A grid of quiet streets laid out along a streetcar line, every family on a lot of its own: Craftsman bungalows behind open lawns under rows of street trees, shops on the avenue where the cars stop, and a bungalow court round a shared garden; a plausible suburb, not a survey.
In the first decades of the twentieth century the electric streetcar let American cities spread for miles beyond their centres. Developers bought farmland and orchards along the new lines, laid out straight streets, and sold the lots to families who could now ride to work from a house of their own. In southern California, where Pasadena and Los Angeles were growing fast, the house most of them built was the bungalow.
The plans came from the magazines and plan books, Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman first among them, and from builders who repeated them street after street. Each bungalow stands on its own lot, set back the same distance as its neighbours behind a lawn with no fence, so that the gardens run together into one green verge; the porch faces the street, an outdoor room under the main roof, and inside the door the living room is built round its fireplace. Shops stand on the avenue where the streetcar stops.
The bungalow court, first built at Pasadena in 1909, put small bungalows in two rows facing each other across a shared garden walk: a way to give people of modest means, and the winter visitors from the East, a house with a porch and a garden on a single city lot. Click a house for the rule it follows.