Jackson Heights A Garden in the City The History of America's ...

by Karatzas, Daniel

$83 · Offered by eBay

Excerpt from the Introduction: The mix of urbane apartment and row houses that constitutes the Queensboro Corporation's contribution to Jackson Heights established a model urban suburbia that demonstrates, as none have since, what high-density housing in the city could be. Important in its own time, Jackson Heights seems even more so now, when the shortcomings of virtually every one of our efforts to provide multi-family housing are all too evident around us. Between the two world wars, Jackson Heights played a special role in the development of a new urban-suburban multiple-dwelling type, the "garden apartment," a term no doubt invented by its chief advocate, Andrew J. Thomas, a self-taught architect who combined persuasive proselytizing, superb organization, and genuine talent to maintain the compositional unity and aesthetic coherence typical for the prewar luxury apartment house amidst the economic and social realities of the interwar period. According to the housing reformer Louis Pink, Thomas "was the first to build apartments with a little court or setback in front with some trees in it. This proved popular and the idea of the garden partment was born. He learned that beauty pays. He also learned that it does not pay to crowd the land. He became a crusader for beauty, light, and air.

• Publisher: Unknown
• Condition: Fine

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