tional undertaking, carrying out extensive experiments in the first years of its existence, the officers and directors serve without pay.
After its organization in 1918, the years following were spent in careful examination of the situation and in a long study of the various types of industrial housing, made in order to determine which one was most applicable to the conditions at Bayonne. The extraordinary upset in economic conditions which followed the World War, particularly the sharp rise in costs of construction and building finance, created almost insoluble problems. It was not until conditions had become somewhat more normal that the course seemed more clear to the sponsors of the experiment. Then, as a result of this long preparation, the Bayonne Housing Corporation in January, 1924, commissioned Mr. Andrew J. Thomas, architect, to undertake the design of this, their first group of five garden apartments, and to supervise the construction work.
Ground was broken for the foundations in the following month. The project suffered from a delay in the Spring of 1924, due to the need of removing the unnecessary legal handicaps mentioned in the previous chapter on economics, which amounted to at least five per cent of the construction cost. As soon as the necessary amendments to the State tenement law and to the local building code could be secured, the project was rapidly completed and the first building was ready for tenants in December, 1924. The other structures were soon finished, and, in 1925, seven years after the Committee of the Chamber of Commerce had made its first report, the principles and standards of industrial housing which the Committee, under the leadership of its Chairman, Mr. C. J. Hicks, had so ably formulated, were realized in this group of apartments.
The demonstration of ideal wage-earners' housing now stands completed. It proves successful in the three essentials—economic, social, architectural. The garden apartments of the Bayonne Housing Corporation give the average thrifty wageearner an ideal home at a price which he can afford.
The Bayonne apartments are now filled with tenants who are enjoying homes finer than anything they had ever hoped for. They are delighted with the garden setting, and when they see their children romping in the play space, in the sunshine, in safety, a heavy load drops off their shoulders.
Thus is reborn something of the older, freer sociable life of
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