City and Suburban Homes Company's Avenue A Estate

History and architecture

Built between 1901 and 1913, City and Suburban Homes Company's Avenue A Estate was the largest low-income housing project in the world at the time of its completion and remained the t such project in Manhattan until the erection of the Amalgamated Dwellings Knickerbocker Village in the 1930s. Its developer, the City and Suburban Homes Company was the most successful of the privately financed limit -dividend companies which attempted to address the housing problems of the nation's working poor at the turn of the century.

The company's investors, led by such prominent New Yorkers as Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark (later Mrs. Henry Codman Potter), Caroline and Olivia Stokes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Darien Ogden Mills, Isaac Seligman, R. Fulton Cutting, and Bayard Cutting agreed to voluntarily limit their profits in order to provide wage-earners with comfortable, safe, hygienic, well-maintained housing at market rates. By paying a dividend, the company attempted to establish what its president E.R.L.

Gould described as "a middle ground between pure philanthropy and pure business" and encourage others to invest in housing of an equally high caliber. City and Suburban's success in building model tenements encouraged others to enter the field, notably the industrialist Henry Phipps who established the Phipps Houses in 1905. In the 1930s when the federal government seriously began to develop a national housing policy, City and Suburban's large-scale development projects, management techniques, and financial structure were studied and used as guidance for the development of new programs.

From its inception City and Suburban Homes has been linked to the light-court tenement. This building type was first proposed by the architect Ernest Flagg in Scribner's Magazine in 1894 as an economically viable alternative to the dark, unventilated dumbbell tenements of the period. In 1896, in preparation for the formation of City and Suburban, the Improved Housing Council, an offshoot of the prestigious Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, held a competition to solicit model designs for light-court tenements.

The winners of that competition were commissioned to design City and Suburban's first three projects and the company became the first developer to build a light-court tenement. At the Avenue A Estate the light-court type was tested and improved in a series of fourteen buildings. These include two re-studies of prize-winning designs from important architectural competitions: Hanle & Short's 1470 and 1492 York Avenue of 1901-03, which combine elements from Thomas Short's first-place, design from the Charity Organization Society's model tenement design competition of 1900 with features from James E.

Ware's initial buildings at City and Suburban's First Avenue Estate but improves on both; and Percy Griffin's 503-509 East 78th Street and 504-508 East 79th Street, a pair of U-shaped buildings, based on his third-place project from the Improved Housing Council's competition of 1896, that are situated back to back and oriented so that both their open courts face southward. The later buildings in the complex are the product of City and Suburban's own architectural department established in 1906 and headed by Philip H.

Ohm. In these light-court designs, Ohm experimented with the placement of courts, stairs, halls, and apartment configurations in an effort to produce the most efficient and economical of plans; this savings of means enabled the company to increase the level of amenities offered to its tenants. Within the framework of a limited budget, all the buildings in the complex were designed in contemporary architectural styles and feature such details as quoining, rustication, patterned brickwork, and elaborately carved doorways.

Ohm's projects include two buildings with courtyard entrances, 530-534 and 536-540 East 79th Street, the latter having open stairs; the Collegiate Gothic style Bishop Henry Codman Potter Memorial Buildings, at 516-520 and 524-528 East 79th Street, Which won an honorable mention from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for the exterior design of an apartment house in 1911; and the Junior League Hotel for Women, at 541-555 East 78th Street, built with sleeping porches on its river front and a rooftop pergola to take full advantage of the building's riverfront site.

The last building was altered in 1978-80, but has not lost its significance and remains an integral part of the complex.

In its projects City and Suburban emphasized large-scale development likening itself to a chain store, able to offer quality goods at bargain prices because of large-scale organization. When it was completed in 1913, the Avenue A Estate comprised 1257 apartments plus a hotel for 336 women. By contrast, the next largest model tenement projects in the city were City and Suburban's First Avenue Estate with 1059 apartments and Ernest Flagg's New York Fireproof Tenements on West 42nd Street with 610 apartments.

While there were other projects that covered large portions of a city block, notably Alfred T. White's Riverside Buildings (1890) in Brooklyn, nothing approached City and Suburban's large-scale high-density developments. Thus, the York Avenue project can be seen as an important achievement in the social housing movement, bracketed in time between White's English-inspired low-density developments and such post-World War I projects as the Coops and Amalgamated Houses.