The Home and the American Garage
Common
sense might argue that early garages were built to prevent auto theft. In
reality, they were primarily places for inventing, constructing, and rebuilding
cars, and protecting them from the elements. Pioneer Brass-Era cars were
notoriously loud, dirty, dangerous, and most significantly, very expensive.
They required constant maintenance and needed to be housed in buildings that
were large enough to hold parts and equipment. In addition, they were
sufficiently distant from residences in case of an explosion or fire (the most
frequent source of early auto insurance claims). These structures were converted
carriage houses, barns, and sheds--outbuildings dedicated to transportation
that were sometimes shared with horses and buggies.3 One famous
early garage, sometimes described as the “first” garage, was Henry Ford’s
workshop situated behind his duplex at 58 Bagley Avenue in Detroit where he
made the 1896 Quadricycle. When the contraption was completed, it was too large
to fit through the existing door, so Ford hammered and chiseled a way out,
thereby creating what is arguably the “first” garage door.
Cars
started out as a novelty in the late1890s but had become a necessity by the
1920s and 1930s due to the growth of suburbs. Concurrently, interest grew in
household garages to protect these sometimes temperamental but prized objects. “In
1913, Collier’s magazine warned that
a car stored in an unheated space could end up with a frozen radiator, rattling
doors, bowed fenders, a cracked frame, and flaking paint.”4 Needless
to say, a heated garage was a luxury few could afford, but an enclosed space
was not. By the 1920s, even though most people did not own a garage, it was a
dream to which they aspired.5 President Herbert Hoover knew this
when he promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” during his 1928
presidential campaign. The slogan struck a chord that resonated in the American
psyche. Throughout the Great Depression, detached and attached garages began
popping up across the country.
For
the most part, the focus during the 1930s was on whether to build an attached
garage, a semi-attached garage, or detached garage with an emphasis on
architectural integrity or convenience, but theft was rarely a consideration.6
In fact, though desirable, homebuyers did not always select a garage. From 1933
to 1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. offered home plans in their catalog that gave
people choices--they could build a garage, or a dining nook, or recreation room
and the like, according to their preference. The company also offered freestanding
garages and pergolas for sheltering cars that could be bought separately and
built later.
With
garages came garage door opening systems for both convenience and later,
security. The garage opening devices of the 1920s sometimes used a spring beneath
the driveway that was activated when the driver entered, or a chain or rope
next to the garage door that the driver pulled to open the door.7 However,
the spring doors could injure a family member who happened to be in the garage,
and both mechanisms failed to adequately secure the automobile.
By
the 1930s, companies began to consciously aim at preventing theft and did so through
the use of photoelectric cells or radio signals. These ingenious early systems
were still uncommon and forerunners to the widely-adopted methods of later
years. According to one description:
a photo-electric cell installation . .
. opens doors when [a] light beam . . . is broken. . . . [Alternatively, a]
remote control on [a] standard in [the] drive[way] . . . operate[d] doors
electronically when unlocked, by key, from car. Both from Stanley Works. There
is also a radio type door operator, from Barber-Colman, which works by short
wave from car when you pull knob on dash.8
Remote
control garage door openers of the 1930s generally consisted of a simple
transmitter and receiver that controlled the mechanism. One type was developed
in Spokane, Washington and used a receiver that responded only to a particular
wavelength broadcasted by the spark coil on the car. Another system developed
in Illinois used coded radio signals sent from an instrument board in the car
to an antenna buried in the driveway, which started the electric motor that opened
the garage doors. Although automobile thieves could potentially find the right
radio wave to thwart the Spokane system, they were hard pressed to crack the
Illinois designers’ radio code.9
By
the 1940s, consumers also turned to garage door opening schemes like that of the
Chicago-based Era Meter Company’s “Drive-Rite-In.” It opened the garage door
via a key-operated post at the end of the driveway.10 But for the
most part, these and other devices were largely aimed at making it easier for the
driver to enter the garage.11 Whether detached, semi-attached, or
attached, garages often had separate entry doors with glass windows, making it
very easy to break in.
After
World War II, attached garages became common features of the typical American
suburban home.12 The 1960 US Census enumerated garages for the first
time. With advances in technology, garage door openers were also becoming more
sophisticated. The key system was abandoned for electronic garage door openers.
These devices of the 1950s and 1960s used a simple code method that operated the
garage door with a push of the remote’s button. However, the remote controls had
a “shared frequency”--a garage door was opened by one of five codes--and that
was problematic in its own right. With only five codes, a suburban driver could
well have the same code as their neighbor. Thus, the goods inside of the post-war
suburban garage and indeed even access to the home were easy prey for a
criminal.
By
this time, garages were being used as transitional spaces that linked the
indoors to the outside. They were refuges for playing music, working on hobbies,
storing stuff, washing and drying, and puttering, and driveways were convenient
playgrounds for shooting hoops and roller-skating.13 With few
exceptions, no one in Middle America locked their garage; to the contrary,
garage doors often stayed open day and night.
However,
with crime on the rise during the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans began locking
their garages and companies that sold garage door openers began to devise more
secure systems. By the 1980s, companies placed dual in-line (DIP) switches that
sent between 256 and 4,096 codes from the remote control to the garage door
opener. Criminals were still able to hack this system, however, by trying
multiple codes on a regular transmitter or using code grabbers to attempt every
possible combination in a short period of time. It was not until the late 1990s
that garage door opening systems used “rolling codes” that changed with each
opening of the door, making it almost impossible for thieves to reproduce the
code.14
With
the progressive changes in garage door technology and loss of innocence
associated with leaving the garage door open all night, the garage and its
contents became relatively safe from theft. Automobile insurance underwriting
recognized the effectiveness of the changes in stemming auto theft. Though the
individual home and garage could provide significant protection against auto
theft, for some this was not enough. For those who needed even more assurance,
gated communities that were walled off from the rest of society offered even
greater protection from crime, including auto theft, and their appeal has grown
from the 1990s to the present.
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