Running along both sides of 45th Street east from State Line for three blocks is a small neighborhood business district. Filled mostly with antique shops today, the handsome red brick buildings once housed a grocery, a drug store, a hardware store, a meat market, and at least one “watering hole” for the many workers who rode the electric “streetcars” home from the meat packing plants in Armourdale to their modest homes here in West Plaza. If you look at the asphalt pavement in the intersection of 45th and State Line, you may notice two curved parallel cracks. Buried under the pavement are the steel rails, as this was the point where the streetcar turned around to make its return journey.
West Plaza was strictly blue collar in those days, and most of the homes consisted of three rooms: a small entry “parlor,” a larger central room, and a small bedroom to one side. Dead center in the large room was a wood or coal burning cast-iron stove, which served both to cook the food and to heat the house. Initially, there was no need for basements in these small homes, as they had no furnaces, gas lines, or running water. Instead, the houses were raised a few feet off the ground and rested on brick pilings. Later, as the city brought water lines, gas lines, and sewers into the neighborhood, many of these small homes were raised several feet on hydraulic jacks, to allow a team of laborers to dig out the basements with pick and shovel and construct a stone foundation. This accounts for the low ceiling clearance in many of these older basements.