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THE ARCHITECTURAL RECORD.
that, since the war, servants’ rooms have not been given a particular place on the plans, though in some cases one bedroom is slightly apart from the others, and is smaller, and could be used for a maid. Maids are becoming extinct at Jackson Heights, for reasons too obvious to re- mark upon. There is no central heating plant, for two reasons—one is that the buildings were planned so that each unit could be sold separately, if desired; and the other is that the law requires a janitor for each building and thus the care of furnaces makes no additional expense in management.
This ends the description of the more important features of the Garden Apart- ments. Their economy is being proven by the test of experience even in the cheaper classes of housing. The City and Suburban Homes Company is demonstrating it under the most diff- cult conditions of all—housing for the wage earner; while the Queensboro Cor- poration is carrying out its principles on a colossal scale for the housing of the class just above in the economic scale. The Queensboro Corporation has given us the first models of it from the ideal point of view, because, working with a higher rental scale, they have more flexi- bility and opportunity in design. They give a surprising amount for the rental. Like the City and Suburban Homes Com- pany, they are able to build even when the speculator cannot.
The Garden Apartments are the latest —and by far the finest—development in the progress that began twenty years ago when the Tenement Act of 1901 placed the first real check on the intolerable housing practices of New York City. These first beginnings were legal, re- strictive, and lay mostly in the domain of sanitation and of public welfare. Thereafter, with bad housing definitely forbidden, interest centered in architec- ture and finance, with the aim of develop- ing types of good housing. The economic changes wrought by the war favored the birth of the Garden Apartment to the extent that the vast increase in cost of construction made it even more advisable than formerly not to overcapitalize real estate investment by overbuilding the land. Concentration became more evi- dently an evil, and with this truth ap- parent, Mr. Thomas was able to create his wonderful models, with the city block conceived as a unit. True, the garden apartment may not yet have reached its full possibilities, but already it bids fair to furnish American city housing with ideal standards comparable to those es- tablished for small communities. Through this achievement, perfected in design, finance and management, and properly related to an efficient city plan, the mod- ern commercial and industrial city may take on a form, a coherence, an orderli- ness, and a wholesomeness, which up to this time it has never had.
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