[milwaukee-electric] Milwaukee-area Lustrons (1948 to 1950)

[Gary Schnabl]

Some 2500 Lustron metal houses were constructed from 1948 to 1950, when 
the firm went bankrupt. Supposedly there were 21 in metro Milwaukee. 
However, only 15 of them have ever been accounted for.
There is a LustronRegistry.(something or other) that is trying the 
account for them all. I have a possible lead on one of them, which was 
present in my neighborhood as a kid, but is no longer there. The vast 
majority of the Lustrons are still standing today--many almost identical 
in appearance to what they looked like over 60 years ago. Some were 
resided, but few were demoed.

Because these houses were constructed during the time frame for much of 
Milwaukee's traction history, would anybody know where some of those 
unaccounted-for Milwaukee Lustrons might be? I thought that Henry Aaron 
lived in one either during 1954 or 1955 some six blocks from where I 
lived, so the registry folks are working on that angle.

The Lustron #2 (a factory demonstrator) was opened in April or May of 
1848 at 3802 West Capitol Drive and was on my uncle's Sentinel route 
when he was 15 years old, a year after he moved in with my young parents 
after his mother in Dearborn MI died a few years earlier. One can google 
that address for an aerial or street map search in case anybody forgot 
what a Lustron looked like.

The Lustrons were all manufactured at the former Curtiss-Wright WWII 
airplane factory in Columbus OH and trucked to their sites in special 
trucks, which advertised the product enroute.


Gary
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Gary Schnabl
Southwest Detroit, two miles NORTH! of Canada--Windsor, that is...