It was hard work, made more challenging by pandemic restrictions. But when establishing two Georgia Historical Society (GHS) markers crystallizes in a shout-out from Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and his promise to do more to house Atlantans, it is all worthwhile.
Christina E. Crawford, associate professor of modern and contemporary architecture in Emory College of Arts and Sciences and Masse-Martin NEH Professor of Art History, will remember Oct. 11, 2022, as the culmination of more than five years’ work with her students, university colleagues and community partners to bring overdue recognition to the first federally-funded public housing in the nation: Techwood Homes (for white families) and University Homes (for Black families) — projects that were completed in Atlanta in 1936 and 1937, respectively.
Techwood Homes and University Homes, composed of low-slung brick apartment buildings set in shared green spaces, became models for New Deal housing projects following enactment of the National Housing Acts in the 1930s. Overshadowed by later projects in New York and Chicago, Atlanta’s University Homes and Techwood Homes nonetheless set the aesthetic language and planning logic for American public housing of the mid-20th century. Generations of families lived at both sites for more than 50 years.
Oct. 11 saw two historical markers unveiled — one for each of the two sites, with Mayor Dickens joining the celebration for University Homes. As he stood in front of Roosevelt Hall, which is all that remains from University Homes, the mayor noted: “We started this. The city of Atlanta began what is known as public housing. Soon a reimagined Roosevelt Hall space will be here. Our history does not have to be our destiny; sometimes it might set a path to change our destiny for the better.” Joining him were Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman 95C and other city leaders, officials from the Atlanta Housing Authority and GHS, and members of Emory Libraries and the Michael C. Carlos Museum.
It was a satisfying conclusion to what began as a pivot project to adjust to research limitations posed by the pandemic. Wanting to shine the spotlight on Atlanta for its part in public housing history, Crawford was one of 10 recipients of Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art for 2020-21, chosen for work on the project “Atlanta Housing Interplay: Expanding the Interwar Housing Map.” She also received a research and development grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts and ongoing support from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS).
Courtney Chartier, then-head of research services in the Stuart A. Rose. Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, had suggested before the pandemic that the two housing sites would be well suited to Georgia Historical Society markers. “Though I was intrigued, the process seemed a bit onerous,” says Crawford, “so I set that idea aside.” When research at the scale she hoped to undertake was short-circuited by shuttered archives and travel restrictions, Crawford began to think about the endeavor more seriously as a public history project.
The project’s origin story
Crawford wrote her dissertation on early Soviet architecture and planning, specifically worker housing, and published that research this year in the book “Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union.” When she came to Emory to give her job talk in 2016, she confesses to an awkward moment.
As Crawford presented a map she had created with important public housing projects worldwide from the 1920s and 1930s, a future Emory colleague asked, “Can you plot Atlanta on that map?” “I was totally flatfooted,” says Crawford. “I am well educated in 20th-century housing, and I just had no idea that the first two federally funded housing projects were here. And, when I came to the city, it became clear to me that Atlanta does not get the respect it is due from an architectural history standpoint.”
Resolving to correct the record, Crawford began investigating the Charles Forrest Palmer papers at the Rose Library, gifted to the university in 1969. Influential in shaping Atlanta public housing and then spring-boarding to shape housing policy nationally, Palmer garnered federal funding in 1933 for both “slum clearance” of the Techwood Flats neighborhood and to construct Techwood Homes, one of the first two projects in the U.S. built under the Public Works Administration (PWA). John Hope, president of the Atlanta University Center, simultaneously secured funding from the PWA for the development of University Homes, the other “first.”
As design for those sites began, Palmer traveled to Europe in 1934 and 1936 to investigate already completed public housing projects in Italy, Germany, Austria and even the Soviet Union. Palmer went on to become the first chair of the Atlanta Housing Authority, which he organized, and was also chosen by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve as defense housing coordinator for the National Defense Office for Emergency Management during World War II.
Original maps, plans, booklets, photographs and films of European housing sites: all of it was at Crawford’s fingertips through the Palmer papers. “His papers are an absolute goldmine. First of all, he kept everything,” she says. And from her earliest days immersed in the Palmer papers, Crawford had the full support of Emory Libraries to take this further, to illuminate these chapters of city history. Indeed, Rose Library curators Randy Gue, Clint Fluker and the late Pellom McDaniels III mentored graduate students through research in the papers for a “Housing Atlanta” exhibition as part of the Public Humanities Graduate Seminar, taught in 2020 and 2022 by Emory College professors Benjamin Reiss (English), Tom Rogers (history) and Karen Stolley (Hispanic studies) as part of the Mellon-funded Public Humanities Seminar.
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