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November 1935. "Underground pass at the Radburn, New Jersey, model housing community which alleviates the dangers of the highway. Radburn is a privately financed model town that furnished some of the ideas for the U.S. suburban Resettlement Agency 'Greenbelt' towns." Nitrate negative by Carl Mydans for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.
The link to Google Streetview is a good starting place for a tour through an early subdivision characterized by pre-Levittown two-story single family homes and attached duplexes, and dead ends that could have benefitted from cul-de-sacs at the ends. What's striking is how small the garage on each new unit was, by comparison to postwar homes. How so many of them survived the Era of Tailfins is a mystery to me.
There is something vaguely ominous about this picture. The shadows. The slender serious man walking away from the innocent carefree child. The dark empty car stopped up above. Gives me the shivers.
Here is the embedded map. If you swing around you'll see a playground and what I'm guessing is a community swimming pool.
Just a few miles and a bend or two up the Passaic River from where I grew up.
The footpath goes under Howard Ave. That bridge is still there
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.944263,-74.1174754,3a,75y,122.09h,84.26t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1syxTilM_5dAWGZ1N_AWLhGg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en
[Let us endeavor to embed. - Dave]
Here in suburban New Jersey, there are a number of commercial real estate developments that would appear to have sought to tease the boundaries between subdivision and municipality -- Radburn, part of the town of Fair Lawn, the Short Hills section of Millburn (developed with the fortune of Stuart Hartshorn, inventor of the roll-up window shade), and Llewellyn Park, the development where Edison chose to build his mansion, are among them. We can only guess as to whether the developers hoped to install governments in their projects, or simply wanted to add to the cachet to beef up sales; but they're literally part of the landscape a century later.
when it snowed in Jersey in November.
--Ray in Henderson, NV Another year of memories and review of times long gone. I can't thank you enough for your efforts. I don't think there has one post that I've not totally enjoyed. God bless.
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