Abstract
IN THE EARLY 1920S, Bernard Newman, the executive director of the Philadelphia Housing Association, extolled the Philadelphia row house as the ideal affordable shelter, urging row housing as a viable solution to what the “housers” of the 1920s and 1930s—prominent reformers such as Edith Elmer Wood, Carol Arnovici, and Catherine Bauer—called America’s “housing problem.” No evidence exists that between the fi rst and second world wars these housers, enthralled by European modernism, ever actually entertained Newman’s idea. Beginning in the 1950s, however, the idea that row housing—especially “used row housing”—could provide good, affordable accommodations for low-income, working-class families gained ascendancy among Philadelphia housing reformers, and by 1970 row housing had become a sizeable part of the city’s public housing stock. However, the late twentieth-century embrace of used row housing hardly signified reformers’ sudden adoption of Newman’s convictions about the efficacy of the row house. Instead it reflected, first, the city’s and the nation’s growing disillusionment with modernist public housing (and, for that matter, urban renewal) and the abrading of what historian Christopher Klemek has called the “urban renewal order.” Under planner Edmund Bacon, that order had flourished in postwar Philadelphia. Born out of early twentieth-century Progressivism, it proposed that government-orchestrated and government-funded action, guided by experts (urbanists, planners, engineers, and master builders, among others), could impose rationality upon the unkempt modern city. Second, the rekindled interest in old-fashioned row housing underscored not only the Quaker City’s dread about the widespread abandonment by whites of row housing itself but also its recognition of the stock’s great abundance, its low cost, and its availability for rehabilitation as public housing. This paper explores Philadelphia’s “Used House” experiment, and, ultimately, why it failed.