Book Published About Mt Washington's Chatham Village

Women play cards in Chatham Village, 1932

Pittsburgh history buffs will love the new book published about Mt Washington's Chatham Village. "Chatham Village: Pittsburgh's Garden City" has a paper jacket which feels almost like suede, giving the cover photographs extra depth. The book's design, by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, N.C., is enjoyable, too, with wide margins and an abundance of photographs, drawings and plans.

Author Angelique Bamberg was the city's preservation planner from December 1998 to 2006 and it was her job to inform and guide commission members in their decision-making. A native of Germany who grew up in the American South, she first came to Pittsburgh earlier in 1998 as a Cornell University graduate student researching her master's thesis on Chatham Village, out of which this book has grown. It's the first book-length treatment of the subject, and Ms. Bamberg has detailed its design and establishing how and why the community is significant, the role it played in the history of planned developments and why it was both a smashing success and a disappointing failure.

Chatham Village, while widely known in planning circles, is one of Pittsburgh's best-kept secrets. The community was built in two phases on 45 acres on a Mount Washington hilltop -- the former Thomas Bigham estate -- between 1931 and 1936. It was a demonstration project of the Buhl Foundation, which wanted to show that quality, affordable housing could be built for middle-class families at a profit by the private sector. It also wanted to demonstrate that Pittsburgh's hilly terrain could be developed economically and beautifully. At Chatham Village, 197 terraced red-brick row houses surround village greens, gardens and paths, all stepping down the sloping site.

The 208-page hardcover edition (University of Pittsburgh Press, $29.95) opens with a look at the four men who were most influential in the development's launch, beginning with Charles Fletcher Lewis, a former Pittsburgh Sun editorial writer who headed the then year-old Buhl Foundation.  Lewis hired three consultants, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright and Frederick Bigger, all architects, planners and housing reform advocates who were members of the Regional Planning Association of America.

To combat sprawl and the ills of the city, the association's members had devised plans for a series of communities called New Towns, with homes grouped around greens, gardens and paths, limiting cars to roads and garages on the perimeter. Clarence Stein believed the automobile had made the traditional urban grid unsafe for pedestrians, especially children who made the streets their playgrounds. Inspired by the English garden city movement, Mr. Stein and Mr. Wright had collaborated on two previous projects, Sunnyside Gardens on Long Island, N.Y., and Radburn, N.J.

Mr. Lewis' consultants convinced him that Chatham could not be built and sold for a profit as individually owned homes, he shifted its focus to rental properties for the struggling middle-class. Designed by Pittsburgh architects Ingham and Boyd, the row houses were no ordinary rentals. They had limestone door surrounds and stone cartouches over some doorways, modern amenities like steel kitchens, and utility and power lines were buried underground, enhancing the aura of an urban Eden designed by landscape architect Ralph Griswold, who emphasized lush lawns accented and shaded by trees. At the first open house, 20,000 people lined up to have a look and there soon was a waiting list for occupancy.

To assure the "model community" was a "model success", the first tenants were carefully screened. They were uniformly Protestant, white-collar and white -- a demographic that has widened over time. Once geared to families with children, Chatham Village now caters more to the needs of adults.  Satisfied that the Buhl Foundation's housing experiment had come to a successful conclusion, Mr. Lewis' successor, Charles Nutting, turned it into a co-op in 1957, offering tenants the chance to become owners at extremely reasonable cost. Most of them did. 

Ms. Bamberg is currently a planning and preservation consultant and instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. 

 

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