This story is from Headway, an initiative from The New York Times exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress. Headway looks for promising solutions, notable experiments and lessons from what’s been tried.
“A beacon.”
That was how Shaun Donovan, former commissioner of New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, heralded Via Verde, the South Bronx development, in 2011.
Construction was nearly done at the time, and I chose Via Verde for the subject of my first column as The New York Times’s architecture critic. It wasn’t the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It wasn’t a visual spectacle, but it was handsome and dignified, standing out with its prefab metal facade not just in a neighborhood of empty lots, aging apartment blocks and derelict rail tracks but also against a backdrop of dreary, bare-bones affordable housing developments all across the city.
Most important, its goal was larger than itself: to reimagine subsidized housing for a new century. I promised in that column to report back on whether it succeeded.
Did it?
Some history: A Bloomberg-era trophy project, Via Verde emerged from two international competitions. Every relevant city agency helped to speed its construction, unheard-of before or since. Engineers, solar experts, community groups, architectural organizations as well as the New York City Council pulled in unison. Envious developers and architects of less coddled projects grumbled.
The winning design team paired Grimshaw, a glamorous architecture firm based in London, with Dattner, a veteran New York outfit. They conceived a 20-story tower and mid-rise annex with 151 subsidized apartments for working poor and formerly homeless renters, alongside 71 townhouses for first-time, income-restricted homeowners, itself a novel concept. Lee Weintraub, the project’s landscape architect, envisioned the campus: a refined, leafy oasis with an amphitheater, rooftop community garden and apple grove.