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52 “Get a new Resident for the Bronx” Logan Billingsley, the man who built the biggest apartment complex on the Grand Concourse, and Andrew J. Thomas, the one credited with designing its most innovative housing, had two things in common. Both started out poor, and both left their most memorable legacy atop that great ridge in the West Bronx. In virtually every other respect, Billingsley and Thomas could not have been less alike. Unlike the roughneck from the West who came East to shed a disreputable past and make money on the right side of the law, Thomas was an idealistic child of the New York City slums who was moved by the poverty he witnessed in his youth to create some of the city’s most revolutionary housing projects. The two men differed in another important respect. Billingsley’s constituency was the rich. Thomas cared intensely about the city’s poor and its swelling middle class. Thomas’s name crops up regularly in treatises about housing innovations in New York City, and rightly so, because if he did not actually invent the term garden apartment, he unquestionably deserves credit for popularizing this innovative form of housing. Yet accounts of his achievements often fail to convey what a remarkable individual Thomas was, and how creatively he addressed the needs of those New Yorkers unlucky enough to pass their days without maids, valets, or hot meals delivered by dumbwaiter to their doorstep. And though he was famously prickly as a colleague, his contributions to housing in the city are immense. Thomas’s early years were bleak. Born in 1875 and raised on lower Broadway, he was orphaned at age thirteen. Two years later he went to work collecting rents for a real estate speculator, a job that afforded him a firsthand look inside the city’s filthiest and most overcrowded apartments . Not long afterward, when employed as a timekeeper for a building contractor, he spent nights in makeshift offices working out construction plans. These experiences shaped him in profound and lasting ways. “I had never taken a drawing lesson nor had any technical schooling in architecture ,” Thomas was once quoted as saying, “but I knew what people needed to make them comfortable.” The passion he brought to his work seemingly knew no bounds. Louis Pink, one of the city’s early advocates of public housing, said of Thomas, “Housing is his religion. ‘What better religion could there be than housing ?’ he often exclaims.” Early in his career, Thomas announced to the world at large, “I’ll abolish every slum in New York if I can gain the attention and help of charitable organizations, the state and society. . . . I’ll raze nine or ten blocks at a time until the entire city is rebuilt.” When he died in 1965 at the age of ninety, his obituary in the New York Times noted that “Get a new Resident for the Bronx” 53 “his grayish blue eyes would light up with enthusiasm or blaze with impatience at anything that delayed his plans for changing the face of the city.” Yet this Jacob Riis of the landscaped courtyard was far more than a dreamy-eyed do-gooder. Perhaps more acutely than any of his contemporaries , he understood that while the garden apartment offered considerable social and aesthetic benefits—building less densely on a plot of land afforded residents not only more light and space but also a greater sense of “home”—a primary attraction of this concept was its profitability. As Pink summed up Thomas’s achievement, “He learned that beauty pays.” Thomas had his greatest impact in Jackson Heights, the newly emerging neighborhood in Queens where he developed a series of artfully designed “garden apartments for wage earners,” as the Times put it. At least for some wage earners: the Queensboro Corporation, the major financial backer of Thomas’s developments in the borough, touted one project as a “restricted garden residential section of New York City,” an unsubtle reminder that units were off limits to Jews, Catholics, and blacks. But his namesake project , at 840 Grand Concourse, is generally considered his masterpiece, “his most congenial work,” according to architect Robert Stern, a latter-day fan, and “probably Thomas’s greatest single building project.” Thomas Garden occupies an entire block between 158th and 159th streets. In design, the circlet of five-story buff brick apartment houses grouped around a sunken interior courtyard looks almost spare. Yet hidden within their embrace and occupying about half the...

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