Two Men Posing at a New Brick Ranch House, No. 1183, 1950s

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Two Men Posing at a New Brick Ranch House, No. 1183, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Men Posing at a New Brick Ranch House, No. 1183, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-DF48BF

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Somebody just bought a house, and the whole point of buying a house in the 1950s was standing in front of it with your hands on your hips until the fact of ownership sank in. The older man in the white shirt has the stance down cold, the posture of a man who has read the deed twice and intends to enjoy every square foot of it, brick veneer included. His younger companion, sweater buttoned against a fall chill, manages the same pose with less conviction, the look of a nephew or new son-in-law recruited to admire someone else's mortgage.

The house itself is doing its own kind of showing off. Wrought-iron porch supports twist themselves into decorative scrollwork that holds up nothing structurally important, a flourish builders added because plain steel posts looked like they belonged on a gas station instead of a home. The brass numerals over the door, 1183, exist so the postman and the assessor never have to guess, proof that even pride needs an address.

A two-car layout, a picture window, a roofline pitched wide enough to announce itself from the street: this was the postwar promise delivered on schedule, one ranch house at a time. Nobody in the frame looks like they suspect that in fifty years the neighborhood will look exactly the same and be worth arguing about for entirely different reasons.

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