Greenbelt Historic District, New Deal Utopia
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Maryland
Greenbelt was not built organically. It was planned: a federal government experiment in community design, built by the Resettlement Administration and opened in nineteen thirty-seven as one of three Greenbelt Towns built during Roosevelt's New Deal. Modeled on Ebenezer Howard's English garden city ideal, it was designed so homes faced interior parks connected by underpasses and pedestrian paths, while a ring road kept automobiles to the outside.
The architecture is modernist, with streamlined Art Deco touches: curved lines, concrete block, and glass brick. The original plan included hundreds of housing units. Residents formed cooperatives, community-run stores and services, almost immediately. One painful fact runs alongside the idealistic vision: Black families were barred from applying for residency. The historic district was listed on the National Register in nineteen eighty, one of the most intact New Deal planned communities still surviving.
