An illustrated talk by Emily T. Cooperman, PhD
Online via Zoom
Tuesday, September 30 at 7:00 PM
Free and open to all
Please register at info@philachaptersah.org to receive the Zoom link

Despite its ubiquity, the American apartment house as a building type in the period before the Great Depression has garnered little scholarly notice, and the garden apartment even less. This talk will chart the evolution of the garden apartment house in Philadelphia before the Great Depression, starting with the city’s first apartments in the 1880s, followed by a remarkable construction boom in the 1920s, and ending in the “bust” of the 1930s. A focus of the presentation will be the social trends that accompanied and led to the rise in popularity of these buildings, including the fallacies of the myth of the “City of Homes” that imagined Philadelphia as a city of “comfortable dwellings largely occupied by their owners.” The talk will also explore the emergence of garden apartment developers, developer-architects, and developer-engineers; and the rise of a new group of designers (including apartment specialists) outside the elite cohort that had dominated the architecture profession in the region. The presentation will conclude with connections between progressive post-World War II multi-family buildings (including public housing), and the garden apartments and their associations created before the Depression.