Jersey Homesteads

A Garden City via the Bauhaus

6th Street and Avenue C, New York City. Dorothea Lange/FSA,  June 1936. 

While researching photos for another story I stumbled across this little gem by Dorothea Lange from June 1936. It shows a play street on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

The Resettlement Administration, an arm of the federal government, was moving 250 families from New York City to a new development on farmland near Hightstown, New Jersey. The new town, originally called the Hightstown Project, was soon named Jersey Homesteads; later, after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the town was renamed Roosevelt.

Lange's photo is intended to show the poor living conditions that the migrants were leaving. Arthur Rothstein had the same assignment, but in the Bronx. Here's one of his shots, from December 1936.

Shopping street in the Bronx. Arthur Rothstein/FSA, Dec. 1936.

I'm not sure that the Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration on September 1, 1937, entirely got what it wanted from these photographs. Certainly they're gritty. And horse-drawn wagons at the time were probably considered obsolescent rather than quaint. But Lange's play street is a nod to the many things that the city government was doing to try make the city's slums a bit nicer. (New York City's play streets date back to 1914. For a story, click here.)

Still, the government thought that a move to the country, with all that fresh air and greenery, would be a good alternative to tenement dwelling, and so it purchased approximately 1,200 acres of land in New Jersey's Monmouth County, about midway between New York and Philadelphia, and on August 5, 1935, work started on the project, which would in time have 200 homes (a reduction from the 250 figure in Lange's photo caption), a factory, a 500-acre farm, water supply and sewer systems, and other structures. The first families moved in on July 10, 1936. (For a description of Jersey Homesteads in its early days, see this typewritten, undated document from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

The factory officially opened on August 2. It was a garment factory. To use real-estate lingo, the target market for Jersey Homesteads was Jewish needle workers in New York and Philadelphia. Russell Lee was one of the RA/FSA photographers who helped to document the new town in its early days. Here's a shot he took of one of the factory workers.

Barry Leving in the factory. Russell Lee/FSA, Nov. 1936.

Jersey Homesteads was only one of many resettlement communities the government created around the country. Perhaps the most famous is Greenbelt, Maryland. In Pennsylvania there was Westmoreland Homesteads, now Norvelt, in Westmoreland County, southeast of Pittsburgh. (The name Norvelt was constructed from pieces of Eleanor Roosevelt's name.)

Jersey Homesteads was blessed to have two highly capable architects - Alfred Kastner as principal architect and Louis Kahn as his assistant. There is some conversation about who should receive the most credit for the remarkable buildings that went up. I don't have an opinion on this. (For more on the design and the designers, click here.)

Here's a shot of one of the houses.

Model house near completion. Dorothea Lange/FSA, June 1936.

Of course I have an opinion. Both designers were strongly influenced by the Bauhaus, and the buildings at Jersey Homesteads show the same influence - the large windows and flat roofs give the game away immediately. So it's possible that what we're seeing is the result of an effective collaboration - two good designers with the same approach, building on one another's ideas. (The University of Pennsylvania has a number of Kahn's sketches for the project. They don't settle the argument, but they're a lot of fun to look at.)

The layout of Jersey Homesteads was strongly influenced by the garden city movement. Ebenezer Howard developed the idea of the garden city in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the ills of the nineteenth century industrial city. The basic concept was to reverse the existing flow of population from the countryside to the city by building small, self-contained cities in agricultural areas. The cities would not be suburban bedroom communities. Rather, they would provide housing, employment, and food production in one organic, self-sufficient entity. The large green belt around the central city was to remain and not be used as a place to build new factories or housing. Several garden cities were built in England in the early twentieth century, and Jersey Homesteads, as built, should be seen as a little American cousin to these English originals.

Jersey Homesteads was organized as a series of cooperatives - most notably the factory coop, the farm coop, and the consumer coop, where the main thing was a grocery store. As often happens with utopian experiments, the coops failed - pretty quickly, actually.

The original idea had been for people to live, work, shop, and socialize mainly within the town. And in the beginning, there were very few cars. This changed when people needed to commute daily to jobs in other towns. Personally, I think the cars would have come anyway.  Jersey Homesteads was too small to support much retail beyond the equivalent of a rural general store. And so the town found itself joining the larger region of central New Jersey. After World War II, when the federal government put the construction of commuter bedroom communities on steroids, farmland was rapidly absorbed into the expanding suburban world, and the original garden city idea of a relatively self-contained community surrounded by green space became less and less tenable.

So, in addition to the push from the inside to be more connected to the outside world, Jersey Homesteads came under sustained pressure from the outside world to conform to the evolving suburban model.

But Jersey Homesteads did not become just another bedroom subdivision. Its early history as a homesteading community organized around a series of coops, coupled with a built environment that was not exactly a bunch of Cape Cods, certainly created an atmosphere conducive to a slightly different path.

A turning point came early, in the form Ben Shahn, who painted a mural for the combined community center and elementary school. Howard Greenfeld, on pages 140-142 of his Ben Shahn (1998), reports that, after a lengthy preparatory period, Shahn started work on the mural in November 1937 and completed work in May 1938. There is some disagreement on the dating, but Shahn spent much of the summer of 1937 working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration, traveling to a number of eastern states. And during the summer of 1938 he was again photographing, this time in Ohio for the Farm Security Administration (pp. 145-148).

He also took pictures of preparatory work for the mural in Jersey Homesteads. Here is one of his shots.

Preparing mortar for the fresco. Ben Shahn/FSA.

The FSA archive dates these photos as 1935-1936, with a question mark. I think 1937-1938 would be a better dating. Arthur Rothstein photographed what appears to be the completed mural. These pictures are dated May 1938. (To see Shahn's and Rothstein's photographs, click here.)

Shahn had worked on a number of mural projects previously; Jersey Homesteads, however, was his first completed mural.

Shahn moved to Jersey Homesteads in 1939, and soon the settlement found itself home to a small artists' colony. Shahn himself was often away, traveling on work or for pleasure, but this was his home until he died in 1969. (For the date of Shahn's move to Jersey Homesteads, see Deborah Martin Kao et al., Ben Shahn's New York, 2000, pp. 15, 91.)

Among the artists and writers who came to Roosevelt was another FSA photographer, Edwin Rosskam, who moved there in the spring of 1953. In 1972 he published a combined memoir and oral history entitled Roosevelt, New Jersey: Big Dreams in a Small Town & What Time Did to Them. Looking back over decades of success and failure, and failure breeding success, he has this to say on page 31 about the science of town planning: "Our town can serve as a warning. Because here nothing developed as planned. The community found its own form and feeling, perversely, you might say, to become something nobody could possibly have foreseen."

For a good recent story on the town, click here.

Here's an interesting collection of materials about Roosevelt and Shahn's mural that Princeton University's library put online in 2018. See particularly the video at the very end, featuring interviews with a number of long-time residents.

See also I'm Haunted by Ben Shahn.