Grandpa Leslie Johnson, a creative man of many talents, bought a triangular shaped lot in St. Louis Park in the late 1950’s. By that time, he’d spent a few decades building postwar housing in the Minneapolis suburb and claimed to have built 170 homes in the prior 17 years. But his triangular lot was a new challenge for him. The lot defied conventional home building practices of those days where the norm was 2-bedroom, 1-bath bungalows on 40-foot lots. Millions of veterans wanted homes and the Veteran Administration home loans required little or no money down. Grandpa was part of that housing boom.
A search for an architect to design a home to fit the weird lot brought Gene Gellert to Grandpa Leslie. Together, the two designed a crooked little house that reputedly did not have a square corner in it. Essentially, the home was shaped like a parallelogram to accommodate the long lot which was 104 feet long and tapered from a width of 80 feet to a point. This diminishing width was the challenge.
There was not a conventional 90 degree angle to be found in the place, except where the walls met the ceilings and the floors. Nonetheless, the home they designed and built was a massive split level with a gorgeous, soaring cathedral ceiling in the living room – somewhat of a novelty in 1959. There was a wide open staircase from the main floor leading to a kitchen with an island cooktop on the upper level. The home had a lot of glass and stonework, and a square bathtub in the main bathroom. I bathed in that tub as a child. To my young eyes, it was as large as a swimming pool.
This project was quite a change from the standard little postwar bungalows Leslie had been building for many years, and the challenge encouraged his creativity. He produced a beautiful contemporary home that belied the ‘Crooked Little House’ label and generated a lot of very positive publicity, including a half-page article in the Sunday Star Tribune, May 1960. Grandparents Leslie and Alice Johnson occupied the home for a few years before eventually selling it and moving on to their next adventure.
The crooked little house still stands at 4701 W. 40th Street, St. Louis Park, MN. Even though it’s now 60 years old and is dated, it looks lovingly cared for. It is the legacy of a creative man whose talents may not have been fully appreciated in his lifetime.
RUNS IN THE FAMILY 