Rediscovering the logic of garden apartments

Places

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 30-35

  Hess, Paul Mitchell ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950627237     PISSN: 07310455     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. There is a well developed literature on the pre-World War II apartment. See E. C. Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments (Cornell University Press, 1990)
2. R. Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City (New York; Columbia University Press, 1990)
3. R. Dennis, "Interpreting the Apartment House: Modernity and Metropolitanism in Toronto, 1900-1930," Journal of Historical Geography Vol. 20, No, 3 (1994), pp. 305-22
4. and J. Hancock, "The Apartment House in Urban America," in A. D. King,ed., Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980),pp. 151-87.
5. For exceptions on the suburban apartment, see R. Schafer, The Suburbanization of Multifamily Housing (Lexington, MA; Lexington Books, 1974)
6. and C. F Horowitz, The New Garden Apartment: Current Market Realities of an American Housing Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1983).
7. 30, subtracting out housing by type in the core central places as defined by the name of the area. On average, 35 percent of the remaining housing is some kind of attached unit, with 7 percent in single-family attached units, and more than 14 percent buildings with more than ten units. Because of smaller average household sizes, about one-quarter of the suburban population lives in attached housing. Suburban garden apartments are typically three-story, walk-up buildings with through-building apartment units.
8. See A. V. Moudon and P. Hess, "Suburban Clusters: The Nucleation of Multifamily Housing in the Suburban Areas of the Central Puget Sound," Journal of the American PlanningAssociation, Vol. 66, No. 3 (2000), pp. 243-64.
9. Development histories are primarily based on visual records. There is remarkably little archival evidence of planning and development decisions in this era. Some arguments in this article are more fully elaborated in P. M. Hess, "Apartments Apart: Site/Non-Sight and Suburban Apartments," in C. J. Burns and A. Kahn, eds., Site Matters (New York: Routledge, 2005).
10. See P. M. Hess, A. V. Moudon, et al., "Neighborhood Site Design and Pedestrian Travel," Transportation Research Record 1674 (1999), pp. 9-19. Gross development densities were based on a conventional half-mile walking shed from the retail zones, and usually extend well beyond apartment areas and into much lower density zones. Including only the apartments and retail lands raises densities much higher.
11. For the Seattle area, see M. R. Wolfe, " Locational Factors Involved in Suburban Land Development," Department of Urban Planning, University of Washington, Seattle, 1961.
12. For the role of large subdividers more generally, see M. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York; Columbia University Press, 1987).
13. On the cult of the single-family house, see, especially, R. Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York; Basic Books, 1987)
14. K. T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York; Oxford University Press, 1985)
15. and D. Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003).
16. Specifically on views toward apartments, see K. Baar, "The Movement to Halt the Spread of Multifamily Housing, 1890-1926," Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 58, No. I, (1992).
17. See a good comparison of Berkeley and New York in R. Fischler, "The Metropolitan Dimension of Early Zoning - Revisiting the 1916 New York City" Ordinance," Journal of the American Planning Association,Vol. 64, No. 2 (1998), pp. 170-88.
18. Fischler argues that, while ineffective, the New Y'ork ordinance too was very concerned with protecting areas of houses. Building codes and other laws were also used to exclude apartments before the development of zoning. See, for example, R. Dennis, "'Zoning' before Zoning; The Regulation of Apartment Housing in Early Twentieth Century Winnipeg and Toronto," PlanningPerspectives Vol. 15. No. 3 (2000), pp. 267-99.
19. VILLAGE OF EUCLID, OHIO v. AMBLER REALTY CO., 272 U. S. at 394. The court is quoting the Supreme Court of Louisiana here, but this language was common with nearly identical language used.
20. D. R. Mandelker, The Zoning Dilemma: A Legal Strategy for Urban Change (Indianapolis; Bobbs-Merrill, 1971).
21. C. A. Perry, "The Neighborhood Unit," in Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, VII, (1929).
22. Johnson has argued that Perry "appropriated" the concept from William Drummond. See D. L. Johnson, "Origin of the Neighborhood Unit," Planning Perspectives 17 (2002), pp. 227-45.
23. N. P. Lewis, The Planning of the Modern City: A Review of the Principles Governing City Planning(New York Wiley, 1923).
24. Like Perry, Stein was a member of the Regional Plan Association of New York. Radburn, stripped of its community facilities and orientation, has been seen as an important prototype for the postwar, subdivision. Interestingly, Stein was also closely involved in the design of Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles, the prototype for the suburban garden-apartment complex. See C. S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966).
25. T. Banerjee and W. C. Baer, Beyond the Neighborhood Unit: Residential Environments and Public Policy (New York and London; Plenum Press, 1984).
26. King County Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan for King County, Washington (Seattle: King County Planning Commission, 1958)
27. and King County Planning Department, The Comprehensive Plan for King County, Washington (Seattle: King County Planning Department, 1964).
28. See M. Southworth and E. Ben-Joseph, "Street Standards and the Shaping of Suburbia," Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol, 61, No. 1 (Winter 1995), pp. 65-68. Not all jurisdictions required sidewalks.
29. Straight-line distances between housing and the center of retail districts are often equivalent to those in older, gridded neighborhoods, but indirect walking routes make actual travel distances farther. See P. M. Hess, A. V. Moudon, et al., "Neighborhood Site Design and Pedestrian Travel," Transportation Research Record 1674 (1999)pp. 9-19.
30. See K. Bulter, S. L. Handy, et al., Planning for Street Connectivity: Getting From Here to There (Chicago: APA Planning Advisory Service, 1999). Portland is an exception, and has also looked at "campus-like" development. New Urbanist development has also created small blocks, but only as a part of large, master-planned communities designed as a piece on greenfield sites, not in the more incremental, less coordinated development typical of suburban apartment clusters.