Radburn, New Jersey

Radburn, New Jersey was and is the first U.S. example of one of the most important planned city concepts, the Garden City Movement, which arose in 19th-century England as a reaction to the pollution and crowding of the Industrial Revolution. In 1898, Ebenezer Howard published the book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, in which he set out his ideas concerning the creation of new towns. He believed these towns should be limited in size and density and surrounded with a belt of undeveloped land. The idea gained enough attention and financial backing to lead to the creation of Letchworth, in Hertfordshire, England, the first such garden city, before the First World War. The second town following Howard's ideas, Welwyn Garden City, also in Hertfordshire, was built after the war.

In the early 1920s, the American architects Clarence Stein (1882–1975) and Henry Wright (1878–1936), [Page 641]inspired by Howard's ideas and the success of Letchworth and Welwyn, drew up plans for the city of Radburn, New Jersey, about 16 miles from Manhattan, in Bergen County. To be a community that would be safe for children, Radburn was designed so that the residents would not require automobiles. In fact, Radburn pioneered the separation of pedestrian and vehicle traffic and the use of “superblocks,” each of which (in Radburn) shared 23 acres of commonly held parkland.

Radburn was an attempt to transplant Howard's turn-of-the-century concepts into the post–World War I American landscape. More than simply improving the physical environment, it represented social planning to control the automobile and promote face-to-face interaction, participatory democracy, and a safe life for children. The community is still renowned for its backyard footpaths and pedestrian underpasses.

To the names of Stein and Wright as principal developers of Radburn should be added that of Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1895–1954), park designer, hired by Stein and Wright in 1924, who worked on Sunnyside Gardens (1924–1928) and Radburn (1928–1930). She also taught site planning and landscape design as a parttime lecturer at Columbia University. Wright also taught at Columbia University during the 1930s.

Radburn is not now a town: It is a section of Fairlawn, New Jersey. It was built from 1928 to 1933 with financing from the City Housing Corporation (CHC), which had previously built Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York (and which went broke in 1933, leaving the Radburn plan uncompleted). The chairman of the CHC was Alexander Bing, a wealthy real estate developer in New York City. Other members of the board included Eleanor Roosevelt and Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture Society. More important, perhaps, Radburn was built in association with the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a small, loosely organized group interested in issues of city and region, including housing and community development, transportation, recreation, and conservation, whose principals included Stein and Wright, Charles H. Whitaker and Frederick Ackerman, Edith Elmer Wood and Catherine Bauer, Stuart Chase, Benton MacKaye, and Lewis Mumford, arguably the most influential writer on cities and regions in 20th-century America.

The fact that the community of Radburn is now within the village of Fairlawn is a part of the dialectic between the “Radburn idea” and its concrete realization. That dialectic is what made Radburn what it was during its heyday from about 1931 to World War II, after which came a greater unraveling of the Radburn idea, illustrating the uneasy relations between Radburn theory and Radburn community life, and of course the problems of suburban expansion in the years after World War II. When Radburn became part of Fairlawn in 1933, the citizens of Radburn turned their attention and energies to their Radburn Association, the Radburn Players, the Radburn Reporter (a weekly), and “Tot Lot”—the Radburn preschool program—as well as to the Church in Radburn and the Radburn School.

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