I had a similar problem in my 1937 colonial. The closets were wide but not deep enough to put a hanger in. They had colliapsible hooks that hung on the back wall. The closets were the same in both 2nd & 3rd bedrooms. I removed the closet doors and the moldings, had the closets built out into the room about a foot. Your closets may be deep enough as they are.
We made the closet door opening big enough for sliding doors. The rooms are so small I didn't want to waste the space for regular doors. I took the 2 original closet doors and converted them to sliders for 1 closet. Left the doorknob rosettes on them so act as those little round finger pulls you see on sliding doors. Replicated or re-used as much as I could the molding that was on the original closet. For the 3rd room, I went to restore and for about $30 got 2 more doors (lucky me, they were already sliders so no patch where the hinges came off!) that unless you look really close (the panel trim on the doors is slightly different) they appear to be original to the house. I'm really thrilled the way they both came out and I'm pretty sure no one would know the difference. I'm on my LT and I don't have a pic to post.
I'll see if I have one on my desktop and post later.

Here's a shot of the closet in one room. These are the doors from Restore.

And here's the closet built with the original single doors from the 2 closets (before paint-don't have a finished shot but you get the idea!)

Thanks, these are interesting.

It's hard to tell from the first picture what the exact closet shape is, so I can't help a lot. As it looks to me though, I'd use that upper back area for long-term storage (suitcases, out of season clothing) and put a hanging rod in the lower area.

The other closet is exactly like the closets in my old home. We solved the wide but shallow problem by making them into mini walk-in closets. I posted this diagram on another thread awhile ago about organizing closets.

This is a diagram of our one very wide and shallow closet. We hung double rods perpendicular to the door on the sides and parallel to the door in the middle. It was wide enough to still be able to get to the side clothes with clothing in the middle. Our other closets were not as wide, so we just hung the double rods perpendicular to the door.

Top view then side view. Blue lines are hanging rods and shelves.

If you put the shelves at about 42" and 84"' you can easily reach to hang clothes on the top rods. Or just have a small stool handy. Or whoever is taller gets the top rows. :)

The long hanging side we hung at about 6'. There's still some room on the floor underneath for a laundry basket for dirty clothes.

We used wire shelves and the metal wall-mounted rods. You just need to find the stud and attach it all the way up. It's fairly easy. And then you can move shelves as needed and cut the wire shelves and rods to size. It's pretty inexpensive too! We installed these all the way to ceiling to maximize storage space.