West Albany, Albany, Oregon

West Albany is a neighborhood of Albany, Oregon, United States.[1] It includes the Fir Oaks subdivision.

Fir Oaks

Established in 1948, the Fir Oaks Addition is a subdivision situated near Liberty Elementary School in the West Albany area of Albany, Oregon, United States. Its property includes 27th and 28th Avenue, Park Terrace SW, Lawnridge SW and part of Lakewood Drive.[2] Guidelines for home development and ownership were laid out in the Fir Oaks Addition Charter. It mandated strict requirements to create a neighborhood affordable only for wealthy Albany residents.[3] Developers chose the Ranch-style house as their common design module. Yet, these homes were not the regular 1000 square foot box plans that dominated domestic architecture during this post-World War II period.[4] They were larger versions, of the Split-Level Ranch, Raised Ranch or California Ranch styles that offered more square footage.[5]

In the 1960s, new home owners in Fir Oaks chose new customized designs that differed from the Ranch-style. These new designs filled up the vacant lots among the neighborhood's existing Ranch-style homes. The last lot was sold in the mid-1970s.[6]

Rural country

In 1945, Albany's city boundary extended from the downtown region along the Willamette River out toward 10th street. The area surrounding it, known as "rural country," was farmland.[7] A farm located south of the Bureau of Mines became the new property for the Fir Oaks Addition in 1948. Owned by John Elbert Elder and his wife Beatrice, the lot included land around Oak Creek and the land located westward near the creek's end at the Calapooia River.[8] Not much is known about the Elder family. A small creek off of Oak Creek and a house located in Albany's Monteith Historic District carry the name of Cathey Elder after one of their decedents; city records provide nothing else.[9]

Charter

The Fir Oaks Addition Charter of 1948 is an example of charters written for housing developments created to segregate race and social classes.[10] The major requirements laid out by the Fir Oaks Addition Charter are listed below:

  • Each lot must be a minimum of half an acre
  • Each home must have street frontage of at least 150 feet
  • Each home must have a minimum selling cost of $12,500
  • No subdividing within a property lot
  • No African American owners allowed[11]

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average home in Oregon cost $8,500 in 1950 while the Fir Oaks Addition Charter required $12,500 or more for homes. The average annual cost of living for the state was $3,000.[12] The higher cost creates a limitation then for owners who did not have an income higher than the state average. Population: 1.565 In 1914, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. adopted deed restrictions to prohibit Mexican-Americans from becoming owners in his development of Spanish colonial houses located in Palos Verdes, California.[13] Later in 1923, developer J.C. Nichols built a Country Club District restricting billboards and African-American owners close to Kansas City.[14] This form of "exclusivity" as Dolores Hayden calls it in her book Building Suburbia, she claims was common among developers, especially in the 1950s.[15] The industry boom, after World War II in 1946, produced a consumer culture that wanted everything to be bigger and better.[16] White-collar and upper-middle-class families wanted to live in big houses among prosperous neighbors, developers helped to make this so.[17]

One of the families that lived in the Fir Oaks Addition was the Ralston family. Their family owned Ralston Motor Company along Lyon Street in downtown Albany. The Ralstons bought two homes in Fir Oaks, one on 3210 Park Terrace and the other on 2710 Park Terrace.[18] City records indicate that Josephine Ralston, mother of Rolla and Robert Ralston and joint partners of the family's new and used car business, was one of the first residents in Albany to have a telephone installed in her home.[19] Many original owners or their immediate descendants still reside in the Fir Oaks Addition, according to the 2000 census, meaning that the neighborhood has remained predominantly Caucasian.[20]

References
  1. "Neighborhoods", City of Albany
  2. "Fir Oaks Addition". City of Albany. Retrieved March 16, 2011.
  3. Fir Oaks Addition Charter 1948, Linn County Courthouse Archives
  4. Marcus Wiffen, Frederick Koeper. American Architecture 1607-1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1981), 412. "Meet the newest historic building in your neighborhood – the Ranch" Albany Historic Building News May 2010, 4.
  5. City of Albany, "Info Hub," accessed March 18, 2011, <http://infohub.cityofalbany.net/infohub/>.
  6. "Info Hub."
  7. Map of Albany, 1945.
  8. Albany & Rural Routes Directory (Albany, OR: Valley Credit Service Collections, 1950), E Section.
  9. Albany & Rural Routes Directory, 1950.
  10. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York City: Vintage Books, Inc, 2003), 69.
  11. Fir Oaks Addition Charter, 1948.
  12. City of Albany, "Albany Census Data," accessed March 18, 2011, <http://www.cityofalbany.net/about/census/>.
  13. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 1990) 172-173.
  14. Hayden, 68.
  15. Hayden, 69.
  16. Marcus Wiffen, Frederick Koeper. American Architecture 1607-1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 412.
  17. Hayden, 69.
  18. Albany & Rural Routes Directory (Albany, OR: Valley Credit Service Collections, 1962).
  19. Robert Potts, Remembering When: A Photo Collection of Historic Albany, Oregon (Albany, OR: Library of Congress Catalog, 1990), 14
  20. City of Albany, "Albany Census Data," accessed March 18, 2011, <http://www.cityofalbany.net/about/census/>.

44.6150°N 123.1204°W / 44.6150; -123.1204

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