Richland, Wash. –
The seventh annual Winter Wonderland and HAPO Festival of Lights kicks off Friday at John Dam Plaza in Richland. This year the latest alphabet home scale model is set to debut.
The mini homes are replicas of the government-built houses designed during World War II to house thousands of workers at the Hanford site.
Spokane-based architect Gustav Pehrson was in charge of the planning of an entire community consisting of hundreds of single and multi-family homes nicknamed the Alphabet houses.
They are called Alphabet homes because each floor plan is named after a letter in the alphabet.
The homes were manufactured to be temporary and built at a rapid rate to keep up with the growing population.
Richland Parks and Recreation volunteers Nancy Doran and Teresa Knirck live in one of these homes.
“These were not built as permanent houses and here we are. I live in an ‘F’ house and mine was built in 1944… it’s solid,” said Doran. “Houses have changed, people have done wonderful adaptations to them, but the neighborhoods are still very much alphabet neighborhoods.”
Construction wasn’t fast enough to meet the needs of the Manhattan Project planners. People would be put on a waitlist and had to go down to the housing office to check their position on the list.
“People would go down weekly to see how their name would move up on the list to see if they indeed got a nice ‘F’ house or even a new ‘L’ which had four bedrooms,” said Knirck.
In 1958 Richland was no longer a government town but a self-sufficient “Class A” city and the government was selling these buildings at a discounted rate of 10% off the selling price.
In 2019 Richland Parks and Recreation started making replicas of the Alphabet homes and displaying them in John Dam Plaza for the Winter Wonderland and HAPO Festival of Lights.
Julie Jackson, the recreation manager for Richland Parks and Recreation, says these replicas are built by staffers.
“Each year we say which house should we build. The guys get really excited and they choose one and build it to debut for the Winter Wonderland in John Dam Plaza,” said Jackson.
This year the replica is a pre-fabricated model Alphabet house.
The houses will be decorated with Christmas lights at the Winter Wonderland event starting this Friday.