Story
Housing Density: A Massive Scale
New York City’s leaders pioneered a revolutionary vision of urban living: large-scale, master-planned, high-rise, low-density, apartment communities. The success of these places—with residents, the media, and designers—set the city on a path to density reduction in the decades that followed.
This story is adapted from an exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum. The original version can be seen here.
Queensbridge Houses
In public housing, NYCHA developed the vast Queensbridge Houses (26 percent land coverage and 209 pp/acre) as an efficient, self-contained mini-city for the working-class with a central shopping district and community center. The site, a former industrial area, was purchased for just $1.00 a square foot, a bargain compared to Vladeck Houses on the Lower East Side ($3.76 per square foot
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Queensbridge Houses
Fredrick Ackerman, chief architect of NYCHA, who defined Queensbridge’s parameters, encouraged 6-story elevator buildings to reduce the cost of expensive foundations. The design team economized by repeating the same building type across the entire site.
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Queensbridge Houses
With 3,142 units, the small, but efficient apartments boasted light in every room and modern sanitary and heating facilities. The primary on-site luxuries were the acres of trees and numerous playgrounds.
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Queensbridge Houses
When Queensbridge opened in 1939, the first tenants (mostly white), were carefully selected nuclear families who agreed to be highly supervised by nosy housing assistants who kept close track of their incomes, housekeeping, and behavior. Queensbridge’s approach to design and tenancy was imitated, usually in much taller buildings, in the NYCHA projects that followed.
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StuyTown-Peter Cooper Village
City leaders, most notably Robert Moses, also encouraged middle-class, large-scale, master-planned, low-density projects. Stuyvesant Town, developed by the private company Metropolitan Life Insurance, required a massive slum clearance program paid for largely by the city. Located between 14th and 20th streets and First Avenue to Avenue C, the 80-acre site replaced the Gas House district of gas storage tanks.
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StuyTown-Peter Cooper Village
Planned in 1942, the first buildings opened in 1947. The buildings of Stuyvesant Town covered only 26 percent of the site and delivered 302 pp/acre. Stacking up the 8,757 apartments in 15-story buildings failed to overcome the impact of low ground coverage.
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StuyTown-Peter Cooper Village
The all-white residents benefited from generous apartments, private green spaces, and neighborhood retail. Sponsors carefully managed occupancy to prevent crowding.
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StuyTown-Peter Cooper Village
Those families lucky enough to get apartments realized that they had gotten far more than just apartments—they were living in a new, lower density urban landscape that stood apart from the city and was secured by private police. Many would stay for decades.
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