But there is one form of housing that rarely gets mentioned: the humble garden apartment. If you live anywhere near a large city, these apartments are all around you. You just don’t notice them, let alone admire them. They are the Rodney Dangerfield of American residential life. Even “missing middle” advocates have very little to say about them. This is despite the fact that these units have at times in the past accounted for as many as 3.5 million living spaces — and even today vastly outnumber the high-rise public housing projects that have been a focus of the housing debate.
But there is one scholar who notices them, who in fact seems to be on a one-man crusade to bring this forgotten institution into the larger residential discussion. That is Joshua B. Freeman, a professor of history at Queens College and the City University of New York. He’s written an entire book called Garden Apartments: the History of a Low-Rent Utopia, and he believes that this humble form of residence may be a partial solution to the housing crisis the country is facing. It sounds like a boring book; it isn’t. In telling the story of the ordinary garden apartment, Freeman takes the reader on a provocative tour of urban social history in America, from the 19th century to the present moment.
He starts by offering a couple of useful definitions of just what garden apartment complexes are. Freeman describes them as “low-rise, multifamily housing, typically arrayed around courtyards or spread over large sites with few streets.” The Oxford English Dictionary uses slightly different wording: It refers to any apartment in a low-rise complex with “landscaped gardens and lawns.”
It’s a good idea to add a few other helpful descriptions: A garden apartment development features multiple entry points, with clusters of walk-up units instead of elevators and long corridors. Courtyards are a nearly universal feature. Before World War II, the courtyards were frequently equipped with play areas for the resident children; more-modern garden complexes have almost always left them out.
IF GARDEN APARTMENTS ARE STILL SO PLENTIFUL, why do we avoid thinking of them, or even noticing them? Perhaps because, to put it bluntly, they don’t look like much. They are almost always unadorned and unimpressive two- or three-story red brick boxes. Even Freeman concedes that they tend to be “bland structures that seem to melt into the background.”
But a century ago garden apartments weren’t seen as bland or written off as something to ignore. They were at the forefront of a movement aimed, in part, at conducting an experiment in social living. They owe their existence to the writing of a British reformer, Ebenezer Howard, who became famous as an exponent not merely of garden apartments but of entire garden cities. Howard was thinking of much more than housing development — he wanted to create compact and comfortable modest-size towns outside the grime and congestion of England’s industrial cities. Garden apartment clusters were a key part of Howard’s agenda: low-rise residential neighborhoods enveloped in greenery and insulated from dense urban conglomeration.
Howard’s garden city ideas didn’t get very far, either in Britain or the United States, but his vision of apartment living did. In the 1920s, urbanist reformers saw low-rise clusters in parklike settings as a way to improve the lives of the poor and the working class. Famous architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius signed up to design them. Their epicenter was the New York City borough of Queens, where some garden apartment developments boasted skating rinks, tennis courts and bridle paths. A promotion for one of these developments exulted that they could create “a home life that would foster our great American ideal … freedom of the open spaces, surroundings of flowers, trees and playgrounds.”
The social critic Lewis Mumford lived in one of these for more than a decade and proclaimed them “a slice of the city of tomorrow.” The philanthropist Nathan Straus insisted that “men and women were not intended to live in tall, crowded buildings.”
THE GARDEN APARTMENT BOOM WAS IN LARGE PART the doing of the federal government. Among other things, federal housing legislation passed in the 1930s provided mortgage insurance for developers of privately owned rental housing, garden apartments most prominent among them. As a result, the Federal Housing Administration subsidized multitudes of garden apartment complexes scattered around the country. More than 90 percent of them were one or two stories. Architectural Forum magazine declared in 1940 that “in the past five years, the garden apartment has come of age.”
After World War II, they had an important role to play. Amid the housing shortage that prevailed in the aftermath of the war, more than 2 million married couples were forced to live with their parents. Freeman writes that “this dire situation made housing a more prominent issue than at any other time in American history.” Garden apartments continued to be built in great numbers as a way of easing the housing shortage. By 1950, more than 400,000 of them had been built with the help of federal money, 85,000 of them in New York City alone.
The boom in garden apartment construction continued even after 1950, when the federal legislation that supported it came to its legislative end. But the quality of the units and the conditions within them began to deteriorate. They were no longer the social experiments that reformers once imagined them to be. The amenities that had been their trademark disappeared. The developers’ investments fell victim to high utility and labor costs, and many garden apartment projects suffered from deferred maintenance. A Federal Housing Administration publication declared that “public space inside buildings is not productive of income and it should be kept to a minimum.”
Outside courtyards, with their large supply of unused space, became breeding grounds for adolescent mischief and gang activities. Garden apartments came to be seen as dumping grounds for minorities and the poor. They became identified in the public mind almost universally as, if not slums, then something just a couple of steps above them. To a great extent, that perception persists.
BUT AS FREEMAN POINTS OUT, the troubled saga of garden apartments has something to teach us. In their glory days, they were outposts of community, enclaves in which neighbors knew and socialized with each other more than most of us do now. They were built to a great extent around child rearing. Care for the young, like most other privileges and responsibilities, was shared. The density of these projects generated community loyalty. Children roamed and played virtually at will, but under the surveillance of numerous adult residents.
One resident of LeClaire Courts, a Chicago garden housing complex, recalled that “the camaraderie was absolutely wonderful. We all took care of each other like a village.” A woman who grew up in the Desire complex in New Orleans told Freeman that “it was very family oriented. Whether they were related to you or not, everybody was your cousin.”
It might be asserted in response that some of these memories are blurred by the nostalgia of advancing age, and that neighborhoods of all sorts experienced a stronger sense of community in those early- and mid-century years. Still, the surviving residents insist that these were good places to live. “They always say no good thing came out of this project,” said one Desire tenant, “but they were wrong.”
The era of sociable community in garden apartment clusters may sound like ancient history, but recollection of it has influenced the New Urbanist developers who have experimented with the design of multifamily housing units in the past decade. They have created low-rise projects with play areas; separate entrances rather than long, sterile hallways; and plenty of greenery all around. It would be too much to say that they are copying all the virtues of early-20th-century garden apartment developments, but it seems fair to say that they have learned from them, and that they point in their own way toward the residential future. Freeman calls these new projects “neo-garden” housing. Maybe that is going too far.
Or maybe not.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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