1942 Home Prices Have 2007 Equivalents
BY LINDA J. WILSON

Photo carnut.com A Studebaker Champion sedan, one of the least expensive cars on the market, would have cost $730, or $8,797 in 2001.

In September 1942 the United States had been at war with the Axis Powers for almost 10 months. New York had ended night baseball games for the rest of World War II and Irving Berlin's musical revue "This Is the Army" opened at the Broadway Theater in New York on July 4. Firstclass stamps were three cents each, the subway fare was five cents a ride, and passengers paid with a token. Service ended on the Second Avenue El, and the line was demolished.

An advertisement for "The New Imperial Homes", a development of two-story, one-family attached brick homes on a landscaped plot at 28th Street and 21st Avenue in Astoria noted that the five-cent-a-ride subway fare would take commuters from the Ditmars Avenue station (as it was then) to Times Square in 20 minutes.

Besides the five-cent subway fare and the easy and fast commute, the uncertainty and looming perils of the war made the safety and security of owning one's home a strong selling point. "Never was it so important to provide for yourself and your family the protection, moral uplift and healthful influence of a pleasant home of their own," an advertisement for the new neighborhood proclaimed. "Never was it so important to economize- to give yourself the protection and assurance of a sound investment which will lighten the load of living expenses and safeguard you against the rising tide of rentals."

For a total price of $5,690 ($1,490 cash down payment and a 20-year mortgage of $4,200), one Domenico Donato, father of current Community Board 1 Chairman Vinicio Donato, bought one of the New Imperial Homes dwellings, paying $38.93 a month (monthly carrying charges of $26.58 in interest and payment on the mortgage, approximately $11 in taxes, 75 cents for water and sewer and 60 cents for insurance).

Their $38.93 a month payment bought the Donato family a house that featured an entrance porch with an outside electric fixture, front door chimes, an entrance vestibule with a guest closet, a large (12.3 by 16.2-foot) living room from which a "graceful winding staircase" led to the second floor, a "regular" dining room measuring 8.4 by 12.3 feet, a "complete" kitchen (6.9 by 12.3 feet) with custom-built cabinets, a broom closet, linoleum floor and "table top range", airy bedrooms on the second floor- a 13.11 by 15-foot master bedroom and a 9.2 by 3.6 second bedroom, a "colored tile bath" with shower, spacious closets, including a linen closet, oak flooring throughout, modern electric fixtures, in the basement a complete oil burner unit to heat the house and an established community with paved streets, sidewalks and curbs and fully improved with water, electricity and sewers "in and paid for" near schools, churches and shopping and Astoria Park, which, according to the list of features, boasted "the largest swimming pool in the world".

Before the reader begins to lament times gone by, however, note that in 1942 the average annual wage was $1,492 ($17,979 in 2001, the latest year statistics were available), and the minimum wage was 30 cents an hour. Donato's new house, a home that cost $5,690 in 1942, would have added up to some 300 percent of his annual wage. (The same house would have cost $71,805, or $498.21 a month in 2007.)

In 1942 if Donato pere needed to buy a Hoover vacuum cleaner for his new house, he would have paid $48.95 ($590 in 2001) and worked 163.17 hours at the average annual wage to pay for it. A Frigidaire refrigerator for his new kitchen would have cost $167.50 ($2,018 in 2001) and working for the average annual wage of $1,492, Donato would have had to put in 558.33 hours at his job for it. A loaf of bread cost eight cents- the equivalent of almost $1 in 2001, a quart of milk was 14 cents (2001 equivalent $1.69), a pound of coffee 24 cents ($2.89, 2001), a pound of butter 41 cents ($4.94, 2001) and a pound of sugar that cost 6 cents in 1942 would run 70 cents in 2001.

A new RCA Victor radio to bring in the news of the war would have cost $19.95 ($240 in 2001). If the Donato family were music lovers, an inexpensive Philco radio-phonograph (phonographs reproduced music on large, flat, easily broken records) would have cost $59.95, the equivalent of $722 in 2001 dollars. Had the Donato family wanted to buy a car- unlikely, as gas and tire rationing went into effect early in the war- a Studebaker Champion sedan, one of the least expensive cars on the market, would have cost $730, or $8,797 in 2001, and Donato would have worked 2,433.33 hours for it. At the other end of the automotive scale, a Cadillac that cost $4,045 in 1942 and $48,742 in 2001 would have required an average worker earning the average annual wage to put in 13,483.33 hours at work before he could call it his own.

Sources: 1941 Commemorative Yearbook, Times Passages, Inc. 1999, LaMartin.com (www.lamartin.com/ ASP/costofliving/cost.asp).