The Architecture of Urban Housing in the United States during the Early 1930s

1978 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 235-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Pommer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Apartment House ◽  
Housing Design ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Housing Programs ◽  
Federal Housing ◽  
Modernist Architecture

The housing programs undertaken by the federal government in 1932-1934 through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration set the pattern for the architecture of housing projects in many cities of the nation for the rest of the decade. In these works the older traditions of American philanthropic housing, apartment house layout, and Beaux-Arts planning collided with new ideas of housing developed by European modernists in the 1920s and introduced into this country just as the federal housing programs began. This process is examined in the three cities most open to Continental modernism in housing: Philadelphia, in the Carl Mackley Houses; Cleveland, especially in Lakeview Terrace; and New York City, in early works of its Housing Authority such as Harlem River Houses and Williamsburg Houses. These examples are then set against the different backgrounds of American and German housing in the preceding decades. The role of Henry Wright in promoting the new architecture on the federal level is clarified. In the light of this evidence, derived largely from unpublished archives and interviews, an explanation is attempted of the early successes and eventual failures of America's public housing design and, more broadly, of aspects of our assimilation of modernist architecture.

De Facto Segregation

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
Richard Rothstein
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Income Differences ◽  
The Public ◽  
Federal Housing ◽  
State And Local Government ◽  
State And Local

The United States’ ability to desegregate metropolitan areas is hobbled by historical ignorance. Believing that segregation is de facto, resulting mostly from private prejudice and income differences, policymakers have failed to consider aggressive initiatives that are constitutionally required to remedy state-sponsored de jure segregation. First with the Public Works Administration, later with war housing built for defense-plant workers during World War II, and still later with the explicit acceptance of racial segregation by the 1949 Housing Act, the federal government created separate neighborhoods for blacks and for whites, often in cities that had not previously known such extreme racial segregation. Subsequently, whites left public housing when the Federal Housing Administration financed suburban development with requirements that builders exclude African Americans. Many other federal, state, and local government policies purposefully contributed to segregation but have never been remedied because policymakers are unfamiliar with this history and the obligations it has generated.

Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on Constitutional Questions: 1914–1917. III

1918 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 640-666
Author(s):  
Thomas Reed Powell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Equal Protection Clause ◽  
Race Discrimination ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Actual Decision

Two instances of race discrimination which came before the court were aimed against aliens. Truax v. Raich annulled an Arizona statute which required every employer of not more than five workers to employ not less than 80 per cent qualified electors or native born citizens of the United States. The decision was based, not only on the equal protection clause, but also on the principle that the states must not interfere with the acknowledged powers of the nation. The power to admit aliens which Congress possesses and has exercised would be nugatory if the states after their admission could deny them the opportunity of a livelihood.But neither of these principles was held applicable to the exclusion of aliens from employment on public works. The opinions in Heim v. McCall and Crane v. New York went so far as to declare that a state must be as free as an individual to decide for itself what persons shall be employed on work done for it. Yet it must be seriously doubted whether the court by actual decision would go so far as to sanction discriminations against Quakers or Methodists or Republicans or Democrats. The exclusion of aliens may be justified on grounds which would not apply to other whimsicalities.

US urban housing prices may stifle consumption growth

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Housing Prices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
San Jose ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Content Type

Subject The economic implications of high housing costs in US cities Significance A lack of homes to buy and rent has pushed prices in California 250% and 50% higher respectively than in the rest of the United States according to a report by the state's Legislative Analyst's Office released on March 17. The problem is most acute in the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, home to Silicon Valley and much of the US tech industry, where the average rent is 53% higher than the California average. Impacts Low-cost areas near employment hubs, such as Queens in New York or Oakland near San Francisco, are likely to grow. However, this will exacerbate political questions over inequality and 'gentrification'. These issues will play a large role in the Democratic primary campaign, as these areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. Congress, which overrepresents non-urban areas, is unlikely to pass legislation addressing this issue before 2017.

Gerald H. Thayer's ornithological work in St Vincent and the Grenadines, Lesser Antilles

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Wiley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lesser Antilles ◽  
American Museum ◽  
The West ◽  
Comparative Zoology ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South

Gerald Handerson Thayer (1883–1939) was an artist, writer and naturalist who worked in North and South America, Europe and the West Indies. In the Lesser Antilles, Thayer made substantial contributions to the knowledge and conservation of birds in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Thayer observed and collected birds throughout much of St Vincent and on many of the Grenadines from January 1924 through to December 1925. Although he produced a preliminary manuscript containing interesting distributional notes and which is an early record of the region's ornithology, Thayer never published the results of his work in the islands. Some 413 bird and bird egg specimens have survived from his work in St Vincent and the Grenadines and are now housed in the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Four hundred and fifty eight specimens of birds and eggs collected by Gerald and his father, Abbott, from other countries are held in museums in the United States.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

Cross-space Consumption among Undocumented Chinese Immigrants in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Zhou ◽  
Xiangyi Li
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Currency Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Migrants

We consider cross-space consumption as a form of transnational practice among international migrants. In this paper, we develop the idea of the social value of consumption and use it to explain this particular form of transnationalism. We consider the act of consumption to have not only functional value that satisfies material needs but also a set of nonfunctional values, social value included, that confer symbolic meanings and social status. We argue that cross-space consumption enables international migrants to take advantage of differences in economic development, currency exchange rates, and social structures between countries of destination and origin to maximize their expression of social status and to perform or regain social status. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic study of consumption patterns in migrant hometowns in Fuzhou, China, and in-depth interviews with undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York and their left-behind family members, we find that, despite the vulnerabilities and precarious circumstances associated with the lack of citizenship rights in the host society, undocumented immigrants manage to realize the social value of consumption across national borders and do so through conspicuous consumption, reciprocal consumption, and vicarious consumption in their hometowns even without being physically present there. We conclude that, while cross-space consumption benefits individual migrants, left-behind families, and their hometowns, it serves to revive tradition in ways that fuel extravagant rituals, drive up costs of living, reinforce existing social inequality, and create pressure for continual emigration.

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