entrances. Each building is stepped up in the centre, thus giving variety to the mass. What a change is this from the unbroken street wall of nearly all city housing, monotonous and forbidding as a prison!
The playground
Another novelty at Bayonne is the provision for the playspirit of children. At one end of the great garden, and walled off from it, is a small playground for the little children. It is equipped with sand piles, small swings and a carrousel, and has a little comfort station attached. On the stucco wall facing the playground, are painted decorations of Humpty-Dumpty and other characters in child-lore, while the rear wall is an architectural feature, consisting of a fountain set in a niche framed with arch and columns, which forms a center of interest at the end of the main axis of the garden. This playground takes the child out of the streets, where our enlightened twentieth century sends him to play under the wheels of the motor cars. The Bayonne plan allows him to enjoy himself in safety, guided by a trained attendant, under the eyes of the mothers. (Incidentally, the services of a play teacher costs only a few cents a family a week—less than the price of a single ticket to the moving pictures—during the seasonable part of the year.)
What a fine setting does the Bayonne Housing Corporation furnish for the child to grow up in. Cheerfulness, space, sunlight, fresh air, a garden with growing things and flowers—and best of all, a playground!—at once an inspiration and an outlet for youthful energies! In Bayonne the young wage-earner can grow up knowing that in this world there are actually such things as birds and lawns and trees and flowers.
Will an architect be believed when he asserts that the bringing of beauty into city tenements is by far the greatest advance in the new housing standards at Bayonne? Is there any greater economy in housing than the social value of a beautiful environment? And it should be remembered that in the present day in the crowded districts of New York City people are beginning to pay as high for the privilege of living in the antiquated, depreciated, dark, insanitary, "cold-water" tenements as they would for a real home in the Bayonne garden apartments. The Bayonne garden apartments give to the wage-earner a home worthy of modern ideals.
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