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Abstract
The design of affordable housing is a pursuit inextricably linked to the project of modernism. In New York City the achievements of its housing authority would become immediately recognizable for their uncompromised realization of modern architecture’s promise for the future – reductive appearance, essential interior arrangements, and a siting defined by the elimination of the preexisting urban fabric. Without the idealistic cover of modernism, the enterprise can now be recognized as anti-urban from the start. Today, the superblock sites of low-income housing continue to stand alone as stigmatized suburban anomalies. This paper looks back at the birth of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and asks what if in 1937, following the completion of both First Houses by Frederick Ackerman and Williamsburg Houses by William Lescaze, it was the radical banality of First Houses that had been embraced as the more appropriate template for the future? Could our future city have become more equitable?
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the Pratt Institute Undergraduate Architecture Department and its Chair, Erika Hinrichs, for their Research Topics initiative and to the students that assisted in this work: Jason Kim, Emma Stephens, and Elizabeth Gomez. And to Anna Oldakowski for her graphic contributions.
Notes
1. First Houses began as an experiment in partial demolition and then renovation of existing tenement houses. The strategy of removing intermittent buildings had been recommended by Clarence Stein as far back as 1920 as a practical and economical way to deal with urban renewal on the Lower East Side. See Landmarks Preservation Commission Report No. 6, LP-0876. 12 Nov. 1974, 1 in the NYCHA Archives. Gabrielle Esperdy cites the Mumford’s Skyline column in her compelling article that puts forth the argument that nearly all non-tenement housing, perimeter block as well as later tower-in-the-park public housing, was part of the same decongestive zeitgeist. See Gabrielle Esperdy, “Defying the Grid: A Retroactive Manifesto for the Culture of Decongestion,” Perspecta 30 (1999): 10–33.
2. Lewis Mumford, “Skyline,” The New Yorker, December 7, 1935, 105–106.
3. Mumford moved to Sunnyside in 1925 and stayed 11 years, commenting, “Though our own means were modest, we contrived to live in an environment where space, sunlight, order, color – these essential ingredients for either life or art – were constantly present, silently molding all of us.’’ See Jr Howard Gillette, Civitas by Design: Building Better Communities, from the Garden City to the New Urbanism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 34.
4. Esperdy cites “$6.05 Per Room in Manhattan.” Architectural Forum, Jan. 1936, 67 and Walter Kruesi, “Cost Analysis: The First Municipal Housing Experiment,” Real Estate Record, September 19, 1936, 7–11. The latter was also reported in “The Cost of Housing,” New York Times, January 25, 1936; “‘First Houses’ Cost Held $10,000. A Room,” New York Times, September 25, 1936; and “First Houses Cost Defended by Post,” New York Times, September 26, 1936.
5. First Houses was landmarked in 1974 as a “bold innovation in planning.” It is recognized by NYCHA as one of its three most unique and enduring projects. See Design Department and Capital Projects Department, New York City Housing Authority, “History of New York City Housing Authority's Housing & Urban Design” (paper presented at the annual AIA Convention, New York City, June 21–23, 2018). It always has been and remains today a popular housing project among its tenants. See Lindsey Smith, “Happy 80th Birthday to America’s ‘First Experiment’ in Public Housing,” Bedford + Bowery, January 2, 2015.
6. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 209.
7. Ackerman was a longtime leading participant in the Technocracy movement. Fellow RPAA members Robert Kohn, Charles Whitaker, and Lewis Mumford were also members, as was Langdon Post. Based on the cultural critique and economic theory of Thorsten Veblen, it strategized the implementation of a more socially benevolent economic system in lieu of capitalism. Following the U.S. economy’s near-collapse in 1929, technocracy was widely embraced. Veblen had envisioned the system as being administered by a “soviet of technical experts, systems engineers following the certainty of facts working for the general good.” It seems that it was in this spirit that what is today called the Design Department at NYCHA was originally identified as its Technical Department. See Leroy Allen, “Technocracy: A Popular Survey,” Social Science, 8, no. 2 (1983): 175–188.
8. Perry’s neighborhood plan formalized a set of ideas that had been coalescing since the introduction of comprehensive urban planning during World War I. It recommended housing 5–6,000 people, including community institutions like schools, commercial storefronts for shops as well as open recreational spaces. But he also proposed a more disruptive internal street system favoring organic patterns and requiring the superblocking of sites. Stein and Wright would inadvertently prove the fallacy of the superblock requirement at Sunnyside Gardens where their plan was integrated with the extant street grid. The neighborhood plan, it was suggested, would provide esthetic and psychological as well as economic value. See Clarence Perry, “Planning a Neighborhood Unit,” American City, Sept. 1929, 124. See also Johnson Donald, “Origin of the Neighborhood Unit,” Planning Perspectives Journal 17, no. 3 (2002): 227–246.
9. Opposition to public housing in the United States had long been ideological. It was simply too intertwined with Socialism. Only with the unleashing of unrest and discontent during the Depression were those in power willing to adopt more radical agendas, including public programs of employment and housing. And even then, they were still vigorously opposed by the private housing lobby. See Peter Marcuse, “Interpreting ‘Public Housing’ History,” Journal of Architectural and planning Research 12, no. 3 (1995): 242.
10. The comment was made in conjunction with Johnson and Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. See Caroline Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 28. Also quoted in Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 183.
11. The perimeter block apartment was not technically an invention of this period, just the one in which we see the greatest creative and capital investment. Some of the earliest examples are by Alfred Treadway White with the Tower Buildings and Warren Place in 1877 and Riverside Houses in 1890, both in Brooklyn. See Plunz, A History of Housing of Housing in New York City, Chapter 4. For a more international sampling of perimeter block/courtyard investigations see also Wolfgang Sonne, “Dwelling in the Metropolis: Urbanity as Paradigm in Modern Housing, 1890–1940,” Positions No. 1 (2010): 122–145.
12. A sampling of Projects by Andrew Thomas are: Linden Court 1919–21, Hays Avenue Apartment 1922, Chateau Cooperative Apartments 1922, The Towers 1923, Ivy Court 1924, Cedar Court 1924, Spanish Gardens 1924, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. 1926 (3 locations), Dunbar Apartments 1928, Thomas Garden Apartments 1928, and Dunolly Gardens 1939. The Metropolitan Life Buildings are perhaps the most austere of all the Thomas perimeter block works.
13. Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 164.
14. Landmarks Preservation Commission Report No. 6, LP-0876, 4. “The chief ornament on the street fronts of the seven wide double units consists of three raised brick courses above the two top corner windows of each building, halfway between the top of the windows and the corner windows of each building, halfway between the top of the windows and the coping of the roof parapet.”
15. Landmarks Preservation Commission Report No. 6, LP-0876, 5. Amenities included a nursery, community rooms, a synagogue, a health clinic, and even storage space for baby carriages accessible by a ramp to the basement.
16. The standards of the war housing program prescribed 20 feet (or at least 16) between buildings. First Houses provides 25 feet. See Roy Lubove, “Homes and a Few Well-Placed Fruit Trees: An Object Lesson in Federal Housing,” Social Research 27, no. 4 (1960): 478.
17. Adolf Max Vogt, and Radka Donnell, review of The Architecture of the City, by Aldo Rossi and Diane Ghirardo, and A Scientific Autobiography, by Aldo Rossi and Lawrence Venuti, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42, no. 1 (1983): 86–88. Vogt sites Rossi’s thesis as a protest against the esthetic functionalism espoused by Philip Johnson and Henry Russel-Hitchcock in their Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. According to Vogt, The Architecture of the City is Rossi’s resistance to the architectural avant-garde’s attempt to turn the ordinary into an agent of revolution, or Le Corbusier’s attempt to create a new ordinary, a new natural order of things. For Rossi says Vogt, the term ordinary is more in keeping with Adolf Loos, who describes housing as ordinary (or conservative), something that occupies the fabric of the city, not something that stands forward from it. Vogt quotes Loos saying: The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative. The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present. Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfills a function is to be excluded from the domain of art. Vogt concludes that Rossi’s position is that residential buildings have not changed since antiquity. They are fabric, not monuments, and only as such can they make a positive contribution to the city as a collective work.
18. Wikipedia entry for New York City Housing Authority, accessed 28 July 2019: In 1935, NYCHA completed its first development, the First Houses, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The parcel of land the houses were located on was purchased from Vincent Astor and the city used eminent domain to secure the remaining property. However, the construction of the First Houses used existing apartment buildings to renovate which proved too costly. See also Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 210. “The project was extremely expensive…three times more than other pre- World War II government projects involving new construction…”
19. In fact, Harlem River Houses, a successful perimeter block scheme, was designed and realized post-First Houses but its planning precedes the shift in design attitudes brought about by Williamsburg Houses. Only with the revaluation of the public housing project in the 1970s does one find low-rise high-density perimeter block projects like Marcus Garvey Village being introduced again.
20. Standardization was synonymous with both functionalism and modernism for Ackerman. During the early years of the depression, Harold Sleeper and Charles Ramsey, both Ackerman associates, took up a project to document the rationalist methodology of the Ackerman office as a handbook for the profession that could contribute to standardizing all aspects of architectural design and production. It would be called Architectural Graphic Standards. See Paul Emmons, “Diagrammatic Practices: The Office of Frederick L. Ackerman and ‘Architectural Graphic Standards’,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 1 (2005): 4–21.
21. Frederick Ackerman, and William Ballard, Survey of Low Rental Housing Projects in New York City (New York: Technical Division of NYCHA, 1934).
22. Emmons notes the difficulties of tracking down a complete list of Ackerman’s work. Both he and Hyungmin Pai specify the destruction of his papers by his wife following his death. See Emmons, 17. See Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002). In particular Chapter 5: Frederick Ackerman, Lewis Mumford and the Predicament of Form, 117–141.
23. Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 43.
24. The article, published in Newsweek describes a scene of “windows broken…; walls cracking; light fixtures inoperative; doors unhinged; and elevators clearly used as toilets.” See “Metropolis in a Mess,” Newsweek, July 27, 1959, 29–31. It is an article that has been cited repeatedly including Katherine Newman and Victor Chen, The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America. (Boston, MA: The Beacon Press, 2007), 19.
25. Bloom, Public Housing that Worked, 35–44. The longer history of the Fort Green Houses generally adheres to the three periods that Nicholas Bloom says have come to define public housing in New York City, even if Fort Green’s rapid deterioration happened ten years out of context. Fort Green was constructed and received its first tenants during NYCHA’s initial phase of building which lasted from 1934 until 1968. During this period, the Housing Authority was an institution dedicated to the idea of model housing as a municipal service. It was occupied by a working-class population that had to meet a rigorous set of qualifying standards. After WWII production at the nearby Navy yard declined significantly and many of the original inhabitants either moved away or fell on hard times. In 1957–1958 the houses were renovated and divided into the Walt Whitman Houses and the Raymond V. Ingersoll Houses. One year later came the Newsweek profile. The now Ingersoll-Whitman Houses would remain in this deteriorated “second ghetto” state for another ten years until NYCHA’s second and most problematic phase beginning in the late 1960s where its mandate changed to become a form of welfare state public housing. NYCHA’s third phase began in the 1990s and runs through to the present. The social failures of the welfare approach, which are well documented, institutionalized a crisis that was eventually addressed by a return to a vision of public housing as affordable housing rather than welfare housing. NYCHA has attempted to reengineer its existing system to serve the city’s working poor, although with mixed results, in particular at Ingersoll-Whitman Houses. See also Chad Friedrichs, dir., The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (Unicorn Stencil Documentary Film, 2011).
26. Application of the Ackerman First Houses planning strategy can account for 3508 apartments along with extensive commercial space. The existing Ingersoll-Whitman Houses (originally Fort Greene Houses) was built to have 3503 apartments and there is but a small strip of isolated one-story retail space at the southeast corner of the site and a somewhat centrally located community building (currently closed) on the Ingersoll end.
27. Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 216. He quotes Talbot Hamlin writing immediately following the Williamsburg Houses opening- “It is neither inviting or informal … having an aggressive formality of its own, a rhythm that emphasizes rather than detracts from the institutional character of the larger group.”
28. Bloom, Public Housing that Worked, 2.
29. Steven Conn, Americans against the City – Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press Inc, 2016), 306.
30. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 57. In particular, Chapter 3, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact.”
31. Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2004), 94–97.
32. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (New York: Knopf, 2012).
33. See Design Department and Capital Projects Department, “History of New York City Housing Authority's Housing & Urban Design,”
34. Conn, Americans Against the City, 306.
35. The Pratt Institute School of Architecture’s Undergraduate Department has sponsored a series of design studios called “The Reinvention of Public Housing” intended to address this question head-on. They have investigated five superblock sites to date. The work has been presented at the ACSA International Conference in Chile, the symposium “A Survey of What’s Possible” at Pratt Institute, and considered for a future housing award in Milan at the Plan Awards. See Frederick Biehle, “The Reinvention of Public Housing” in ACSA publication for the 2016 International Conference Cross-Americas: Probing Dis-Global Networks, forthcoming.
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Frederick Chaffee Biehle
Frederick Biehle is a practicing architect and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute. In 1986 he was awarded the Prix de Rome fellowship in architecture allowing him to live and study in Italy for two years while researching the remains of imperial roman urbanism. He is the coordinator of the Pratt undergraduate Program in Rome, whose curriculum focuses on large scale urban intervention. Previously he coordinated the comprehensive design studios using multi-family housing for its program. His current research, the Reinvention of Public Housing, involves proposals to reintegrate urbanistically the portfolio of superblock low income housing sites managed by the NYCHA.