Chatham Village, Pittsburgh: A Depression-Era Garden City

The bluffs of Mount Washington above the Monongahela River was Native American hunting ground before French traders arrived in the seventeen hundreds and Fort Pitt was built at the forks below. This hillside was farmed and then left as scrubland as Pittsburgh's mill workers crowded into the river valleys.

In the early nineteen thirties, during the Great Depression, Pittsburgh's Buhl Foundation decided to prove that the private sector could build beautiful, affordable housing and still turn a profit. They hired the celebrated planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, who had pioneered the American Garden City movement, and gave them about forty-six acres of hilltop land.

Stein and Wright arranged nearly two hundred brick townhouses around shared courtyards and gardens, with no through traffic cutting between homes. Completed in nineteen thirty-six, Chatham Village became an international model for humane urban housing. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand five. It later became a housing cooperative, and residents still own it together today.