Photo by Henry “Mac” Mizuki, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
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Granite City is named not for the rock but instead for graniteware—those midnight-blue enamel pans speckled with white dots that look like a night sky. When it was founded in 1896 as a steel mill company town, Granite’s No. 1 export was patterned dishware; the mill workers hailed from Armenia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, Mexico, and Russia, and settled immediately around the mills in a neighborhood called Lincoln Place (nicknamed “Hungary Hollow,” during the first waves of immigration, then “Hungry Hollow” during the Great Depression). Seventy years later, when this photo was taken, the mills made trains and trusses, not pots, and were so large they resembled a city filled with brightly lit towers, squiggly pipes, and flame-topped smokestacks. It was the 1960s, the era of upward and onward, the era of suburban migration. So these Granite City housewives were easily lured onto a bus for a sales tour of Paddock Woods subdivision in North County. The name makes no sense—a horse enclosure in the woods?—but that odd image strikes straight at the heart. Horses are for people of means and leisure. Fairytales take place in the woods. The woods are full of sunshine filtered by tree branches, wildflowers, and juicy green grass. It didn’t matter that these were the same ranch houses being built in Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Metropolis, Annapolis, and Boise. You got to pick your carpets and finishes. You got a picture window that looked out over a stretch of lawn. And that picture window had a view of a sky unclouded with ash, and air that smelled like nothing but air.
