Electus D. Litchfield, "The Model Village That Is: The Story of Yorkship Village, Planned and Completed in Less than Two Years," House Beautiful 51, pp. 533-536 (1922). Click or tap on images to view larger.
| THE MODEL VILLAGE THAT IS |
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| The Story of Yorkship Village, Planned and Completed in Less than Two Years |
| BY ELECTUS D. LITCHFIELD |
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OF all things that man's genius has created, the town would seem to be the only one of importance for which generally he has no plan. The town just grows. 'Each for himself and the devil take the hindmost' is the common rule for city development; and the worst of it is, the devil does take the hindmost. So convinced is man that there must be a plan behind all of the natural growths with which he is familiar, that he styles his God the architect of the universe; and yet, for his own greatest work, he repeatedly has no plan.
Those few cities which have been built according to an intelligent programme are so superior that little argument is necessary to prove the advantage of an established scheme of development. In our own country, Washington and Buffalo are outstanding examples of towns built in accordance with a well-thought-out plan; and even Philadelphia and New York can point to the advantages derived from their preestablished plans, crude and elemental though they were. The charm of many of our New England villages is due to the fact that, in their beginnings, there was the germ of a definite plan. Unfortunately, there is none in which the plan has kept pace with its growth.
Charles Howland says that the development of modern law may be divided into three great periods. The first, that concerned with the development of the rights of the individual; the second, that in which the rights of property received most consideration, and the third, --- upon which we are now entering, --- that in which the rights of the community are to be clearly established.
One of the few beneficent results of the Great War was the splendid development of the community spirit, and in the Government villages built during that period, here and in England, are preached sermons in brick and mortar, to the text, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'
On May 7, 1918, the Cooper Farm was spread out, as it had. been for more than a century and a half, between the north and south branches of Newton Creek, close to their confluence where they emptied into the Delaware River. A country turnpike passed through to its centre, dividing the farm roughly into halves, and crossed the south branch of the Creek over an old wooden bridge, thus connecting it with the ancient town of Gloucester. The City of Camden and the great yards of the New York Shipbuilding Corporation lay immediately across the northern branch of the little river.
Down close to the shore, where the creeks widened out into an estuary, where they join the Delaware, was the old Cooper Homestead, built of wood in wide clapboards, surrounded by a few fine old trees; and off to the westward stood a comfortable brick mansion built, as the figures in its gable testified, a few years before the Battle of Gloucester, which was fought on this same ground during the Revolution. The rest was fields and hedges and, off in one corner, a patch of wood.
In May, 1920, the picture had completely changed. There appeared a completely developed community of more than seven thousand persons. Where before there had been cornfields and potato patches, there were no less than eight miles of paved streets and thousands of well-grown trees, twenty miles of hedges, stores, a church, and 1578 houses. We hear now and then of boom towns, where perhaps even a larger number of people find so-called homes within a very limited time, but never in this country, and probably never in the world, have permanent homes for so many people been provided within as short a period of time as at Yorkship Village, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia.
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THE PLACE OF THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET SHOWS THE VALUE OF
DEFINITELY CLOSING A VISTA
When, during the war, the great cry went up for ships, ships, and more ships, the yards at Camden were the best equipped of the shipyards of the country to meet the demand, and when the Government ordered their facilities doubled, homes for the vast army of additional workmen had to be found. The order went, therefore, to the architects and town planners of Yorkship Village to select a site and build, as economically but as rapidly as possible, a community, which physically should do all that was humanly and reasonably possible to produce and maintain a healthy and happy body of workers. The mental as well as physical health, not only of the worker himself, but of his wife and children, is necessary for efficiency. What the town could do to promote both of these, this town was to do. 'Beauty, old yet ever new, eternal voice and inward word,' smoothing the wearied brow and refreshing the tired spirit, was to be there. Education for the children, recreation for both children and elders, and the Church to point the way to higher things. Stores, of course, conveniently located and properly equipped, providing for every want of the people; space for outdoor markets where the fruits of the adjoining farms could be sold on market days; gardens, too, where those with energy and the necessary time could raise their own crops and keep down their household budgets. In short, it was to be a town planned to the best of human ability, or rather to the best of the very human ability that was employed, within the very meagre time there was available --- a town planned to be as ideal, and yet as economically sound, as possible.
Of course, it is not ideal, for nothing is ever perfect, and there are many ways in which this one is neither complete nor perfect, but by and large, it has something of a lesson for many towns and villages. In the first place, it is practical, and such beauty as it has is the byproduct of a studied plan and not a mere superficial growth.
The general layout of Yorkship Village combines something of the formality and directness of French planning with the more picturesque quality of that of the modern English villages. It consists, in short, of a Town square, about which are grouped apartment houses, stores, a hotel, places of amusement and a school --- from which extend radial streets to the confines of the property and to Camden and the shipyards. Girdling the Square is an outer ring or octagon of streets, and again, in ever widening arcs, curved streets which follow more and more closely the centre.
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The house lots here, as a rule, are shorter than are found in most communities, for the reason that the back yard is ever a presumptive point of untidiness and squalor, and these latter were therefore kept at the minimum with space only sufficient to provide adequately for drying the weekly wash. To offset the diminutive back yard, and to provide generously for light and air, there is provided, beyond the yard, a common playground in which have been planted apple or other wide-branching trees where the youngsters of less than school age may play within sight of their mothers at work in the kitchens.
The high board fence is taboo in Yorkship Village. Fences with concrete posts with top member of chains and a second member of wire between, about which is planted a privet hedge, constitute the divisions between the individual plots. The hedges add to the sightliness and protect the fence, and the fence goes far to protect the hedge from the unruly small boy.
Not far from the centre of the town is a large recreation building, provided with a gymnasium for men and women, its wide two-story porch commanding a view of the eighteen-acre recreation field for the use of the boys and the older members of the community, with running-track, football field, and baseball diamond, as well as its bleachers and grand stand.
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The houses, which are built some singly, some semi-detached, some in groups of three, four, and five, even up to eleven, are planned and placed upon the plots in careful relation to each other, so that together they form pleasing compositions and contrasts. The houses themselves vary in size from four to eight rooms, the greater number having six rooms each. Infinite care was spent in planning these houses as economically and efficiently as possible, making them in every sense easy housekeeping homes.
No house is more than two rooms deep and there is not a dark room in the village. It is not surprising that the people who live there say their families have never been so healthy before.
Each house has its own heating plant, fully equipped bathroom with enameled iron tub and basin and toilet with low-down tank. The kitchens have gas ranges, slate tubs with enameled iron covers, dressers, etc.
Situated as the town is in western New Jersey, close to the Pennsylvania line, its architecture is, as it should be by inheritance, New Jersey and Pennsylvania American, or, as it is usually called, Colonial. This lends itself readily to the material available and is most satisfying and economical. It would have been easy to have given the town the curse of looking 'ready-made.' Unflagging effort was made to avoid this.
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The houses, while built mainly of brick, are not all of this material, numbers being of stucco and a few of wood, but even the brick houses are built of brick from different yards, nine different manufacturers contributing the largest single brick order probably ever given in this country. Then the jointing and the bonding of the brickwork was infinitely varied --- the different foremen competing to make the brickwork most interesting. Here and there in the gables they amused themselves making some special design in brick, or introduced a concrete tablet bearing the date of the armistice or some other object of interest. Numbers of the houses bear duplicates of the old insurance signs so familiar to Philadelphians --- 'the hand in hand' and 'the green tree' and other old trade-marks lending a spot of interest here and there.
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Many different kinds of roof were used: black, striped, purple, green and mottled slate, asphalt shingles in red, brown, and green. Slate-covered asphalt roofing turned over battens giving the effect of tin or copper roofs were also used. A complete plan of Yorkship Village with all the roof colors shown was made before the roofs of any houses were applied, with a gratifying harmony in the finished result; while the whole palette of colors was drawn upon to form pleasing combinations for paint of shutters and trim.
The planting, too, was all planned out in advance. Instead of using nursery stock, a celebrated landscape gardener was employed to translate plant laurel, bush huckleberry, dogwood, and other flowering shrubs from the woods, and to select well-grown trees from the meadows to be moved bodily to Yorkship's avenues and squares. The same appropriation which would have produced a large number of spindling trees to be planted so close together that eventually they must be thinned out, made it possible to obtain a smaller number of fine well-grown specimens, which gave immediately a settled character to the town. Well-grown bushes, too, helped to obtain at once an established homelike quality.
The pictures speak for themselves. When the Government sold the property to the people, a few weeds ago, thousands stormed the hall where the sale was held, begging for an opportunity to bid upon the houses which they occupied.
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Prof. Michael J. Ruiz
Asheville, North Carolina, USA
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