Dingbat (building)

A dingbat is a type of apartment building, named for the midcentury-style visual motifs on its exterior, that flourished in the Sun Belt region of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s as a vernacular variation of the shoebox style. Dingbats are boxy two or three story apartment houses with overhangs sheltering street-front parking, built by converting single-family lots into multi-family housing while still providing parking. Mainly found in Southern California but also in Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada and Vancouver, they remain in wide use as affordable housing and have drawn later interest as examples of Mid-Century modern design, though their tuck-under parking can create a structurally vulnerable soft story.