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Greenbelt Homes, Inc. architectural drawings

 Collection 0268-MDHC

Greenbelt, Maryland, was the largest of three towns developed under the Greenbelt Town Program in the late 1930's. Today, Greenbelt and the Town Program hold an important place in the history of American architecture and town planning. This collection consists of the architectural drawings of Greenbelt Homes, Inc., and includes blueprints, tracings, and drawings of Greenbelt buildings and homes, their accoutrements, and their environment.

Dates

  • Creation: 1935-1975

Use and Access to Collection

This collection is open to the public and must be used in the Special Collections reading room. Researchers must register and agree to copyright and privacy laws before using this collection.

Duplication and Copyright Information

Photocopies or digital surrogates may be provided in accordance with Special Collections and University Archives duplication policy.

Copyright resides with the creators of the documents or their heirs unless otherwise specified. It is the researcher's responsibility to secure permission to publish materials from the appropriate copyright holder.

Archival materials may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal and/or state right to privacy laws or other regulations. While we make a good faith effort to identify and remove such materials, some may be missed during our processing. If a researcher finds sensitive personal information in a collection, please bring it to the attention of the reading room staff.

Extent

7 microfilms

Language of Materials

English

Scope and Contents

The Greenbelt Homes, Inc. architectural drawings span the years 1935-1975, but the bulk of the materials cover the years 1935 to 1942. The collection, on seven reels of 35mm microfilm, includes blueprints, tracings and drawings of Greenbelt buildings and homes, their accouterments and their environments.

Historical

Greenbelt, Maryland, was the largest of three towns developed under the Greenbelt Town Program of the late 1930's. When conceived, the idea of a completely planned community, was viewed by some as a brash, possibly even dangerous, project initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his intellectual supporters. Today, however, Greenbelt and the Greenbelt Town Program hold an important place in the history of American architecture and town planning. Since opening for public inspection in 1936, city planners, architects and social scientists have been interested in the physical and social environment created by the innovative builders of Greenbelt.

Many of the innovative design elements partially built or only conceptualized in the early years of the twentieth century were incorporated in the building of Greenbelt. These features included curvilinear street patterns, the super block, the separation of pedestrian walkways and the street system, and the organization of neighborhoods around elementary schools.Projects such as Riverside, Illinois, Forest Hills Gardens in Pittsburgh, and Radburn, New Jersey, all featured some of these town planning elements, but nowhere had so many been joined together in a single large community on the scale of Greenbelt.

Bureaucratic inertia and cumbersome regulations have generally thwarted originality in federally-funded housing projects, and few have achieved a reputation for architectural merit. The Greenbelt Project was different in this respect, because it was part of a wide array of federal programs launched by the New Deal. Although not entirely successful, many of these projects were more imaginative and bolder than any previous programs to come out of Washington in the twentieth century. Rexford Tugwell, Chief of the Resettlement Administration and a close confidante of Roosevelt, urged FDR's approval of the Greenbelt Town Program. Tugwell believed that "new towns" represented the first practical alternative to the ugly and wasteful processes of urban growth that had plagued America since the early nineteenth century. The human resources for such a program were available; there were thousands of unemployed construction workers in the Baltimore-Washington area, and the best architects and town planners could be hired as they were without work also.

John S. Lansill, appointed by Tugwell to oversee the greenbelt programs, was not a planner or architect. He was, however, an excellent judge of people and with the aid of the architect, Frederick Bigger, he hired an outstanding staff to design Greenbelt. Similar groups designed Greenhills outside Cincinnati, Ohio, and Greendale near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Greenbelt had to be under construction before the other two towns, so its planners and architects were pushed the hardest by Lansill. Almost all the plans were drawn in a period of six to eight months. These men were allowed a great deal of creative latitude in their work, and the result was one of the most innovative and significant experiments in new town planning in the mid-twentieth century.

Arrangement

Each frame of the Greenbelt Homes microfilm has been devoted to a single drawing, and the frames have been numbered sequentially. The microfilm reels and their corresponding frames are:

Reel 1 1-308

Reel 2 309-830

Reel 3 309-830

Reel 4 1378-1691

Reel 5 1-587 (Light-colored blueprints)

Reel 6 588-1193 (Light-colored blueprints)

Reel 7 1194-1473 (Light-colored blueprints)

A description of each frame can be found in document linked under the "additional description/inventory" section of this guide.

Custodial History and Acquisition Information

The University of Maryland College Park Libraries received 1700 architectural drawings, blueprints and tracings from Greenbelt Homes, Inc. (GHI) in 1976. From 1979 to 1981, these materials and approximately 877 additional drawings on temporary loan from GHI were microfilmed by the University of Maryland College Park Libraries with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The original 1700 drawings were destroyed, and the ones on loan were returned to GHI.

Related Materials

A large number of publications about Greenbelt, Maryland are available in the Maryland Room of Hornbake Library and can be searched in the library catalog. Local newspapers found in the Maryland Room include:Greenbelt News Review, 1937- Coop Consumer, 1958-1976

Three vertical files of clippings, brochures and reports can be found in Hornbake Library's Maryland Room under the headings "Greenbelt, (Md.)," "Greenbelt Consumer Service," and "Greenbelt Homes, Inc." Maps of Greenbelt can be found in the "Maryland Maps" catalog under "Greenbelt, Maryland."

Items found in other archival collections within Special Collections and University Archives include include Maryland Manuscript #4701, a partial listing of drawings of Greenbelt structures; Maryland Manuscripts #4876, #4877a-b, and #4878 which are specifications for additions made to homes in Greenbelt; and a University of Maryland publication entitled The Government of Greenbelt, which is part of the "Studies in Government" series.

Title
Guide to the Greenbelt Homes, Inc. architectural drawings
Status
Completed
Author
Jonathan Jeffrey
Date
1990-03
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Revision Statements

  • 2007-04-15: EAD markup checked and verified using JEdit software by Jennie A. Levine.
  • 2017-08-22: EAD markup checked and verified following ArchivesSpace migration by Emily Flint.
  • 2018-11-12: Finding aid reviewed and minor edits made by Duncan Griffin.
  • 2019-01-24: Conditions governing use, scope/contents, immediate source of acquisition - added by Eric Stoykovich.
  • 2020-10-12: Finding aid updated and revised by Joanne Archer

Library Details

Part of the Special Collections and University Archives

Contact:
University of Maryland Libraries
Hornbake Library
4130 Campus Drive
College Park Maryland 20742
301-405-9212