After yesterday’s brickbat, today a qualified bouquet for the New York Times and a Lens blog feature on Jason Reblando’s project ‘New Deal Utopias‘.
Of course, as so often, you can see the work better on Reblando’s own web site – and the NYT does supply a link to the front page of this – and it has also been featured on the Design Observer ‘Places’.
It’s a nice enough feature with the pictures, linking to some useful sites to tell you more about Ebenezer Howard and garden cities, and giving some basic information and links about the three New Deal planned villages of Greenbelt (and here), Maryland, Greenhills, Ohio and Greendale, Wisconsin, though one might quibble whether the pages Lens links to are always the most informative and whether Answers.com is a particularly useful and credible source of information. Though at least it is in one feature – on Wikipedia you have to hunt around a little.
Its perhaps surprising that there doesn’t appear to be a feature on these settlements on the New Deal Network‘s web site, but they were of course documented by the FSA/OWI under Roy Stryker (who does get a link – but one that doesn’t mention Greenbelt.) You can find links to the three towns in the subject index of the collection of their pictures on the Library of Congress American Memory site, which has roughly 570 pictures from Greenbelt, 120 from Greendale and almost 180 from Greenhills, all taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which provide a useful background to Reblando’s work. Among them are many photographs by
Completed home. Greenbelt, Maryland. Arthur Rothstein, LoC.
Arthur Rothstein, (1915-1985), Marion Post Wolcott, (1910-1990), John Vachon, (1914-1975), Russell Lee (1903-86) and Carl Mydans, so Reblando is entering into formidable territory. Again it is perhaps surprising that there appears to be no feature on these developments on the American Memory site – perhaps it’s a part of their history that too many Americans would like to forget.
Assistant community manager talking with members of maintenance crew, Greendale, Wisconsin, John Vachon (1914-75), LoC.
Family on terrace in Greenbelt, Maryland. Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990), LoC
The period of the New Deal and WW2 was arguably America’s finest hour – and certainly the FSA/OWI one of the truly great documentary projects. Since then, with Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Tea Party it has been downhill all the way, and any mention of social projects such as the Greenbelt towns must have the rabid right spitting blood into their tea cups and reaching for their guns. So it’s great that the NYT and Reblando are drawing attention to these visionary projects again.
On Reblando’s site you can also see two other housing-related projects, Lathrop Homes and Outside Public Housing, both of which I found more satisfying than his work on the New Deal Utopias, where I couldn’t really see what he was trying to show through the work. Perhaps it is a project on which he is still working, and I hope so, as I’m sure there is much more that could be done.
Although I’ve not visited any of these towns, Greendale in particular seems to have turned in to something of a curiously mixed celebration of a largely mythical American history, including “A Dickens of a Christmas… gazebo concerts, green markets, a reenactment of a civil war ncampment, a tour of Greendale “Original” homes, a vintage baseball tournament, and a garden-gazing walk.” Surely rich scope for an ironist.