Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 22

THE SUCCESSFUL APPLICATION of the garden city idea outside London offered a timely inspiration to architects and planners in the United States. In New York City, the borough of Queens proved especially fertile ground for such housing experiments. In Queens there was room to build innovative planned communities and model tenements, and there was certainly demand for new housing of any kind. There the major goals of Howard’s garden city ideal could be realized—“improved housing at lower cost through the availability of inexpensive land, and increased productivity and happiness of the residents through isolation from the evils of urban environments.”¹

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Tenth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was reputedly the most densely populated place on earth. In 1890 in that tenement district, 334,080 people were jammed into a square mile, or 522 per acre. As a whole, the population density in Manhattan was a comparatively comfortable 63,119 per square mile, or 114.53 per acre. Manhattan’s population peaked at over 2.33 million in 1910, and density had increased to 102,146 per square mile. By comparison, in 2010 Manhattan’s population stood at 1.6 million, a mere 69,000 per square mile. That figure is even more stunning when we consider how many people reside in high-rise buildings today; in the immigrant city of 1910, people were jammed into low-rise tenements. To take one particular example, a four-story tenement at 94 Orchard Street was home to 66 persons in that year; a century later, it was home to only 15.²

Jacob A. Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, featuring his photographs of the city’s immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, some of the most impoverished to be found anywhere. At the time, reformers had achieved but limited success in passing legislation aimed at improving the quality of life in the tenements. The Tenement House Law of 1901 mandated side courts and a rear yard, and limited a building’s footprint to no more than 72 percent of a lot.³ These were modest successes in mitigating the worst conditions, but the tenements remained—overcrowded, unhealthy, and, in the view of some, a breeding ground for immorality and crime. They remained because many New Yorkers had no choice.

An alternative to urban crowding was life in a distant suburb. Riis settled his family in Richmond Hill, Queens, a gracious community of suburban homes along the line of the Long Island Railroad. In his autobiography, The Making of an American, he described the sense of comfort provided by the “ridge of hills, the ‘backbone of Long Island,’ between New York and us. The very lights of the city were shut out. So was the slum, and I could sleep.” There is no question that Riis identified the ultimate victory over the slum with a suburban future. Each year, he and his wife welcomed to their home children from the crowded tenement districts of the Lower East Side, certain that their deprived visitors could only benefit from a day in that wholesome suburban environment: “Even as I write the little ones from Cherry Street are playing under my trees. The time is at hand when we shall bring to them in their slum the things which we must now bring them to see, and then their slum will be no more.”⁴

The welding of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898 presented a singular opportunity to remake the city. New transportation links soon opened the outer boroughs to real estate development, and for the first time in the city’s history a building boom supplied in abundance new, quality homes for working-class and middle-class families. No longer would three rooms in a walk-up tenement be their only option.

In a sense, this was a specifically New York problem. While there was inadequate housing for the poor and marginal in all cities, few places had congested tenement districts on the scale of New York. Indeed, the tenement itself was largely a New York artifact. In other American cities the poor were housed in small homes, and in the early decades of the twentieth century, fully two-thirds of the housing starts in cities were one-family homes.⁵ It was the dramatic situation in New York that informed the critiques of architects, planners, and housing reformers, however, and the solutions they offered came out of that very Manhattan-centered perspective.