Queensbridge Houses

Driving east from the southernmost tip of Central Park in New York City, you reach the Queensborough Bridge after about 2.5 km: it connects Manhattan and the borough of Queens. At the foot of the bridge lies New York’s largest social housing project, Queensbridge Houses, built in 1939 and still in use today.

The Y-shaped floor plan of the residential towers and their location in a park-like setting demonstrate how much the accommodation of poor city dwellers improved over the course of one and a half centuries. For a long time New York, like other big cities, was the scene of the most horrendous housing conditions imaginable. Though slum clearance legislation was adopted as early as 1800 – entitling the city to buy and break down buildings that covered an entire plot (and thus had no garden or courtyard) – the hesitant regulations proved no match for the combination of explosive population growth, prohibitive rents and opportunistic speculative development. Between 1800 and 1850, many parts of the city housed dozens of families crammed into buildings on plots measuring 8 x 32 m, with four housing units per floor, no running water or toilets, and bedrooms without any access to ventilation or light: the so-called ‘railroad tenements’ (because of the similarity to the floorplan of a railway carriage).

The introduction of the ‘dumbbell plan’ in the second half of the nineteenth century slightly improved things, but the housing situation of the urban underclass remained awkward: though light shafts were introduced, these were less than 1.5 m wide, and plumbing was rudimentary. Only new legislation introduced around 1900 promoting the use of wider plots literally brought more air and light into public housing, a development that was subsequently furthered in 1916 by the introduction of the famous zoning law.

The end of the First World War marks the beginning of the tendency to build larger-scaled projects, often realized farther away from the expensive city centre, with a lower building density and particular attention to outdoor space, incident light and additional features such as children’s playgrounds. Buildings on the edges gave way to buildings that were scattered over the terrain.

Queensbridge Housing is an example of such a largescale approach. It encompasses 3,149 apartments, realized on a location the size of 12 regular city blocks. The programme consists of houses, a community centre, a school, a shopping mall and six courtyards that serve as playgrounds. The entire project covers a rectangular area of 400 x 500 m (20 ha) intersected by two north-south streets flanked by public amenities and a single east-west street that leads to the parking lot at the heart of the neighbourhood. The streets dovetail with the street grid of the surrounding city. The residential towers arranged in the resulting six sectors circle an open space with a green, park-like quality.

The building blocks of the project are two types of residential towers with Y-shaped floor plans. In the first type, six apartments are clustered around a central staircase per floor; in the other, five. The towers are clustered by twos, threes, fours or fives into meandering structures of six storeys high and up to 160 m long. The architects, W.F.R. Ballard, Henry S. Churchill, Frederick G. Frost and Burnett Turner, managed to achieve a very compact chain of dwellings, providing a relatively large number of different dwelling types and sizes. The dwellings range from two- to five-room apartments, either arranged like terraced housing or fitted with diagonally placed windows. Some L-shaped, five-room apartments envelop two-room apartments; elsewhere identical dwellings lie parallel, side by side. The stairwells and light wells are also very compact and hardly take up any façade space.

The angles in the tower floor plans (120 degrees) create dwellings that are much more favourably positioned towards the sunlight than in towers with a usual, cross-shaped floor plan. They also create a varied façade, in which the lines are not all orthogonal. Consequently, the overall composition seems slightly less massive than would be the case if the buildings had been placed in line. All of these architectural resources notwithstanding, Queensbridge Housing is a major problem area, with a reputation tarnished by drugs and crime. On the other hand, there are no plans to tear it down – perhaps because of its good spatial structure and favourable floor plans.