Like most public housing to this day, New York’s projects were built in what is known as the tower-in-the-park style, an adaptation of the housing complexes described in Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, or Contemporary City. Pink, who helped create the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The now infamous Pink Houses in Brooklyn, built in 1959 and named after Louis H. Long a subject of debate and concern for New Yorkers, public housing has recently made its way further into the spotlight with the increasingly rapid gentrification throughout the city’s five boroughs, but more importantly, NYCHA’s alarming recent financial crisis. There are all the familiar symptoms: overcrowding, poverty, crime, and poor health. Yet today, nearly a century later, the projects are arguably the closest thing New York has to the slums of its past (or of developing countries). The overcrowded, poorly ventilated, unsanitary, and crime-ridden NYC slums would be swept away by a grand effort of publicly funded, thoughtfully planned living complexes that would bring dignity and well-being to New York’s working classes. Pink (of the eponymous Pinks housing project in Brooklyn), who was Chairman of the State Board of Housing, to create the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who himself had lost his wife to tuberculosis attributable to poor housing, had joined Louis H. When the United States’ first public housing was built in 1935 in New York City, the initiative marked the beginning of the end of New York’s rampant slums. Above: A series of graphics released by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) in the 30’s and 40’s with the onset of public housing construction.
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