Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb

By Jeffrey A. Kroessler and Laura A. Heim

The first book devoted to this landmark of architecture, urban planning, and social engineering

Situated in the borough of Queens, New York, Sunnyside Gardens has been an icon of urbanism and planning since its inception in the 1920s. Not the most beautifully planned community, nor the most elegant, and certainly not the most perfectly preserved, Sunnyside Gardens nevertheless endures as significant both in terms of the planning principles that inspired its creators and in its subsequent history. Why this garden suburb was built and how it has fared over its first century is at the heart of Sunnyside Gardens.

Reform-minded architects and planners in England and the United States knew too well the social and environmental ills of the cities around them at the turn of the twentieth century. Garden cities gained traction across the Atlantic before the Great War, and its principles were modified by American pragmatism to fit societal conditions and applied almost as a matter of faith by urban planners for much of the twentieth century. The designers of Sunnyside— Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Frederick Ackerman, and landscape architect Marjorie Cautley—crafted a residential community intended to foster a sense of community among residents.

Richly illustrated throughout with historic and contemporary photographs as well as architectural plans of the houses, blocks, and courts, Sunnyside Gardens first explores the planning of Sunnyside, beginning with the English garden-city movement and its earliest incarnations built around London. Chapters cover the planning and building of Sunnyside and its construction by the City Housing Corporation, the design of the homes and gardens, and the tragedy of the Great Depression, when hundreds of families lost their homes. The second section examine how the garden suburbs outside London have been preserved and how aesthetic regulation is enforced in New York. The history of the preservation of Sunnyside Gardens is discussed in depth, as is the controversial proposal to place the Aluminaire House, an innovative housing prototype from the 1930s, on the only vacant site in the historic district.

Sunnyside Gardens pays homage to a time when far-sighted and socially conscious architects and planners sought to build communities, not merely buildings, a spirit that has faded to near-invisibility

• Language: English
• Publisher: Empire State Editions
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9780823293827

Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Jeffrey Kroessler is a Professor at the Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and author of The Greater New York Sports Chronology; New York, Year by Year: A Chronology of the Great Metropolis; Historic Preservation in Queens; and other works.

Book preview

Sunnyside Gardens

SUNNYSIDE GARDENS

Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb

Jeffrey A. Kroessler

With architectural illustrations

by Laura Heim

AN IMPRINT OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK 2021

Copyright © 2021 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com/empire-state-editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kroessler, Jeffrey A, author.

Title: Sunnyside Gardens : planning and preservation in a historic garden suburb / Jeffrey A Kroessler.

Description: Empire state editions. | New York, New York : Fordham University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021001961 | ISBN 9780823293810 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823293803 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780823293827 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: City planning—New York (State)—New York—Sunnyside Gardens—History. | Historic districts—New York (State)—New York—Sunnyside Gardens. | Landscape protection—New York (State)—New York—Sunnyside Gardens. | City beautiful movement—New York (State)—New York—Sunnyside Gardens—History. | Sunnyside Gardens (New York, N.Y.)—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HT168.S88 K764 2021 | DDC 307.1/21609747243—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001961

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Preface

Sunnyside Gardens Chronology

Introduction: Sunnyside Gardens and the Garden City Idea: A Cityscape for Urban Reform

I. Planning

  1  The Garden City and the Garden Suburb in Great Britain

  2  The Garden Suburb in New York

  3  Planning and Building Sunnyside Gardens

  4  Design and Community: Architecture and Landscape as a Social Good

  5  Building on Success: Radburn and Phipps Garden Apartments

  6  Foreclosure: The Great Depression and the End of a Dream

  7  Envisioning the Future City

II. Preservation

  8  Preserving the Historic Garden Suburb in London and New York

  9  Preserving Sunnyside Gardens

10  The Fight for the Historic District

11  A Question of Appropriateness: The Aluminaire House Controversy

Conclusion: A Second Century for the Garden Suburb

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

THIS BOOK HAS HAD a very long gestation period. As an undergraduate history major at Hobart College, I developed an interest in utopias and dystopias, and then I was fortunate to later take Frank E. Manuel’s course in utopian thought while pursuing an MA at New York University. I first researched Sunnyside Gardens when I was studying with Richard C. Wade at the CUNY Graduate School, and it formed a chapter in my dissertation on the urbanization of Queens. How do utopian aspirations play out in practice? Historically, not well.

While a graduate student researching Queens, I became involved with local historical societies and preservation groups. In that way I met the individuals who had formed the Sunnyside Foundation to bring Sunnyside Gardens back to the form its designers intended. I have remained active in citywide preservation organizations—the Historic Districts Council, the Municipal Art Society, the City Club of New York—and have sought to bring a historian’s insights into preservation controversies of the moment. That experience certainly contributed to the making of this book.

After history and preservation, architecture is the third dimension. Many of my observations and insights were facilitated by architect Laura Heim, my wife. We bought a house in Sunnyside Gardens in 2004, just in time for the fight over whether it should be designated a historic district. During the sometimes unpleasant disputes that ensued, we countered the inaccurate statements of the opponents of designation, I with historical facts, and she with architectural analysis. We had fun. At a key moment of the struggle, she put together images of what could happen to the little brick houses under the present rules—vinyl siding and stucco affixed to facades, Palladian windows, garish paint schemes. It was a turning point. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Sunnyside Gardens and Phipps Garden Apartments a historic district in 2007. I shudder to think what could have happened to this historic planned community had it not been designated, and worse, what would have been the fate of the landmarks law had misinformation and unwarranted fears torpedoed this designation.

Since opening her practice here in 2006, Laura has worked on dozens of homes in Sunnyside, bringing a contemporary sensibility into the protected brick buildings. Her process has involved analyzing the surprisingly numerous housing types, which revealed how they evolved over the five years of construction. She drafted plans for each court to highlight key features and generated drawings of each block. This book proves the benefits of a marriage of history and architecture, each incomplete without the other.

Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb brought together the many strands of my life, and in a sense it was inevitable: I grew up on Long Island, in Garden City.

SUNNYSIDE GARDENS CHRONOLOGY

1898  Ebenezer Howard self-published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, reprinted in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow.

1903  Howard formed the Garden City Association with the aim of achieving the ends outlined in his book, with local chapters created across Britain.

1903  Howard and associates formed First Garden City, Limited, and purchased 3,818 acres about thirty-five miles north of London for their initial endeavor, Letchworth Garden City. Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker were appointed the architects.

1906  Dame Henrietta Barnett began developing Hampstead Garden Suburb outside London. Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker laid out the original plan; Edwin Lutyens planned the Suburb’s formal center and designed the two churches, St. Jude’s and the Free Church.

1909  The Russell Sage Foundation Homes Company began building Forest Hills Gardens in the borough of Queens; Grosvenor Atterbury was the lead architect, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the landscape architect. The garden suburb has about 890 freestanding and attached houses, and 11 apartment buildings. Protective covenants covering the open space and the buildings instituted at the start remain in effect.

1911  The Queensboro Corporation began building Jackson Heights; Andrew J. Thomas designed the earliest buildings.

1912  Raymond Unwin published Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!: How the Garden City Type of Development May Benefit Both Owner and Occupier.

1913  The Garden City Association became the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, with Ebenezer Howard as president.

1914–1918  During the First World War, Raymond Unwin worked with the British government to build new housing for war workers along garden city principles.

1917–1919  The U.S. government funded new housing for war workers through the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the U.S. Shipping Board and the U.S. Housing Corporation. Frederick L. Ackerman was chief of Housing and Town Planning under Robert Kohn; Henry Wright designed Colonial Terraces in Newburgh, New York.

1919  Howard and associates began the second Garden City, Welwyn. Louis de Soissons was appointed architect and planner.

April 18, 1923  Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Lewis Mumford, Frederick L. Ackerman, Benton MacKaye, Alexander Bing, Charles Whittaker, Stuart Chase, and Robert Kohn formed the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA).

March 14, 1924  Members of the RPAA organized the City Housing Corporation as a limited dividend corporation to build a garden suburb; by June they had acquired seventy-seven acres in Long Island City adjacent to the Sunnyside rail yards. Construction of Sunnyside Gardens began within months. Stein and Wright were the primary architects, with additional designs from F. L. Ackerman; Marjorie Sewell Cautley was the landscape architect.

1924–1936  Lewis Mumford and his family lived in Sunnyside Gardens, first in a co-operative apartment on 48th Street and then in a private house in a mews on 44th Street.

April 1925  The International Federation of Town and Country Planning and Garden Cities met in New York City. The gathering featured a visit to Sunnyside Gardens and Jackson Heights. Howard, Raymond Unwin, Barry Parker, and Ernst May attended. Lewis Mumford edited the May 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, with contributions from Stein, Wright, Bing, MacKaye, Chase, and Ackerman.

1928  Sunnyside Gardens was completed, with a total of 563 homes (293 one-family, 224 two-family, and 46 three-family houses) and 322 units in apartment buildings.

1929–1931  The City Housing Corporation built the first section of Radburn, a town for the motor age, with a total of 430 one-family and 44 two-family houses, 90 row houses, and 92 units in two apartment buildings. The Great Depression brought construction to a halt by 1933.

1931  Phipps Garden Apartments, designed by Clarence Stein with landscaping by Marjorie Cautley, was completed adjacent to Sunnyside Gardens. The first set of buildings had 344 units for tenants of modest means. In 1935, Phipps Houses built a second block of garden apartments immediately behind the first.

1931–1936  Residents of Sunnyside Gardens launched a mortgage strike and banded together to resist foreclosures and evictions; more than half of the residents lost their homes.

1932–1935  Stein and Wright were the site planners and consulting architects for Chatham Village, a garden suburb of 197 homes in Pittsburgh.

1933  Stein and Wright dissolved their partnership of ten years.

1934  The City Housing Corporation filed for bankruptcy.

1934  Henry Wright joined the faculty at Columbia University in the new program in town planning and housing studies.

June 29, 1935  Governor Herbert Lehman dedicated Hillside Homes in the Bronx, funded by the Public Works Administration. Clarence Stein designed the five-block complex of five-story garden apartments with landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley.

1935  Henry Wright published Rehousing Urban America.

1935  Stein and Wright consulted on the planning of Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency. The community was completed in 1937, incorporating elements of Radburn.

July 10, 1936  Henry Wright died at age fifty-eight.

1939  The City premiered at the New York World’s Fair, highlighting the ideas of the RPAA and featuring scenes of Radburn and Greenbelt. Clarence Stein had created Civic Films, Inc., to produce the film. Lewis Mumford prepared the script with Pare Lorentz; Aaron Copeland composed the music; Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke were the cinematographers.

1957  Clarence Stein published Toward New Towns for America.

1962  Concerned about increasing speculation and the loosening of design controls, residents of Hampstead formed the Hampstead Garden Suburb Protection Society.

1964–1968  The forty-year easements regulating the open spaces and architectural features of Sunnyside Gardens expired; some residents erected previously forbidden fences along their property lines into the common courtyards, paved over front yards for driveways, and built rooftop additions.

1968  Hampstead Garden Suburb was designated a conservation area, and the reconstituted Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust began enforcing strong preservation controls as the ground landlord.

July 18, 1974  The New York City Department of City Planning voted to designate Sunnyside Gardens a Special Planned Community Preservation District, a new zoning classification that also applied to the Harlem River Houses, Parkchester, and Fresh Meadows.

February 7, 1975  Clarence Stein died at age ninety-two.

1975  Radburn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

1981  Sunnysiders formed the Sunnyside Gardens Conservancy to preserve the historic character of the community and foster restoration. This became the Sunnyside Foundation for Community Planning. They offered technical assistance on facade maintenance, obtained public funding to upgrade the commercial blocks of Skillman Avenue, and initiated a preservation easement program.

September 7, 1984  Sunnyside Gardens was listed on the National Register of Historic Places through the efforts of the Sunnyside Foundation.

January 26, 1990  Lewis Mumford died at age ninety-four.

2003  Residents organized the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance to gain designation as a historic district by the city.

2005  Radburn was designated a National Historic Landmark.

2007  The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Sunnyside Gardens and Phipps Garden Apartments a historic district.

2008  City Planning removed the Special Planned Community Preservation District designation from Sunnyside Gardens; henceforward, only the Landmarks Preservation Commission would regulate.

2013  The Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected an application to locate the 1931 Aluminaire House, designed by Albert Frey, in the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District, but it granted tentative approval to building eight units of housing on the lot, a former playground. In 2016, the City Council allocated funds to purchase the site for a public park.

2016  Phipps Houses proposed a ten-story, 209-unit affordable housing building for the parking lot between the Phipps Garden Apartments and the railroad, but they withdrew the plan in the face of opposition from residents and the local councilman.

2020  The School Construction Authority demolished the parking garage designed by Clarence Stein to make way for a new middle school. The structure was included in the National Register historic district, but it was excluded from the historic district designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Sunnyside Gardens

INTRODUCTION

Sunnyside Gardens and the Garden City Idea

A Cityscape for Urban Reform

SUNNYSIDE GARDENS HAS BEEN an icon of urbanism and planning from its inception in the 1920s. Urban historians, architects, and planners still study this distinctive community, and given the chance, they eagerly make a pilgrimage to experience firsthand its verdant landscaped courts and modest brick row houses.

This garden suburb was both the culmination of a generation of Progressive Era housing reform and an experiment in social engineering. Not the most beautiful planned community, perhaps, nor the most elegant, and certainly not the most perfectly preserved, Sunnyside Gardens nevertheless remains significant both in terms of the planning principles that inspired its creators and in its subsequent history. More than any other garden suburb, its builders were self-consciously following the garden city ideal first expressed in England in the last decade of the nineteenth century and given concrete form in the first decade of the twentieth.

The architects of Sunnyside were motivated by a reformist impulse. They asked how we might reshape our cities to foster more equitable communities and create a more livable urban environment. Remarkably, they also had the confidence to believe that they could do exactly that through enlightened planning and design. To a degree, that motivation continues to animate urban planning a century later, and the persistence of those ideals explains why Sunnyside Gardens remains as relevant today as when it was built.

There is no place quite like Sunnyside Gardens. That statement is not descriptive hyperbole; it is quite literally true. For all the interest in the place among academics and architects over the decades, it is unique. There have been hundreds of garden suburbs, planned communities, and model housing experiments in the United States, but no place follows the Sunnyside plan exactly.¹ What, then, accounts for its enduring appeal, and why is it still held up as an important example of enlightened urban design?

Why this garden suburb was built when and where it was, as well as how it has fared over its first century, is the heart of this book. The story of Sunnyside Gardens is more than a story of housing reform, because the builders sought also to offer an alternative design for urban living. This is a story of planning history, architecture, social history, and historic preservation, all played out within the grand narrative of Greater New York.

Utopia

The idea that the city could and should be remade has persisted from the Victorian Age into the present. Reform-minded architects and planners in England and the United States knew too well the social and environmental ills of the cities around them at the turn of the century. Lewis Mumford and other social critics emphasized the dehumanizing aspects of the contemporary city, with its mechanization and regimentation, and how its forms, from overcrowded tenements to alienating towers in the park and sprawling suburbs, contributed to the unraveling of the social fabric.² Indeed, that generation of visionaries introduced the very idea of the livable city. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this meant reimagining how city dwellers could live, how the buildings and spaces of the city might produce happier, healthier, and more fully realized human beings. No form of industry and no type of city are tolerable that take the joy out of life, wrote Mumford. This was not a matter of merely altering the form of the built environment, for the task of city design involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization, of coordinating on the basis of more essential human values than the will-to-power and the will-to-profits, a host of social functions and processes that we have hitherto misused in the building of cities and polities, or of which we have never rationally taken advantage.³ It was an ambitious, even utopian aspiration.

No one, perhaps, was more influential in advancing this line of thought than Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928). Neither an architect nor a planner, Howard might be termed a Victorian utopian.⁴ He was in fact a great admirer of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward (1888), and he arranged for the printing of that book in England.⁵ Mumford, too, admired the book, calling it one of the most important political pamphlets of its time, a work illustrating how a community must prioritize the common good and tame the chaotic impulses of the individual. Furthermore, Bellamy understood that socialization in one department was incompatible with unlimited individualism in every other.⁶ It was a principle Mumford found appealing. The physical ordering of society would mold the people, and the people would shape its physical forms.

In 1898, Howard self-published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Reissued in 1902 under its more familiar title, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, that slim volume outlined his vision of an urban future, drawing upon various strains of English socialist thought. In contrast with the unregulated and uncoordinated free market development that then characterized urban growth, Howard proposed building entirely new garden cities beyond the confines of the existing metropolis. For a tract by an unknown, marginal figure, the book had a surprisingly immediate and widespread impact. Within a year of its publication, Howard was leading the newly formed Garden City Association, with local chapters springing up across Britain.

Such was the optimism and confidence of the age. The garden city idea gained traction across the Atlantic before the Great War, and for much of the twentieth century its principles, modified by American pragmatism to fit American conditions, were applied almost as a matter of faith by urban planners. The garden city as defined by Howard—a self-contained community with a limited population size, a mix of homes and industry, and surrounded by a greenbelt—would never be fully realized in the United States.

Mumford certainly embraced the utopian aspects of the garden city movement. This was an attempt to build up a more exhilarating kind of environment—not as a temporary haven of refuge but as a permanent seat of life and culture, urban in its advantages and permanently rural in its situation. This was nothing less than a movement towards a higher type of civilization than that which has created our present congested centers.⁷

As much as its physical form, the underlying economic and social arrangements of Howard’s idea held great appeal to the generation that came of age during the Progressive Era. Frederic C. Howe recognized the fundamental difference between the ordinary city and the garden city: The former is left to the unrestrained license of speculators, builders, owners, to a constant conflict of public and private interests; the latter treats the community as a unit, with rights superior to those of any of its individual members. One is a city of unrelated and, for the most part, uncontrolled private property rights; the other is a community intelligently planned and harmoniously adjusted, with the emphasis always on the rights of the community rather than on the rights of the individual property owner.⁸

Theories of ideal communities, innovative design, and urbanism were insufficient by themselves to transform cities. Even after a century of model tenements and planned communities, urban renewal and social engineering, the problems of urban America in the mid–twentieth century seemed as intractable as ever. Poverty and inequality, crime and vice, racial and ethnic tensions, and educational systems of limited effectiveness continue to bedevil cities. One aspect of life that has improved over the last century, at least in the developed world, is the urban environment. The air is cleaner; rivers, lakes, and oceans are far less polluted; streets are better lit and have less debris; and living conditions are far healthier and more comfortable for even the poorest citizens. Housing laws generated during the Progressive Era proved to be remarkably effective in mandating minimum standards of light, air, heat, and sanitation. The era also introduced zoning to regulate use and scale; New York passed its first zoning resolution in 1916.⁹ Population densities dropped dramatically since the turn of the century, and the age of frighteningly overcrowded tenements all but faded from popular memory in the United States and Britain.

At the same time, however, we seem to have lost faith in the idea that motivated those urban visionaries: that by remaking the physical city, by providing new homes in a healthy and wholesome setting, we will not only improve people’s lives, but actually foster the elevation of the human condition. For that generation, elimination of inferior housing and the building of well-designed new homes in a rational context became an imperative for the betterment of society, and no one doubted that the betterment of society should be our common goal.

Over the course of the twentieth century, many acclaimed housing experiments and planned communities were built in and around London and the city of New York based on those idealistic principles. Each embodied the faith that better housing would produce better people, that social ills were the result of the conditions of life rather than moral failings of the individual. Remove slum dwellers from the slums, the thinking went, and we will eliminate the social pathologies associated with the slum, and it was widely recognized that the slums were infecting the body politic.¹⁰ In 1944, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia exhorted, Tear down the old. Build up the new. Down with rotten, antiquated rat holes. Down with hovels. Down with disease. Down with crime. Down with firecraft. Let in the sun. Let in the sky. A new day is dawning. A new life. A new America.¹¹

Only later, after too many solid residential neighborhoods had been demolished in the name of urban renewal, did the question arise as to whether it was indeed necessary to wipe the slate clean, to demolish the old completely and build anew under supposedly enlightened planning principles.¹² Adding to the civic pushback was the banality of much of the new construction that replaced the familiar, human-scaled city, and certainly very little of the new housing embodied any of the ideals of the garden suburb.

By the middle of the twentieth century, urban planners and the government agencies that enabled them had embraced ideas of urbanism antithetical to the principles espoused by Howard and his followers. Rather than fostering community, economic and social diversity, and density, the ascendant standards emphasized the separation of land uses; a rejection of the street and street life; a rejection of traditional elements like squares and public plazas; the treatment of individual buildings as objects in space, not integrated into a complex urban fabric; and the primacy of the automobile, as evidenced by the construction of high-speed expressways through urban neighborhoods. As a result, compact and thriving urban neighborhoods were wiped away to make way for clean modernist spaces. Outside the city, the misinterpretation of garden city principles yielded suburban sprawl.¹³ With the embrace of those anti-urban design principles by the federal bureaucracy came mandates for their universal application in all projects receiving federal funding.

Lewis Mumford thought that with urban renewal the city was only exchanging slums for super-slums. The design—elevator buildings, long anonymous corridors destined to become breeding grounds for crime (as indeed happened), dysfunctional open spaces—ordained that outcome. Yes, the real estate industry was profiting from urban renewal, but more damning was that they were not creating environments designed to foster community, but places seemingly designed to stifle human potential.¹⁴ Nathan Glazer offered a particularly sharp critique of the result. Contrasting the cold and uniform public housing projects that replaced a vibrant, if run-down tenement neighborhood in East Harlem, the very neighborhood where he had grown up, in fact, he suggested that it reflects what the housing reformers in league with the early modernists wanted. Examining the resulting social landscape, he wondered whether the established principles of housing reform actually benefited their intended beneficiaries.¹⁵ What they represented was a perversion of the goals and design principles of Progressive Era urban reformers rather than a faithful application of them.

Austere, cold, and anonymous public housing projects of the mid-twentieth century may have been the unfortunate end, but unhappiness with that outcome ought not to negate the hopeful idealism of that first generation of urban planners. No doubt they, too, would gasp at Corbusier-inspired towers situated within superblocks, and nowhere more so than in the postwar public housing projects. As Mumford remarked, There is nothing wrong with these buildings except that, humanly speaking, they stink.¹⁶ The misappropriation of an idea does not necessarily invalidate it. The wonder is that alternatives had been built in and around New York decades earlier—Forest Hills Gardens, Jackson Heights, Sunnyside Gardens, Phipps Garden Apartments, and Radburn. Why, we must ask, did the builders of cities and suburbs turn away from those successful, human-scale precedents?

Jane Jacobs Doesn’t Like Queens

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is a masterpiece of urban criticism. In that eye-opening book, Jane Jacobs not only provided a new perspective on the recent past, but also a prescription for future urban living. From transportation policy to zoning, historic preservation to urban planning, Jane Jacobs has been invoked as a guide and an authority. Voiced or unvoiced, What would Jane do? is the question floating above urban policy issues great and small.

No one can doubt that the