Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 20

The beginning of the Great War in 1914 meant not only the mobilization of Britain’s naval and military forces, but also the nation’s industrial capacity. Almost overnight, industry had to build new armament and munitions factories—facilities that employed thousands. As workers flocked to these expanding enterprises, the question of where they would live became a pressing concern. The government embarked on a large-scale program but broke with past practices and embraced a more enlightened model for working-class housing.³⁰

In 1917, Charles Harris Whitaker, editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, dispatched architect Frederick L. Ackerman to England to study the new war housing. What he found was that the British, rather than erecting temporary houses or barracks, built solid homes and charged the worker “a reasonable rental based upon pre-war conditions.” Expenditures above returns were to be written off as the cost of war. The British seemed to understand that the prewar methods of financing housing were inadequate, so the government shouldered the costs of construction and management.³¹ In the architecture and community plan, they were determined not to mindlessly replicate the inadequate housing found in older working-class neighborhoods, but to develop new communities along the lines of the garden city. The result was “a creative synthesis: it was both modern and yet oriented to vernacular designs based on an appreciation of the diversity of picturesque styles found in local villages.”³²

As director of the housing branch of the Department of Explosives Supply, Raymond Unwin was directly involved in that effort. He supervised several projects and personally designed Eastriggs and Gretna, two new communities near a massive munitions plant employing 30,000 workers along the Scottish border. He prepared the plan, and Courtenay Crickmer, who had worked at both Letchworth and Welwyn, supervised the design of the housing. Construction was underway within months of the start of the war, and by 1916 Gretna housed 20,000 residents in solid, red brick houses with provisions for active community life. Eastriggs was built along similar lines between 1916 and 1918. Scottish architect Robert Lorimer thought Unwin had succeeded at Gretna, for “all is plain, practical, straightforward, of pleasant and reasonable proportion, and mercifully devoid of ornament or pettiness. A satisfying feeling of variety is achieved, not so much in an artificial attempt to get variety in the individual houses as by a happy scheme of plan.…”³³

Cottages for munitions workers at Gretna; Raymond Unwin, architect, 1915. (Published in Journal of the American Institute of Architects, February 1917.)

During his tour, Ackerman visited Gretna and was greatly impressed. “To witness an enormous industrial community in which law, order, and arrangement prevailed; to see no slums and to realize that in this community there would be no slums; to sense the balance which it is possible to maintain between intensive industry and the normal life of the worker—is to feel a thrill such as one seldom experiences,” he wrote. “To realize that this great war is the impulse which brought this thought into being gives to us an added significance, for we know now, long before the end, that it has not been in vain.” Beyond the quality of the design and construction, however, he took away deeper lessons. English war housing clearly demonstrated “that high social, moral, and physical standards are essential to a nation’s well-being in war or during peace.” Further, the examples he saw reinforced his belief that the private sector could never be expected to provide quality, affordable housing for the masses. He understood that these new industrial garden cities would serve “as a permanent exhibit of what the State can do when it acts with the full power of its rightful authority and with a broad enlightened conception of its aim and purpose. It is an exhibit of what may be accomplished by delegating to imaginative men the necessary power and authority; and it is also an example of what any enlightened community can achieve by surrendering its burden of fallacies regarding super-individual rights and the rights of property.”³⁴ Ackerman enthusiastically applied these lessons to his work in New York after the war, though he never did witness the American government exercise the “full power of its rightful authority” in the realm of housing.

Ninety years later, the Glasgow architectural firm charged with developing a new master plan for Gretna expressed admiration for the way Unwin “was able to turn principle into practice.” The architects marveled that his “winding picturesque pattern of streets … set very comfortable in the 21st century—they are safe, walkable, they keep traffic in check, they have generous private and public open spaces together with well-placed centres and focal points.”³⁵

American planners had certainly attempted to apply the garden city idea in the years before the war, but it was the war housing that demonstrated how it could be applied to homes for workers of modest means. The English example pointed the way for the United States to build housing for war workers, and that experience resonated deeply after the war. Louis Pink, a member of New York State’s Board of Housing, visited England in the mid-1920s and understood that the early garden cities were not intended to house the masses. Rather, “they are the laboratory of the housing movement—the pathfinders. They experiment and point the way. All the world is in debt to Letchworth—not because it houses a few thousand people—but because it has transformed the architecture of workers’ cottages and has vastly improved the layout of low-cost developments elsewhere.”³⁶

After the war, New York City would experience an unprecedented housing boom. Large, undeveloped tracts in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens provided quality housing for hundreds of thousands of families. This was also a moment for housing reformers to step forward.