Page:Industrial Housing.djvu/57

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apartments consist generally of four, five and six rooms each, with bathroom and with bathroom and shower-bathroom in the six-room apartment.

One innovation is the bedroom with extra bath in the sixroom apartments. It is located near the entrance, and forms a separate apartment within the apartment, so to speak. This accommodation was planned for those numerous families who share their home with relatives or parents, or with grown sons or daughters, who require a little separation and privacy, or who reduce their living expenses by taking one or two "roomers" who are not members of the family. These cases are frequent, and unless they are properly arranged for in the planning they are apt to cause crowding and personal friction. In the cellar of each building is a room for baby carriages.

The garden environment

All these practical needs and the human and social essentials in housing are made dramatic by architecture and gardening. After all, the finest feature of the garden apartment is its bigscale environment of beauty. What a contrast to the slum does the Bayonne setting present! Its influence in the lives of those who dwell in it, particularly on children, can not be exaggerated.

But the finest part is the great interior garden. It is 335' long, including playground, and it varies in width from 52' to 104'. From every apartment there is an outlook over green lawns, planted with trees, shrubs and flowers—the life of growing things in the heart of the industrial city. The rear apartments jut out into this great garden, and what a different outlook does the housewife enjoy, as contrasted with the view from the rear of a typical city tenement over dark, foul backyards and courts, over dilapidated fences and cheerless pavements clogged with rubbish—a scene whose sole decoration is the public display of private laundry! In the Bayonne plan there are no courts. The "courts" are really only shallow alcoves in the garden, 6$' wide.

On the street front, the Bayonne buildings are set back from the sidewalk and are elevated on a terrace a few feet high, which is faced with a low retaining wall of brick. This provision, incidentally, is a practical necessity, due to the need of raising the buildings high enough to allow a proper fall for drainage into the street sewers. On the terrace level are the fore-lawns, planted, and traversed with flagstone paths which lead to the

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