25 October 2007

The Golden Door


Chinese immigrants to America called California the “Golden Mountain.”

The Central Americans who came to Arlington called the garden apartments in the Buckingham neighborhood “The Golden Door.” Both groups recognized the possibilities of America, though the gold was not for free, and climbing the mountain and passing through the door was going to take a lot of back-breaking labor.

This morning the gold of the Coast is more the dulling red-gold of the embers of dreams. A friend called last night to confirm that the house in Bonita was gone, burned to the ground. How different life would have been if the Navy had insisted on another move.

Other friends lived just blocks away in the canyon, and they may be among the homeless now.

The Buckingham garden apartments are going to be gone, too, and the time for discussion is past.

It is strange to walk into the conflict at this late date. It is a bit like the discovery of the corpse at the bottom of the retaining wall last week. We know the minute that the police were called: 1:36pm. The police report provides all we will know of the matter. The unidentified man was Hispanic, was homeless, and there appeared to be no foul play involved in his death.

That is apparently the end of the matter, although “the investigation continues.” Many of the people who live in the Buckingham rentals speak no English, and do not even read in their native Spanish. This man, possibly from a tiny village ravaged by civil war, will leave us nothing to describe his odyssey.

The activists tried to play the history card in their fight with the rightful owners of the Buckingham property, and that is where their interests and mine coincide.

The Buckingham neighborhoods represent a significant development in American history, even in their bedraggled present. Other examples exist across the country, but reflect the time after WW II was ended, and the Boys were coming home and ready to start new lives.

The concept actually originated in the writings and vision of Englishman Ebenezer Howard, who wrote a book in 1898 called "Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform." His idea was to provide instant communities of human scale to deal with the expansion of London beyond the Green Zone.

The first such affordable American dwellings were built in 1917 by Edward MacDougal, who was inspired by the Zoning Resolution of 1916, which established regulations for decent housing and zoning. He placed his garden apartments on three hundred acres of farmland in the New York City borough of Queens, and called the development “Jackson Heights.”

The template was established. Garden Apartments consisted of long, low detached buildings designed to minimize the crowding of the tenement. Public space was emphasized, and landscaping was important to the well-being of the humans who dwelt there. The structures were laid out in an overall scheme of super-blocks that deliberately separated vehicle traffic from that of the pedestrians.

That development came to the attention of a futurist named Allie S. Freed. There is a public park named for him in a section of the Doctor's Run downstream from Buckingham, though I doubt if many of the people who walk there have much idea of who he was.

Freed was a successful New York entrepreneur in the taxi business. He had adopted the assembly line-techniques of Henry Ford to the production of taxicabs, and his line of Paramount vehicles rose to be the third most popular in New York City.

He grew rich in the fallout of the Yellow Cab monopoly bust of the early 1930s, and applied some of his wealth to social causes that became starkly apparent in the Depression.

As Henry Kaiser later demonstrated in applying the principles of the assembly line to the production of ships, it was a universal methodology. Freed was in Washington in the mid-1930s, serving as FDR's Chairman of the Committee for Economic Recovery.

One of the ways to do that was to apply the assembly line to the production of dwellings, and that is the principle that began the creation of the Buckingham neighborhood.

Eventually, there would be 1,800 garden apartments constructed in the Colonial revival style, and it would be the largest such development in the world.

Buckingham would be the Golden Door to a new world. It would serve that function to three generations of wildly divergent backgrounds.

Now they are going to start ripping the down the doors to put up the high-rises that Freed hated.

But we will have to get to that tomorrow. I have a few doors to walk through this morning that will not wait.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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