Looking at some of the major housing projects in Harlem, its sometimes hard to imagine what was there originally. The archival photos of West 124th Street, looking towards Broadway, circa 1930 show a middle class neighborhood with cobblestone streets, storefronts and an active street life. The second photo down shows a wider view with a horse carriage to the far left (click to enlarge). The building at the horizon in all the photos is the the International House. As part of the urban renewal trend of the 1950's, the blocks from West 122nd Street to 125th Street and Broadway were entirely razed to build the middle class Morningside Gardens and the lower income General Grant Houses. These 21 story buildings would be tallest in the area at the time and most probably thought they were new and a luxury to the middle class and the poor. What city planners now have learned from this earlier experiment in housing is that building up does detract from the nature of low rise neighborhoods, not mixing income classes in the same building does more harm in segregating social economic classes and that ground floor commercial spaces are a must to have a sense of street life and community. This is also an example of how the best intended designs might not be the most successful when human factors are not considered. Archival photos courtesy NYPL. Current photos by Ulysses.
Morningside Gardens was built prior to the Grant Housing by a few years.
ReplyDelete1300 Amsterdam Ave. later became a Drug Store.
The current (modern) photo shown is of LaSalle Street not 124th Street.
Negroes were not welcomed on the Westside of Amsterdam Ave or could not rent in the bldgs shown in those photos.
West 124th got obliterated at this point of Broadway since the original city street plan was thrown out the window. The view from today is on La Salle and is the closest proximation to the view of the original West 124th Street. You can see the elevated train and the International House in all the photos old and new.
ReplyDeleteColumbia University and the city still thought these blocks were slums even thought they had some elevator, luxury buildings on them mixed with tenements and SROs. The newer projects were thought to be modern and would bring on a mixed neighborhood. Our research suggested the block was becoming increasingly Puerto Rican at the time which is interesting since that community has moved on in the past couple of decades.
I actually don't think the problem is density (i.e., "building up"), so much as it is the design of these giant, tower-in-the-park developments. They destroyed the streetscape and sapped the mixed-use vitality of the neighborhoods. The towers became prisons. The rest is history.
ReplyDelete