Before Radburn: Lenape Trails, Dutch Farms, and the Town Built for the Motor Age

The Lenape people called this corner of Bergen County home for thousands of years, traveling trails that became the roads Dutch and English settlers inherited in the sixteen hundreds. Those colonists divided the land into farms, and the area stayed in agricultural use, corn and grain and pasture, well into the twentieth century. In nineteen twenty-seven, the City Housing Corporation bought more than a thousand acres of that farmland roughly ten miles from the under-construction George Washington Bridge and proposed something radical: a town designed around the pedestrian, not the car.

Architect Clarence Stein and planner Henry Wright created superblocks where houses turned their backs to streets and their fronts to interior parks linked by underpasses. Landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley worked with them, and Radburn is credited with some of the earliest culs-de-sac in the United States. The part that was actually built covers one hundred forty nine acres, including twenty three acres of interior parks, and in two thousand five it was designated a National Historic Landmark District.

Radburn opened in nineteen twenty-nine, months before the stock market crash halted its expansion. Though it was never finished, Radburn's pedestrian-path-and-park-block layout became one of the most copied templates in twentieth-century planning worldwide.