Amalgamated

 

Building # 1 [actually 1-5], Sedgwick Ave. between Dickinson and Saxon Avenues, Springsteen and Goldhammer, 1926-27, demolished; replaced by Buildings 1A and 1B, 1968-1970, Herman Jessor; Building #6, Van Cortlandt Park South between Saxon and Hillman Avenues, Springsteen and Goldhammer, 1928; Building # 7, VCP South between Hillman and Gouverner Avenues, Springsteen and Goldhammer, 1929; Buildings # 13 and #14, between Orloff and Gouverneur Avenues, Springsteen and Herman Jessor, 1947-1949


The Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx are eleven apartment houses, scattered over six blocks just south of Van Cortlandt Park, on a slope that rises from Bailey Avenue to Mosholu Parkway.  The buildings, erected between 1927 and 1970, constitute a brief chronicle of change in Bronx multiple residence design. Six-story mock-Tudor manor houses hug the sidewalk; twelve-story cross-plan boxes are poised on a wide lawn; a pair of twenty-four story megaliths looms on the hillcrest.

 

The cooperative is an historic institution. Building Number One, opened in 1927 to 303 families, was one of the first large-scale moderate-income housing cooperatives in the country. (By 1997, there were 100,000 units of such housing available in New York State alone.) Its parent organization, the Amalgamated Housing Corporation, was founded in the mid- 1920s to help workers, mainly Jewish immigrants in the needle trades, escape from  lower East Side slums in which they were trapped by a post-WWI shortage of other affordable housing. To provoke new construction, which would permanently empty the Old Law tenements,  Governor Alfred E. Smith signed a 1926 Housing Law, which offered a twenty-year tax exemption and low-cost building loans to any developers who would agree to keep their profits below 6 percent. New York City landlords, enjoying a building boom in middle class and luxury housing,  turned a cold shoulder. But the largest garment union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, seized the opportunity to begin constructing attractive apartments, which (with some initial loan assistance) would be affordable to its members, and others, in buildings to be owned and democratically managed by the tenants themselves.

 

The first “cooperators” moved into homes whose design was a point-by-point correction of the faults of the tenements. The relatively low cost of outer-borough land had enabled the union to buy a full block on Sedgwick Avenue, across from the Jerome Park Reservoir. For architects they turned to the firm of Springsteen and Goldhammer, which had been successfully designing “Garden” apartment houses in the Bronx,  developing a format used for middle-class housing in Queens during the previous decade. Plans were drawn for five linear buildings placed along the perimeter of the site. Unlike tenements, these were set parallel to the streets, and covered only fifty-one percent of the ground, leaving a large central courtyard. Joined end to end,  the apartment houses formed an encompassing five-story brick wall, with  two narrow gaps left as gateways at opposite ends of the block. Only two rooms wide in most places, the buildings offered apartments a view of both the street and the courtyard. There were no dark and airless inside rooms, or windows facing dead walls.

 

To eliminate the need for internal corridors, twenty separate  stairways served the different buildings, with only two or three apartments opening onto each landing. The outside entrances to these stairways didn’t face the street, but instead led to the interior courtyard, the “garden,” laid out in formal plantings and crossed by a 506 foot walk between the gateways. Concealed from Sedgwick Avenue by a cleverly angled approach, (and no more than glimpsed through a tunnel-like portal on Dickinson Avenue),  the garden common was the physical focus of the complex. In effect,  Amalgamated’s Building Number One (as the whole group was designated)  turned the privacy-starved, street-oriented life of the downtown slums inside-out, to the great satisfaction of the “pioneer” cooperators, a few of whom eagerly moved in before internal wiring was completed.

 

Unfortunately, the Sedgwick Avenue apartments were demolished in the 1960s, victim of the continuing success of the cooperative, whose residents, by then numbering nearly 1500, felt it was no longer reasonable to ask people to struggle with five-story walk ups, and chose to use the land for the two over-scale towers, completed in 1970. However, it’s still possible to get a sense of how Building #1 looked by visiting two smaller Amalgamated apartment houses nearby, Building #6 (finished in 1928) and Building #7 (of 1929), each of which might be considered  a detached fragment of a full-block garden complex. Like the original, they shield their courtyards from the street, and must be entered through intriguing tunnels from Van Cortlandt Park South. Their exterior and garden facades are visually organized in horizontal layers, with deeply textured brick in the lower stories, counterpointed  by rough stone ashlar around doorways and basement windows; plain masonry and low-relief elaboration above; and an upper story varied with fields of light-colored  stucco, pointed gables and rectangular turrets, and imitation cross-timbering. As photographs show, the same articulation was used on the Sedgwick buildings.

 

Building #1 seems to have relied on artisan bricklayers to execute most of its decoration, which involved “corbelling,” a stepwise projection of bricks from the wall. Supported on corbels, long flat pilasters added relief to corner turrets and flanked windows, whose sills rested on rows of small, corbelled arches. You’ll find the same signature ornament on the walls of Buildings #6 and #7. To judge the possibilities of expert brickwork, though, be sure to examine in the courtyard of #7 the radiating pattern over round-headed doorways, and a double “hounds-tooth”—you’ll know it when you see it—which tops the courses of dark brick.

 

When the cooperative began building again after the end of World War II, garden apartments had seen their day. They were succeeded at the Amalgamated, as elsewhere,  by high-rise  “towers in the park,” which could vertically house as many families as had occupied the peripheral block, while leaving much more green space, now in the form of a surrounding lawn rather than a shadowy interior courtyard. (Towers could even be skewed to the street grid, like Buildings #13 and #14, maximizing sunlight for their rooms and views for their terraces.)  In the modernist manner, the rectangular slabs were purged of ornament. There would be no more of the Tudor gables or half-timbering  which pioneer cooperators had found satisfyingly suburban.  But a prepared eye will recognize, in details of the second-generation buildings, a faint but respectful homage to the picturesque masonry of the first:  banded brickwork on the lower stories, doorways framed in irregular stone, and—barely noticeable above the eighth story—vestigial corbel arcades and pilasters.

 

David Bady