Reader question: Why are there two military Quonset huts in the middle of Green Bay?
Answer: “A pop can lying on its side” is one of the ways the November/December 2019 issue of Humanities from the Brown County Library described the pre-fabricated steel design engineers drew up for the military at the place which would lend its name to the product, Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Half-buried soda cans would better describe the two 905 and 907 12th Ave. Quonset huts. Former 907 12th Ave. resident Sue Tompkins told the Press-Gazette in a Feb. 26, 1989, article, the hut “expands and contracts with the temperature changes … that means patching leaks when spring arrives … When it rains, the metal is resonant with raindrops.”
The current residents couldn’t confirm if that was still the case as October turned into November. They declined to be interviewed.
Tompkins’ father, World War II veteran Dwaine Santy, bought the 740-square-foot corrugated steel hut and the concrete below it for $6,000 in 1946 for his parents at the height of a national housing emergency. The Second World War had scattered 9 million Americans across the country, according to the National Park Service, and the War Production Board had banned almost all residential construction. Two months after the war’s end, nearly 1.2 million families shared the same roof as other households, and nearly 3 million new homes would need to be built by 1947 just to keep the status quo.
Tens of thousands of Americans were compelled to consider the innovative — if spartan — Quonset as a roof over their heads.
The November/December 2019 Humanities magazine issue noted in the same year that Tompkins’ father bought the Quonset, thousands camped outside a New York military base for days to buy 811 surplus huts at $275 apiece.
Profiting off of the post-war Quonset boom was the La Plant Steel Building Company along 1017-1019 N. Jackson St., according to Jeff Gilderson-Duwe, a local historican at the Brown County Library.
Their ads in the Press-Gazette proclaimed “Uses Unlimited!” as cheese storage, a school, a rabbit hutch, or an airport office for its 24-foot-wide Quonset hut. It followed in the spirit of experimentation encouraged by the manufacturer of the Quonset huts, Great Lakes Steel Corporation, according to a 1947 architectural magazine.
“One point of interest is that Frank Zeise is listed as having an interest in the La Plant Steel Building Company in 1946,” said Gilderson-Duwe, “and it is Zeise Construction that continued at that address beginning in 1955,” when the La Plant ads dropped off. “I cannot tell if Zeise continued to sell Quonset huts or if that business had dried up.”
The blocks of the military longhouses that had popped up from Neenah to New York were falling out of favor just as quickly in the 1950s as a 10-person team could put one up in a single day in the 1940s, disappearing or transforming into wood-frame houses that didn’t remind veterans of their military days or rattle when it rained.
Not so for the two huts in Green Bay’s Tank Park neighborhood on the west side.
Seen from the air, the Quonsets stick out from the dark squares of their wooden-framed neighbors in aerial photos snapped of Green Bay. The first view from the air available of the city from 1938 shows the two huts were built on empty grass lots.
No records of how many Quonsets were installed in Green Bay exist, Gilderson-Duwe said, so, “we are not able to give you an account of how many there were, where they were, and why they persisted or ‘went away.'”
A roam around the air using available archival photos shows no large neighborhood of Quonsets in Green Bay in the past. The two rounded silhouettes are the only ones known to serve as homes still standing today, their roofs silvery in photos from 1948, 1960, 1978.
Do you have a question about Green Bay? Send them to Jesse Lin at 920-834-4250 or jlin@gannett.com for investigation and an answer every Monday.
