"The best public housing project ever built in New York"

That's how the AIA Guide to New York City describes the Williamsburg Houses, which were built in 1937 as a project of the Public Works Administration. The raised stainless-steel street signs on the apartments caught my eye as I passed them on this run; I didn't realize until I got home and did more research that these were the easily the most important buildings, both architecturally and historically, along the route. So I had to come back.

The Williamsburg Houses are NYCHA public housing, but they have a different history than most other city projects. They went up before the Housing Act of 1937, which among other things mandated extremely tight controls on construction costs. So the apartments were built to a higher standard than later megaprojects like Red Hook and Queensbridge. The public housing historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom writes:

Williamsburg's modernist designs offered a machine aesthetic but did not achieve industrial scale economies. The four-story walk-ups.... [were costly] because the low heights did not at that point balance out high land costs. Glazed brick stair hall exteriors, high ceilings in the apartments, wood floors, closet doors, and commodious kitchens raised expenses. Each building also had up to eight stairwells with only two apartment entrances on each landing. Williamsburg... looked cheap but was comparatively expensive.

In 2003, the Williamsburg Houses were designated a landmark, in part out of appreciation for their Modernist design. This represents another turn of the screw in intellectual fashion, I guess. If you took Intro to Architecture in college, you came away with the idea that weird European Modernist ideas about superblocks, breaking up the street grid, and "towers in the park" were almost entirely to blame for the disastrous state of American public housing and the decline of cities in general. Anybody who's ever visited Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan or Sandburg Village in Chicago—upper-middle-class communities that look just like public housing towers—knows that this story was way too simple. Still, if the Modernism works here, it's probably because the PWA avoided towers and maintained a human-friendly scale. Unfortunately, that turned out to cost quite a bit more more than Congress and local political machines were willing to pay to house low-income families.

It would be easy to wax rhapsodic about the New Deal idealism behind such an ambitious low-income housing development. (Below, a picture of one of the tenement apartments it replaced.) But the projects in New York and elsewhere were also segregated at birth: Of the original 1,650 families in Williamsburg, just one was black, writes Wendell E. Pritchett in his biography of the African-American New Dealer Robert Clifton Weaver. Another project built around the same time, in Harlem, was almost entirely black. It was considered a limited victory at the time that the Harlem project was even built, that African-Americans were able to get jobs on housing-project construction sites, and that the projects at least weren't used as an excuse to clear blacks out of neighborhoods to replace them with whites. As Pritchett observes, public housing's entanglement in racial segregation is at least as important to the story of its failure as Le Corbusier's bad ideas about architecture.

The archival pictures here are from The New Deal Network. Below are my own pictures. I'll close with a few more thoughts and links.

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

I try not to get too heavy in these posts. This is, after all, a blog about the rather eccentric activity of jogging with a camera. And snapping the outsides of buildings while running past them affords only modest insight into the lives lived inside them. But when you explore the outer boroughs on foot, it's hard not to be aware that the vast majority of people in this city get by on extremely tight budgets, and that a lot of them live in public housing. Nationally, the failure of the projects is so well-known that even liberals rarely talk about a right to decent, affordable housing anymore. (And this in a country that massively subsidizes homeownership in the higher tax brackets.) But reading more about the Williamsburg Houses got me thinking about how little I really know about public housing, even though it has shaped both my city and my neighborhood. (I live just a couple of blocks from the Whitman Houses.) How big a failure has it really been in New York? What do we know about how it fails and how it succeeds? Here's an interview with historian Bloom, in which he makes a compelling case that the NYC projects were a relative success in providing affordable housing, and shouldn't be lumped in with what happened in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, etc. This article from the conservative City Journal paints a grimmer picture... and then sets up the argument for what sounds to me like the mother of all real-estate boondoggles. As for those Chicago projects, this short history of the Robert Taylor Homes (pdf) sheds a lot of light on why big projects so often failed, and is a reminder of a real weakness of post-war urban liberalism: When planners made an inevitable mistake—such as building too many large family apartments, which over-saturated the projects with teenagers—the sheer scale of their designs and the bureaucracy made it difficult to adjust.

There's a fledgling National Public Housing Museum in the works in Chicago, which hopefully will engage with these questions. It's said to be modeled on the excellent Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a place everyone in New York should visit at least once.