Radburn

     Model Town to Rise in Jersey to Meet Needs of Motor Age
     City Housing Corporation Buys 1,005 Acres near Paterson for Community of 25,000
Safe Highways a Feature
     Pedestrians Not to Use Those Roads Set Aside for Auto's, Nor will Homes Face on Them
No Crossing to Schools
     Self-Contained Residential and Industrial Centre is the Aim - Land cost $2,000,000.²

     Scientific City Planing (sic!) Experiment for Fair Lawn

     First Residents Enter New Radburn Apartment

     Clarence Samuel Stein (June 19, 1882 - February 7, 1975). Clarence Stein was born in Rochester, New York into an upwardly mobile Jewish family. While a youth, his family transplanted to New York City. There he was immersed in the milieu surrounding the Ethical Culture Society, attending its Workshop School and developing his sensibilities within the context of Progressive thought: the integration of physical and mental labor, the importance of a universal humanistic philosophy, the concept of a nurtured individualistic sensibility.¹⁶

     Henry Wright (1878–1936), American landscape architect and community planner, b. Lawrence, Kans., studied architecture at the Univ. of Pennsylvania. He was widely recognized as a leader in the movement for the building of better communities. He served (1918) as town planner for the Housing Division of the U.S. Emergency Fleet Corporation. Wright was a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, along with Lewis Mumford and Clarence Stein. This group imported Ebenezer Howard's garden city model from England to the United States. With Stein, Wright designed model communities at Sunnyside, L.I., and at Radburn, N.J. Radburn is especially noted for its superblock plan. He was consultant to the New York state commission on housing and regional planning during the 1920s, and later, to the Public Works Administration. Wright also taught at Columbia Univ. during the 1930s. He wrote Rehousing Urban America (1935)
     Born in Lawrence, Kansas, Henry Wright's family was Quaker and he based many of the ideas for his communities on Quaker ideas. In 1902 Wright helped architect George Kessler design the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri when he was only 23 years old. By the early 1920s Wright became one of the core members of the Regional Planning Association of America, along with Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, and Benton MacKaye, and it was this association that led to Wright's most well-known work.^17,18 Photo's of Henry Wright and of his parents Francis Alfred Wright and Mary Huldah Chace can be seen at Chase Family Photo's near the bottom of the page.

     Margaret Sewell Cautley was the landscape architect. Graduating in 1917 from Cornell’s College of Agriculture, where she studied landscape architecture, Cautley worked for Warren H. Manning and then architect Julia Morgan. She opened her own practice in New Jersey and, in 1921, designed the 30–acre community park, Roosevelt Common, in Tenafly. In 1924, she was hired by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, the developer-philanthropists backing the Garden City movement. With them, she worked on Sunnyside Gardens, Phipps Garden Apartments, and Hillside Homes, all in New York City, and on Radburn, in Fairlawn, New Jersey. Cautley is credited with the selection of native plants for these projects, creating interior common spaces onto which homes and private gardens were oriented, and working to enhance a sense of community through landscape features.
Cautley lectured at Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked with the Civilian Conservation Corps in New Hampshire. She wrote for numerous magazines and authored the treatise, Garden Design: The Principles of Abstract Design as Applied to Landscape Composition in 1935. She earned her M.A. in 1943 from the University of Pennsylvania, where her thesis focused on renovation methods for blighted areas of Philadelphia.^19,20

     Charles S. Asher was part of the team that developed Sunnyside and Radburn. Among other things, he named the streets. For his obituary, click the icon.²¹

     Andrew Jackson Thomas was a self-taught American architect who was known for designing low-cost apartment complexes that included green areas in the first half of the twentieth century.
     He was born on Lower Broadway in Manhattan, New York, in 1875. Thomas was the son of a dealer in oil paintings and diamonds. His mother died when he was twelve. He was an orphan by the age of 13. Thomas spent some time working in the Yukon gold fields, and worked as a rent collector in the Columbus Avenue tenements in New York. He obtained a job as a timekeeper for a building contractor, where he became interested in construction plans. He was able to use his self-taught knowledge to launch a career as an architect. He died in 1965.²²

Hirschklau Lane was build in 2001. There are 10 units. (Block 3723, lot 12) They are located behind the Plaza Road N townhouses.²³ The Crossings at Radburn were build at Daly Field and the Hayward Industry parcel in the late 2010's. Many people were opposed to the project for open space reasons, but in the end Fair Lawn lost the zoning battle. It created lots of bad feelings between residents of Radburn, as Daly Field was sold to Landmark Co. without any input from the residents. Because of this, Radburn's governing structure, a rather paternalistic system left over from the beginning, was changed to a standard HOA format. Whether this is good or bad, remains to be seen.