Los Proyectos -NYC
1958

Lorenzo Pacheco (b. 1933)
Tempera and watercolor on board, 14 3/4 X 10
Signed lower left: L. Pacheco / 1958
Gift of the artist, 94.30

Los Proyectos (the projects) were built as part of a federally aided program implemented by the New York City Housing Authority in East Harlem during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The goals were to eradicate urban slums and provide improved housing and living conditions for New York's low- and middle-income families, sectors of New York City's population often overlooked in the general preoccupation with the city's extremes of wealth and poverty. The complex, which still stands, numbers nine buildings, each with nineteen stories. Its 1,470 apartments were planned to house approximately 5,335 people.

Named to memorialize Senator Robert A. Taft (1889-1953), a prominent congressional sponsor of the 1937 Housing Act, the project, one unit of which is depicted here, is bounded by East 112th and 115th Streets and Park and Fifth Avenues. This unpopulated scene, while documenting the newness of the projects, suggests the sacrifice of human scale endemic to these utilitarian structures, a criticism leveled at such bureaucrat-designed developments by city planner Jane Jacobs in her 1961 landmark study The Death and Life of Great American Cities.¹

Notes:

  1  In the introduction to her book, when making the point that the older housing might have been badly deteriorated but at least was more humanistic in its size and setting, Jacobs quoted a tenant of one of the East Harlem housing projects, who said: "Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They . . . pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don't have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or newspaper even." Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 15.