally down the cliff to Alpine Landing. Once known as Closter Landing or Closter Dock, this sea-level portion of the park offers easy access to the Hudson River and once served as a terminal point for ferries traversing between New Jersey and New York. It also provides an interesting lesson in the ways history can become distorted or revised, based on faulty information or the passage of time.

Mistakes were made...

According to an old historic marker at the base of the Palisades, the British took advantage of this favorable landing spot on November 18, 1776, starting the chain of events which resulted in the evacuation of Fort Lee (the military installation, not the town) and Washington's retreat across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. You might recall that we covered this unhappy turn of events after our visit to New Bridge Landing last year. Once across the Hudson, the troops were said to have taken a stone paved road up the embankment, then turning south to reach Fort Lee. What's more, their commander, General Lord Cornwallis, is said to have appropriated a nearby house and tavern for his headquarters. Some even said that the tavern's owner, Rachel Kearney, served beverages to Cornwallis as he plotted his troops' next moves.

The house and the road are still there, but the story is off by a distance and a few days. As a much newer, adjacent waymarking sign states, the actual date was November 20, and scholarship now proves that Cornwallis' troops landed at a place known as Huyler's Landing about a mile to the south. The timing error, it seems, may have been due to some hasty record-keeping by a British officer. In any case, the nearby road was no doubt used by generations of travelers and locals who plied the river, but it most likely was not trod by invading Redcoats.

The Kearney House, awaiting post-Sandy restoration.

It's doubtful that the house's history includes a general's stay, and Mrs. Kearney wasn't born until 1780, four years after the British crossed the Hudson that November. She and her second husband, James Kearney, didn't move into the home until 1817. Still, historians have it on fairly reliable word that Rachel converted the family home to a tavern after James' death in 1831, eventually building an addition to accommodate more business and lodgers. It was a savvy move, as the site was landing point for many river travelers and even hosted a steam-powered oat and coffee mill starting in the 1860s. The tavern kept rivermen fed and in good spirits until it was purchased by the Palisades Interstate Park Commission in 1907 as part of a larger plan to preserve the Palisades and build a public recreation area.

Today, the Kearney house stands as a reminder of habitation and industry at Alpine Landing, though it currently wears the evidence of 21st century intervention. The small white wood and stone structure was inundated by floodwaters during Hurricane Sandy, and plywood covers the lower windows as well as a large hole in a lower wall. Restoration is underway, based on the meticulous documentation the Commission has done of the building over the past century. Fortunately, the park and volunteers anticipated the potential for flooding and moved many artifacts to the upper floors before the storm, though other pieces were later retrieved from various spots on the landing where the storm had deposited them.

Closter to nature: preserving the wild in Bergen County

A couple of weeks ago we headed up to the State Line Lookout of Palisades Interstate Park to make a quick check of the hawk watch area. This has got to be one of the most easily accessible hawk watches in the region: drive up, park your car and stroll a couple dozen feet on level ground. No hiking at all is necessary to get to this spot, which sits at an elevation of 532 feet above the shores of the Hudson River.

Winged traffic was light that day, and we'll be making a return trip in the next couple of weeks. That left us with an opportunity to wander around the northernmost part of Bergen County.

Bopping around a bit, we eventually found ourselves in Closter, driving past what looked like a huge mud puddle. What we discovered was the Closter Nature Center, a 136 acre nature preserve in the midst of upper Bergen County suburbia. A smallish log cabin facing the puddle had a welcoming porch and an outdoor fireplace, a perfect place to view what we assumed had to have been a nice little marshy lake.

The Nature Center was established in 1962, after Closter's town council, worried about land overdevelopment, set aside 80 acres of woods, wetlands and streams for preservation. It was a wise and visionary decision, especially considering the severe lack of open space in Bergen County. Since then, the center has added more land through state and local Green Acres funding, ensuring that community residents always have a place to escape the man-made world and reconnect with the natural.

But why the big mud puddle? We stopped in to find out and luckily ran into one of the organization's officers, who explained that they were in the midst of a major rehabilitation effort. Ruckman Pond, as it's called, is actually man-made, having been dredged from swamp in 1959 as a skating area. (That explained the fireplace on the cabin porch -- it acted as a warming station for chilled skaters and their friends.) After years of sediment, falling leaves and decomposing aquatic plants settling to the floor of the pond, water quality and oxygen levels began to suffer, endangering the wildlife that had made it a home. The only way to save the fragile ecosystem was to drain, dredge and refill it, a process highly dependent on the weather.

Once most of the water was removed from the pond, earth moving equipment shifted the sediment around so it could dry sufficiently to be carted off for composting. It took most of the summer, but the job was finished shortly before our visit. By the time we got there, rain had already started to refill the pond, and a few turtles and birds were exploring their newly-cleaned home.

That leads us to one of the most daunting parts of the whole restoration effort:: relocating the animals that lived in the pond. Can you imagine having to find emergency housing for frogs, turtles, snails and crayfish? That's exactly what the nature center's volunteers and staff had to do, and while some creatures unfortunately didn't survive the disruption, many others have and will be reintroduced to the pond as soon as water levels return to the appropriate stage.

The pond is the big story of late, but it's just part of draw. Three miles of trails bring you through a lovely bit of woods, and while we didn't hear much bird chatter during our midday visit, it's likely a great place for kids or other new birders to discover various avian species in the early morning hours. The center also offers programming to introduce young people to the many creatures and plants native to the suburbs.