Sited in rural Bergen County, Radburn was a model--a safe, modern, and affordable planned community where middle-income Americans could "breathe and enjoy life."

Created amid the spinach fields of northern New Jersey on the eve of the Depression, Radburn was the origin of an internationally acclaimed model of community design known as the "Radburn Idea." (1) That idea, derived from the principles of English Garden City planning, aimed to promote social reform and improvement in housing for Americans of moderate income. Apart from the communities (more than a dozen) for World War I defense workers, few lower- and moderate-income neighborhoods attained the "garden" ideal or the parklike setting of more expensive suburbs that were appearing at the edges of American cities through the 1920s. Radburn, however, was a distinctive and exceptional adaptation of Garden City planning to the needs and conditions of metropolitan growth in the United States, especially the increasing presence of the mass-produced automobile in American daily life. Representing an ideal of neighborhood planning (fig. 1), its creation directly affected national housing policy during the Great Depression, had far-reaching influence on suburbanization in the United States, and continues to influence community design nationally and internationally.

Radburn was a demonstration of the community planning theories of the members of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), developed in the 1920s in response to the growing national problems of insufficient low- and middle-income housing and the unplanned growth of cities. Although housing reforms associated with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Progressive movement had effectively improved basic housing needs through building codes and zoning, the additional construction costs associated with these improvements made low-income housing unprofitable for the commercial building industry. Through the same period, a growing middle class sought escape from the deepening squalor associated with the slums and industrial districts of the cities. Compared to inner-city conditions, the speculative real estate market's rapid development of the edges of already overcrowded cities with monotonous, gridiron rows of tightly packed houses for housing moderate-income working families was an equally unappealing solution. Meanwhile, existing road systems were fast becoming burdened by increasing motor traffic--trucks, buses, and the automobile. Radburn was designed to illustrate the feasibility of regional, mixed-income satellite towns that would be self-supporting through decentralized industries and would ease the congestion and growth of American cities.

The "Town for the Motor Age" was sited twelve miles from New York City in the borough of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, near a planned highway and rail line that was projected to provide easy access to the midlevel employment of most of the residents. Although the designers, Clarence S. Stein (1882-1975) and Henry Wright (1878-1936), intended Radburn to be a fully self-sufficient commercial and industrial town of twenty-five thousand people in the vein of a title Garden City, that dream was never realized. With the Depression-induced bankruptcy of the City Housing Corporation, the company that created the town, Radburn's development was brought to a halt in 1934. Only one-third of the town, consisting...