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August 1941. "Residential section. Hibbing, Minnesota." The latest thing in houses. Medium format acetate negative by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
There are certainly many businesses that have flat roofs- most of them in fact, so why should it be such a problem for a house?
You really put me on the wrong track Dave, with your caption. Being a foreigner, I am not familiar with the term "trunk road," so I really looked for the meaning of a "trunk stop"!
By the way, in the Netherlands the stop-sign was first introduced in 1941 by ... our German occupiers, in 1951 we changed over to a "European" version, only in 1979 we also got as we called it the "American" style sign:
1109 Minnesota, visible in the original photo with a flat roof, still has a flat roof. Another one in the area is at the intersection of Minnesota and 9th.
the scant brick detail on the chimney is an astute accent; too, the minimal detail on the Dylan house renders the same.
In the street sign, notice the spelling error.
[No typo. It's a Trunk Highway. - Dave]
Who expects that one of these days on these beautiful, or at least interesting, old houses' pictures that we will have a Shorpyite say "Hey, that's MY home!" (and it not be TTerrance because he uploaded a photo of his old home!)
One of these days, someone's going to have their home on Shorpy....
Or maybe we just all need to start a "Geo-Shorpy-Caching" club, to visit some of these interesting places!
What, no one on that trunk highway in 1941 could point southeast and utter the words, "Los Angeles is that-a-way"?
A neighborhood filled with those homes, and that lawn, would look perfect in several southern California municipalities.
In Hibbing, less so.
Does anyone else find the original mid-century modern style of 1129 Minnesota Street more appealing than its present façade?
[I would say it's more Moderne than Modern. - Dave]
Like Bob Dylan sang "a hard rain's gonna fall" on that roof and cause big problems!"
From ngbarnett's "Still There!" photo, it looks like a sloped roof was added. I was wondering how well a large flat roof in Minnesota weather worked out.
I wonder if the current residents have any idea of how hip their house use to be?
Where was the Architect from, Arizona? The flat roof had to be a real issue with all the snow. I'll bet it was a leaker. No surprise that a pitched roof was added at a later date.
I wonder why they evetually added a hipped roof eventually.
Maybe something to do with 54 inches of average annual snowfall in Minesota? 116 inches of precipitation? Naah, surely not.
The good people of Hibbing seem not to have liked this newfangled architecture of the Bauhaus movement. The house has been so modified to almost completely eliminate the Walter Gropius look of the original. The Bob Dylan house is a little less modified, but the stucco and the added decorative elements work towards the same effect.
The house at the corner still exists at 1129 Minnesota Street along the old (Trunk) Highway 169. The smokestacks in the background are part of the Hibbing Public Utilities Commission steam plant.
in Minnesota is just a disaster ready to happen.
Bob Dylan was born just three months earlier in Duluth but grew up in Hibbing. The similarity of his family home to this one is startling.
Not exactly a vision of harmonious (as distinct from homogenous) development.
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