![]() The First Houses: The United States’ first public housing, built in 1935 and still in existence on 3rd Street and Avenue A. So what happened? How did they get to where they are today? And while public housing in NYC lacks most of the flourishes of Le Corbusier’s original plans, they were a groundbreaking improvement from the slums they replaced: a fact that many today forget when they rail public housing’s inhumanity. That’s more than we can say for the vast majority of development today. The bottom line was that a way needed to be found to provide dignity and well-being to the city’s poor, and cheaply, particularly with the onset of urbanization. Notwithstanding for a moment the many criticisms about the paternalism or megalomania of one man thinking he might resolve socioeconomic disparities with a few pages of design, the Ville Contemporaine was a nice idea: green spaces for everyone, big roadways where all classes drove and strove together, and even cleverly L-shaped apartments that came together tetris-style to ensure that every unit had light shining throughout their apartment at all hours of the daytime. ![]() Like most public housing to this day, New York’s projects were built in what is known as the tower-in-the-park style, an adaptation of the housing complexes described in Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, or Contemporary City. Pink, who helped create the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The now infamous Pink Houses in Brooklyn, built in 1959 and named after Louis H. Long a subject of debate and concern for New Yorkers, public housing has recently made its way further into the spotlight with the increasingly rapid gentrification throughout the city’s five boroughs, but more importantly, NYCHA’s alarming recent financial crisis. There are all the familiar symptoms: overcrowding, poverty, crime, and poor health. Yet today, nearly a century later, the projects are arguably the closest thing New York has to the slums of its past (or of developing countries). The overcrowded, poorly ventilated, unsanitary, and crime-ridden NYC slums would be swept away by a grand effort of publicly funded, thoughtfully planned living complexes that would bring dignity and well-being to New York’s working classes. ![]() Pink (of the eponymous Pinks housing project in Brooklyn), who was Chairman of the State Board of Housing, to create the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who himself had lost his wife to tuberculosis attributable to poor housing, had joined Louis H. When the United States’ first public housing was built in 1935 in New York City, the initiative marked the beginning of the end of New York’s rampant slums. ![]() Above: A series of graphics released by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) in the 30’s and 40’s with the onset of public housing construction. ![]()
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