Posters for Housing and Health

Abstract

THE 1930S POSTER IMAGE contrasts a modernist public housing development with conditions in a tenement district. In the latter, a woman pushes a baby carriage through a neighborhood that at the time would have been considered unhealthy.1 She approaches overflowing garbage cans; laundry lines fill the tall, narrow space between tenement buildings; and an old water tank tops a roof. An elevated train can be seen in the distance. The image, in gray-blue and gold, is crossed out. Eliminating these types of neighborhoods as a means to promote health has been a goal of housing and health advocates since the time of Thomas Southwood Smith and Edwin Chadwick in the 19th century.2 The modernist housing development, rendered in four colors, sits on a superblock with no through traffic; each building has ample access to sunlight and green space but not to streets. Long, narrow buildings, designed to maximize ventilation, contain many corner units. Residents would have views of nature and plenty of opportunities for outdoor recreation. The poster's text reads: “BETTER HOUSING: THE SOLUTION TO INFANT MORTALITY IN THE SLUMS.” This poster was produced by the federal Works Progress Administration–Federal Art Project sometime between 1936 and 1938. During its years of existence between 1935 and 1943, more than 2 000 000 copies of approximately 35 000 distinct posters were produced, but fewer than 2000 have survived.3 At least a half dozen of these involved housing and health themes. Some promoted overall public housing goals of clean, safe living; others celebrated the opening of individual developments. In addition, some posters were dedicated to other health-related topics, including syphilis, workplace injuries, tuberculosis, and hand washing. Overall, the Works Progress Administration program produced posters dedicated to everything from travel and tourism to book readings and war bonds.4 Many of the posters had designs similar to the one pictured here with simple graphics; clean, bold lettering; and socially oriented messages.5 Better housing: the solution to infant mortality in the slums, one of a series of posters promoting health through new forms of housing, 1930s. The idea for this publicly funded program to support unemployed artists began in New York City as an initiative by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia; in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal took over the program and expanded it across the United States. The New York poster program was administered by Richard Floethe, an artist who had trained at the influential Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany. He illustrated many popular children's books before and after his work in the program. The artist who designed the poster was Anthony Velonis, a master printmaker who helped elevate the process of silk screening to an art form he called serigraphy.6 Velonis eventually cofounded a printing firm that would produce work for many famous artists in the decades after World War II. The poster program operated by accepting requests from public and nonprofit agencies for a poster on a specific topic.7 Floethe would post the topic request along with some parameters for the project, and individual artists on staff in the department would submit designs. A winning design was then produced for the client.8 This poster was produced for the New York City Housing Authority, which may have intended to use it to promote its plans for slum clearance and public housing construction. It was a unique time in the history of health and housing; an early phase of the New Deal had produced about 35 000 units of public housing, many modeled on European models of new architecture, and Congress was about to pass the 1937 Wagner-Steagall Act, which would dramatically expand the program to eventually produce almost 1.2 million units.9,10 The new housing development in the poster reflects the values of modern architects who believed that the incorporation of strong design elements would achieve important social and health goals.11,12 These modernist ideals would dominate public housing architecture for decades despite a growing disillusionment with the social effects of these designs that began in the 1950s.13 Some of the health assumptions that underlie the poster, including the superblock as a preferred way to provide access to open space and reduce traffic conflicts, would not be totally challenged until the growth of the built environment and health movement in the 1990s.14 By the beginning of the 2000s, a new consensus as to what constituted a healthy neighborhood—one that features fine-grained development, mixed uses, street connectivity, and other features that promote walking, healthy eating, and social capital—would emerge.15,16