To the east of the estate lies a neighborhood of small neat houses, each with a green lawn and a garage. The homes are huge, rambling Tudor-owned by manufacturers, businessmen, and industrial executives.
Smooth black roads wind through avenues of cedars, blue spruce, and neatly trimmed lawns that come down to the very edge of the macadam. North and west of the Newbold estate is the area known as Rydal. The gilt was peeling from the ballroom, and the formal gardens had disappeared beneath a growth of weeds and saplings. Empty for over twenty years, it had suffered from fire, snow, and wind. On a high clearing stood, until recently, his home, in ruins, but recognizable as the seventy-five-room Georgian mansion (six central furnaces) it had been in another era. To the east of the highway lies Crosswicks Farms, a large irregular tract of some two hundred acres of rolling countryside-the long unsaleable estate of a millionaire stock-broker, the late Clement B. The story told here is, of course, only one story-but in its main outlines it is characteristic of several of the thirty or forty veterans’ cooperatives that have struggled or died a-borning since the war and it is a significant part of a larger problem-that of discriminatory trends in housing, which make the whole area one of the chief sources of present-day prejudice in the United States.Ī few miles north of Philadelphia on route 611 is the Township of Abington, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Hunt here presents a case history in veterans’ housing-the story of a plan for a cooperative project on the outskirts of Philadelphia which uncovered some of the ugly tensions that so often lie beneath the apparently placid surface of American suburbia.
0 kommentar(er)
