Garden City: Rhode Island’s Model Mid-century Suburb, Part 1

by JENNIFER ROBINSON Preservation Services Manager, Southern New England

America’s landscape was transformed by post-World War II development. However, despite the ubiquity of construction from this period, relatively little research has been done to understand its context and design – particularly in New England. In this article, Jennifer Robinson, a Cranston, Rhode Island, native, introduces us to Garden City in Cranston, currently the subject of an indepth survey being conducted by The Public Archaeology Lab (PAL). The survey, which is the first of its kind for a mid-century Rhode Island development, will be released in 2023, and its findings will be included in the summer issue of Historic New England magazine.

When asked to define a stereotypical New England house, most people probably have a similar image in mind. The iconography of New England is well established and fixed in the American psyche; postcard racks are filled with images of rural eighteenth-century farmsteads, historic seaside streets, and clapboarded mill villages. However, despite these common visualizations, it is interesting to consider that the majority of homes in New England were built after World War II. In Rhode Island, for example, approximately seventy percent of extant housing was built after 1940. The built environment of postwar America is defined by a widespread ambition to construct single-family homes for a burgeoning middle class, and in Cranston, Rhode Island, the state’s second-largest city, this trend is evidenced in many housing developments. Its most comprehensively designed plat, however, is Garden City, which began construction in 1946. It was introduced in the Cranston Herald as a “City within a City” – one that would include a ready-made “Main Street,” complete with pharmacy, luncheonette, salon, supermarket, hardware store, and specialty shops, along with a church and school.

The idea of building a planned community from scratch is not strictly a mid-twentieth-century concept; a previous generation had grappled with the negative impacts of industrialization by envisioning green, spacious suburbs separated from cities. The so-called “garden city movement,” espoused by Ebenezer Howard in Britain during the late 1800s, is one example of this type of aspirational city planning. During the post-World War II era in the United States, however, suburban planning was taken to new extremes, and in many ways, Garden City shares many of the tropes of national postwar development. It received funding from the land planning division of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and its winding, serpentine streets are in alignment with FHA directives. Houses are neatly set back from concrete curbs, with manicured lawns and picture windows. And the lack of racial diversity in its first homebuyers is also indicative of broader national trends – that of movement away from city centers to suburbia, with the availability of cars, infrastructure, and postwar capital leading the way.

Because of the ubiquity of New England developments of this kind, and their proximity to the recent past, it might be easy to dismiss Garden City as another clichéd housing tract. However, there are deeper and more nuanced stories yet to be uncovered in these communities that may, at first glance, seem to have identical trajectories. With the release of the 1950 US Census in April 2022, for example, a clearer picture of Garden City’s first residents is now accessible for the first time. A cursory survey revealed that a significant portion of early homebuyers were first- and second-generation immigrants from Italy, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Austria, Russia, Greece, Romania, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey, and Sweden. Although not an entirely unique phenomenon in housing developments nationwide, the influx of new immigrants into postwar suburban developments has often been overlooked. Emerging research into this trend, in books such as Houses for a New World (Barbara Miller Lane, Princeton University Press, 2015), has begun to unpack demography that has been traditionally oversimplified.

In addition, an astounding range of occupations found in the 1950 Census reflects the availability of homeownership to a wider audience than one might expect. Jewelry factory workers, bus drivers, and US Navy personnel could purchase homes adjacent to those of doctors, retail managers, engineers, and bankers. A modest house on Garden City’s Poplar Drive could be purchased for about $9,600 in 1950 – now shocking to consider when the same house, in 2022, was sold for $395,000. Local newspaper listings from the 1950s indicate a strong sense of community, with myriad clubs, organizations, and charity groups meeting in the development’s shared recreation hall.

Perhaps most interestingly, the mastermind behind Garden City’s particular vision of suburbia was

Nazzareno Meloccaro, himself a first-generation Italian immigrant. Born in Pontecorvo, Italy, in 1903, Meloccaro arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of seventeen, and in the 1920s, began working in the construction industry. By 1931, while living in Cranston, he became a US citizen, and by the late 1940s, he had procured 233 open acres just over two miles from Cranston City Hall –a landscape characterized by farmland as well as a coal and graphite mine.

Meloccaro was joined by a local engineer, Peter Cipolla, who conceptualized Garden City’s plat layout and was responsible for its survey drawings. Additionally,

Meloccaro hired Adolph Otto Kurze, a son of German immigrants, as the housing development’s chief architect. The first structures to be built were apartments – ninety-four units hailed in the Cranston Herald (1950) as "…miniature replicas of the large apartment houses found in New-York City." These were followed by single-family homes, built both on speculation and to order by union laborers in a variety of styles and price ranges. There were modest ranches and Cape Cods, colonials, and split-levels which were, as a whole, relatively distinctive in scope. Kurze was clearly attempting to avoid the repetition of other famous developments such as Levittown, New York, often derided by national critics for its mind-numbing uniformity.

It is unclear whether Meloccaro was working from a specific model, but a 2019 interview with Kenneth Kurze, Adolph Kurze’s son, revealed that Melocarro’s team conducted reconnaissance in the 1940s at other housing developments, including in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Kurze learned about construction techniques and site layout during this trip. Interestingly, there is a suburb in the Pittsburgh area also called Garden City –indicating a possible connection, at least in name, between these two locations.

Simultaneous to Kurze’s house design, an unknown architect was drawing up plans for a commercial center that would provide retail and service amenities to the neighborhood. Unified commercial and residential development was a concept that was already being explored before World War II; developments like Country Club Plaza (1922) in Kansas City, Missouri, often cited as America’s first suburban shopping center, contained an architecturally unified design with space for ample parking. On the west coast in particular, development of automobile-oriented shopping centers in the post-World War II period reached a crescendo and served as models for similar designs throughout the country.

What makes Garden City stand out, particularly in New England, is its effort to cohesively integrate its Main Street with housing. Many New England housing developments certainly were built in proximity to commerce – the so-called “strip mall” being a prime example of this type of automobile-driven development. However, Garden City’s approach is considered the first of its kind for Rhode Island, and the neighborhood, along with its accompanying lines of storefronts, quickly became a realm of its own. Prestigious Providence department stores, including Gladdings (c. 1954) and the Outlet Company (1962), built satellite stores in the outdoor shopping center; residents and visitors could access businesses from either neighborhood streets, or a newly expanded four-lane highway on New London Avenue.

Now, nearly eighty years from its inception, Garden City has retained its function as both a community and a commercial hub. There also is an intact sense of place, despite the recent demolition of the plat’s original 1952 elementary school, and a gradual shift from locally owned service businesses and shops to largely national retail chains. Although the material composition of house exteriors has been altered significantly – wood cladding replaced by vinyl siding, wood sash changed to vinyl windows – an essential integrity of form and scale remains relatively stable. Vistas down Begonia, Lawnacre, and Juniper drives would still be recognizable to Nazzareno

Meloccaro and his colleagues, with the exception of now-mature trees.

Despite its intactness, like many other developments of this type, Garden City lacked an indepth survey to understand its historic significance in the context of twentieth-century planning, social history, demography, and architecture. The findings of the 2022 survey are nearly compiled, and Historic New England looks forward to sharing new details in the next issue of Historic New England magazine.