By the 1950s, vintage rowhouses of this kind on the 5501 block of Vine Street were decaying or abandoned. The Public Housing Authority proposed to conserve 200 single homes to be occupied by single families, in the Authority’s first experiment with used housing.
In 1940, 5533 Vine St., the house shown at right in this photo, was the home of Robert Jones, age 49, an African American laborer in building and construction, whose family had resided here as early as 1935. Jones and his wife, Eleonora, age 42, were participants in the Great Migration, born in Georgia and Virginia respectively. Both had seven years of education. Likely a victim of the era’s depressed housing market, in which blacks were the last hired, Robert was unemployed throughout 1939 into 1940. Eleonora was employed for 60 hours weekly throughout 1939 as a maid. Her earnings of $600 for the year ($11,057 in 2019 dollars) may have been this poor family’s only source of income. Their daughter, Eleonora, age 14, was born in Pennsylvania, a fact that suggests the Joneses had migrated north at least by the mid-1920s.
