Bridgeport, CT
Area Planned: 24.72 acres. Housing planned: Semidetached houses, 6 families; Row houses, 259 families; Semidetached two-flathouses, 28 families; row two-flat houses, 84 families. Total, 337 families.
Housing constructed: Semidetached houses, 6 families; Row houses, 185 families; Semidetached two-flat houses, 12 families; row two-flat houses, 54 families. Total, 257 families.
1919 excerpt describing the design features:
"In spite of having land as flat as a piece of paper,
the designers deliberately chose to meet these requirements
in an extremely irregular and picturesque
and accidental-seeming plan instead of in
something on the order of the Philadelphia gridiron
or a smooth curvilinear system of layout.
They followed in this respect a precedent often set
in recent European town planning work but seldom
boldly attempted here. It is a difficult thing to
do with entire artistic success, even if the costs of
construction can be kept at all on par with those
involved where the same repetition of small units
is made in a monotonous way, but where it is as
well done as in this case the result is strikingly
attractive. So far as the general plan goes, little,
if any waste of land or of street and utilities construction
can be charged against the irregularities
of the plan, and there is no question that in point
of picturesque interest, attractiveness, and charm
this development takes a very high rank. In the
grouping of the houses into rows and into linked-up
building masses so irregular that they can hardly be called 'rows,' and in the grouping of these rows
and building masses themselves into larger compositions;
in the deflections of angle, in the relation
of the road and sidewalk lines to the building
masses, and apparently in the placing of the trees,
an artistically dangerous and difficult thing has
been done with notable artistic success. From
almost any point of view within the development
the houses look well and we may credit this to the
unusually careful study given to the problem by
both architect and landscape architect and the
complete harmony of their work. Had the houses
not been given the kind of setting which their design
seems to demand; had their picturesque quality
been overlooked and the streets laid out with
greater regularity of plan, much would have been
lost as far as beauty is concerned."
The Bridgeport Site Today
Renderings, 1919
