J. Nathan Goldberg
Promotional photograph for Techwood Homes (Charles F. Palmer Papers, box 167, folder 8, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
In the final sequence of the Atlanta Housing Authority’s 1940 promotional film, And Now We Live, a mother prepares dinner in an apartment at Techwood Homes, the first federally funded public housing development in the United States [Figure 1]. As she looks up, she smiles at something off camera: her husband, returning from work, who enters the next shot. Walking into the kitchen, he lifts open a pot on the stovetop and briefly examines its contents, then turns back to his wife to formally greet and kiss her [Figure 2]. Although he smiles in approval of the meal she has made, his happiness, as conveyed in the film, is more clearly the result of their modern environment—specifically the new spacious and ergonomic kitchen filled with novel equipment—that has produced a stable family life. As the film’s narrator puts it, the scene proves that citizens, despite national economic crises, still have faith in “America and her institutions.”[1] This vision of a new American life emerging out of the despair of the Great Depression depended on the representation of the eat-in kitchen (hereafter the eat-in), a space large enough for both cooking and eating. Presented to the public as the center of a hardworking family ideal, the eat-in was where the “institutions” of the home, the nuclear family, and work were harmonized.
Figure 1: Film still from the Atlanta Housing Authority’s And Now We Live (Long Version), 1940 (Charles F. Palmer Papers, AV1, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 2: Film still from the Atlanta Housing Authority’s And Now We Live (Long Version), 1940 (Charles F. Palmer Papers, AV1, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
My goal here is to examine the crucial role that the eat-in played in promotional materials for Techwood Homes and to investigate how it gave visual and spatial form to the emerging American family life proffered by New Deal programs like public housing. I begin by underlining the significance of the modern kitchen for the Public Works Administration (PWA), which pushed for housing standardization and efficient domestic spaces through federal design standards. Turning to promotional materials, I then examine the visual language used by Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) that both articulated the “look” of these federal standards and captured the transformative potential of slum clearance and public housing. Images of transformation highlighted the material shift from old-fashioned multipurpose kitchens to the eat-in, and served as testimonies to the positive social and economic effects of federal activism. Novel in its appearance and equipment, the Techwood eat-in served as a model of efficient modern domestic space and provided a vision of the harmonized life promised by the New Deal.
Federal Design Standards
New Deal promotional images of public housing used the eat-in to model the benefits of architectural standardization. Design standards for the kitchen set by the PWA called for air cross circulation, location near the apartment entrance, ample space for cooking and eating, good artificial lighting, and block form equipment.[2] Architectural plans for Techwood indicate that the project’s designers closely followed federal standards for some units while ignoring them in others [Figure 3]. While Techwood type “A” apartments eliminated the dining room in favor of a larger kitchen for cooking and eating (the eat-in), type “B” units featured a smaller kitchen attached to an adjacent dining room. For my purposes here, what is notable despite these spatial differences is the standardized appearance of Techwood kitchens in promotional documentation. While some images emphasized the spaciousness of type “A” model kitchens, the federally standardized bundle of equipment—an electric range, a wide ceramic sink with draining board, and a narrow rectangular refrigerator—was the most depicted element of the space in images [Figure 4]. The sturdy metal cabinet affixed to the wall above the appliances was likewise common in promotional materials, relaying the durability of the architecture and equipment that the PWA provided in its public housing.
Figure 3: Type “A” and “B” unit plans. The “A” plan without a dining room is on the left, the “B” plan with a dining room is on the right, and the two different kitchen orientations are central. Note the standing cabinet in the more spacious “A” kitchen. Burge and Stevens (architects), Techwood Project no. 1101, Atlanta, Georgia, 1934-1935 (oversight by Public Works Administration Housing Division, HABS, 043002pu).
Figure 4: This image was perhaps the most widely circulated promotional photograph by Palmer and the AHA (Charles F. Palmer Papers, box 167, folder 8, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Images that emphasized the uniform look of the kitchen appliances at Techwood sharpened what Katie Marages Schank calls the “idea of modernism.” The AHA and federal government sought to connect the surface-level appearance of novel equipment with the comprehensive idea of public housing, namely that its clean, hygienic, economical, and efficient spaces would create an improved environment for domestic and family life.[3] While the glossy appliances were alluring, the spacious (rather than cluttered) nature of the eat-in also communicated the modern design ideals behind PWA standards: the attractive shine of novel equipment could be intellectually connected to broader positive social and economic effects promised by the Techwood project. The kitchen—sanitary, hygienic, economical, and efficient—thus became the ideal space to promote standardized public housing design. It became a universal space that was easy to control visually. Standardized equipment and design suppressed individual taste and thus became a uniform example of the “look” and ideas associated with public housing. Sleek and glossy white appliances were designed to resist stains and water damage—that is, to be impervious to marks of use or personality.[4]
Purchased wholesale by the federal government for distribution across numerous projects, the standardized complex of blocky electric kitchen equipment was designed for efficiency and thus facilitated a streamlined modern life for the New Deal family that managed to secure federal housing.[5] The eat-in was rigorously studied by designers to “avoid lost motion, unnecessary stretching or stooping, and allow for easy opening and tight closing of doors, windows, and drawers.”[6] Referencing the emerging fields of ergonomics and motion studies, PWA standards sought to bring factory efficiency into the home.[7]
Turning back to And Now We Live, we see the kitchen highlighted as the site of this modern domestic labor. The film directs our attention to a mother, daughter, and son working together in its space [Figure 5].[8] While the son places cereal and other pantry items in the lower cabinet, the mother wipes off wet dishes and then passes them to her daughter who waits patiently to collect plates and utensils for stacking. This family works in a consistent rhythm, moving together in fluid motions without banging into one another. In this scene, the film captures idealized assembly line work in a domestic setting, efficient home labor facilitated by Techwood’s new modern kitchens that had been carefully designed to avoid all forms of equipment and/or bodily inefficiency. The film suggests that labor within the ergonomic eat-in will nourish and fuel the New Deal family and serve as an example of how to perform efficiently in other arenas. Training children in the patterns of methodical and orderly work, the kitchen environment, as the film’s narrator tells us, will yield future citizens prepared to “cope with the problems and hazards of America’s future.” Promotional materials underscored the significance of the eat-in for the American public, positioning this space as central to an emerging middle-class life in public housing. The efficient labor of a hardworking citizenry, both inside and outside of the home, would produce the conditions necessary for a harmonious family structure [Figure 6].[9]
Figure 5: Film still from the Atlanta Housing Authority’s And Now We Live (Long Version), 1940 (Charles F. Palmer Papers, AV1, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 6: Atlanta Journal Constitution image from 10 July 1936 that showcases modern appliances and spatial arrangement in eat-in kitchen at Techwood Homes (Charles F. Palmer Papers, OBV3, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
The Techwood kitchen was envisioned by the Housing Division and designed by architects not only as an efficient “work laboratory” for domestic labor but also as the “focal point of all dwelling unit activities.” Promotional materials presented the eat-in as this “focal point” and in so doing communicated a significant PWA design standard: the kitchen was required to have space for both eating and cooking, a rule that rendered the separate dining room an excessive and unnecessary luxury.[10] As the Housing Division’s 1937 bulletin, Homes for Workers, makes clear, dining rooms were abandoned in federal standards because they were rarely used throughout the day and thus deemed spatially excessive [Figure 7].[11] Although the type “B” apartments at Techwood Homes significantly departed from this federal standard, the type “A” eat-in seen in And Now We Live was, in fact, more commonly used in promotional materials to support the federal mandate.
Figure 7: Rendering of PWA’s standardized eat-in design. Image from Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Homes for Workers, Bulletin No. 3. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1937), 56.
National Revival and the Transformation of the Kitchen
The modern kitchen was an essential space for the PWA Housing Division leadership and designers because it could, it was believed, transform federal public housing occupants into an ideal New Deal citizenry. The eat-in modeled a type of domestic space that was modest and multipurpose, fitting for a growing middle class. Tension between the narrative of standardization conveyed by promotional images and the eat-in kitchen’s spatial reality brings into relief the representational strategies employed by federal actors and the class contradictions that emerged after residents moved in to Techwood Homes.
Addressing “workers,” the Housing Division’s 1937 bulletin had two goals. First, it sought to celebrate the fact that public housing was now accessible thanks to federal intervention. Second, it sought to appeal specifically to hardworking, humble, and unpretentious American citizens through images of enticing modern spaces like the eat-in. The modern kitchen was an architectural solution that signaled both the economic revival of the New Deal and the emergence of a population out of the conditions of slum dwelling.[12] As Schank argues, however, while public housing was promoted as a “way of living” available to all (especially for those who had been displaced by slum clearance), contradictions became evident after the first tenants moved into Techwood.[13] Residents were not former slum dwellers but were rather already members of the lower-middle-class.[14]
Despite evident contradictions, the fantasy of a hardworking poverty-stricken New Deal citizenry lifted out of poor housing into the middle class persisted into the 1940s. In his address at a formal ceremony at Techwood on September 1, 1936, Horatio B. Hackett, the director of the PWA Housing Division, solidified these claims by repeatedly referring to residents as “families who have never had real homes.” Applauding New Deal activism, Hackett’s statement crystallized what public housing in a “transformed and reclaimed” area meant for the both the nation’s citizens and the federal government:
Techwood Homes is more than decent housing in beautiful surroundings made available to persons who have never known of their own experience what a home could be. It is tangible evidence of a new and better conception of Americanism. It is a manifesto of the right of every American to share the benefits of our ingenuity and enterprise. . . The spirit which has produced Techwood Homes is the true spirit of America. It is a spirit which, I am confident, will not soon perish.[15]
Hackett made a broad appeal to the national consciousness, using public housing to defend New Deal state activism and convey a new “manifesto” about the “true spirit of America.” As his statement illustrates, the construction of a new citizenry relied on both the glorification of the federal government’s role in lifting families out of the slums and images that articulated a universal spirit of “Americanism.” As John Tagg has argued, New Deal photographs generated a “believable public language of truth,” one that would create social order, evoke a national unity, and renew the legitimacy of the state during a time of economic crisis. Documentary photography demanded “identification” with a citizenry constructed by the federal government through the framing of images.[16] Hackett’s broad declaration of national unity and spirit during a time of profound economic crisis required evidence of transformation to make the promise of an emerging American life understandable for a broad public. The Techwood kitchen was thus spatial proof of New Deal success. It was an image of the new form of living for citizens allegedly raised from the slums and, by extension, a representation of a nation lifted out of the Great Depression.
Calling the public to witness emergence from economic despair—the materialization of a “new and better conception of Americanism” at Techwood—Hackett’s speech prefigured the claims made later in promotional materials that emphasized the transformative effect of New Deal activism. Photographs and films that featured the eat-in were circulated widely to newspapers, magazines, and the federal government by the AHA and its first chairman, real estate developer Charles F. Palmer. Often, photographs of the new eat-in at Techwood were paired with “before” images of slum kitchens to dramatize the radical change of the kitchen spaces. These before/after contrasts showed an emerging class of New Deal citizens. Promotional images were particularly attuned to the new materiality of the eat-in. While kitchens in the slums were frequently portrayed as poorly lit, cluttered, dangerous, unsanitary, highly flammable, and cave-like, those in Techwood units presented a bright alternative [Figures 8, 9, 10].[17]
Figure 8: Man stands in cluttered kitchen with “Gunther Beer” cardboard boxes covering wall and table. Gas lamp positioned at center of image (Charles F. Palmer Papers, box 168, folder 5, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 9: Hanging cabinets and stacked dishes were frequent elements of promotional photographs (Charles F. Palmer Papers, box 168, folder 5, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Figure 10: Hanging cabinets and stacked dishes were frequent elements of promotional photographs (Charles F. Palmer Papers, box 168, folder 5, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
The visual before/after strategy used by the AHA can be seen in two images of kitchens in a Junior League Magazine from April 1937 [Figures 11, 12]. The first captures the materiality of a slum interior with a battered and torn open wall and a crooked and dangling sink. The image depicts three children within the dark and dirty interior space. Juxtaposed to the soiled floor, the youngest child is cast in intense light and perches on the side of the table, hanging between the brightness of the elevated tablecloth above and the darkness of the slums below. While this “dreary and unsanitary kitchen,” the caption tells us, was “typical of slum conditions,” the federal housing program would raze such dwellings and replace them with “decent” homes adequate for the “bright-looking children” seen in the photograph.[18] The image of the Techwood eat-in in the magazine exudes whiteness to dramatize this promised transformation: the woman, her dress, the cabinets, the sink, the electric stove, and the electric refrigerator are all cast in white light that flows from the window and bounces off of the glossy kitchen equipment.[19] Far from depictions of dark, dirty, unsanitary, and cluttered slum interiors, this image captures the space of a novel kitchen filled with sparkling appliances. Featuring modern sanitation and plumbing, this kitchen, a bright space now suitable for the innocent “bright-looking children” of the slums, replaced the “old disgraceful conditions” shown earlier in the magazine
Figure 11: “Kitchen in Techwood Homes. Modern sanitation and plumbing replace the old disgraceful conditions shown on page 40.” Note the same promotional image from figure 4 here (Junior League Magazine 23, no. 1 [April. 1937], 41. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University. https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:rad.schl:10777665?n=31).
Figure 12: “This dreary and unsanitary kitchen, which also serves as a bedroom, is typical of slum conditions in our land. Atlanta has made it possible through its Federal Housing program for such dwellings to be demolished and for these bright-looking children to move into a decent home” (Junior League Magazine 23, no. 1 [April. 1937], 14. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University. https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:rad.schl:10777665?n=292).
For the PWA, the eat-in served as evidence of the material, spatial, social, and economic successes of New Deal housing initiative. Throughout And Now We Live, the narrator calls us to witness transformation through domestic space. “What a difference,” he tells us, between the contented community at Techwood Homes and a “morose” family seen on screen seated around their old-fashioned kitchen table (though truthfully, their smiles contradict this purported misery). What is promised is not only a transformation from the cluttered, dark, and deteriorating space captured by the camera, with open, rickety, and crooked cupboards and rusty black kitchen equipment [Figure 13]. More than a material and spatial change, the eat-in meant a major shift in social mindset, a “new plane of thought and a fresh, clean attitude toward the world” produced by Techwood Homes. Represented as a crucial part of the transformation to a “fresh mindset,” the kitchen became a dominant architectural space for the AHA, one that stood for the “fresh, clean surroundings” of public housing that would reform the attitudes of an alleged group of former slum dwellers.
Figure 13: Film still from the Atlanta Housing Authority’s And Now We Live (Long Version), 1940 (Charles F. Palmer Papers, AV1, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
Promotional materials directed audiences to witness the new life promised by the eat-in’s efficient space and novel equipment. Representations of the kitchen sought to produce a national understanding that modern housing could have transformative social, economic, and moral effects as the country climbed out of the darkness of the Great Depression. The aim of New Deal federal housing was not solely to alleviate poverty, despite the claims made by Hackett, the PWA, and AHA. The goals for the program were more complex: New Deal advocates sought to represent national revival, economic stability, and social order through carefully framed images of the modern life offered by public housing.
Conclusion
As I have argued here, the eat-in was portrayed as a space for an efficient, hardworking family of existing and future productive workers and citizens. The kitchen was the domestic space that channeled, and in turn represented, emerging middle-class American efficiency and modernity as guaranteed by federally funded public housing. Photographs and films of New Deal public housing created a false vision of social uplift through the depiction of hardworking citizens purportedly raised out of the slums by their modern environment, amenities, and equipment. These images directed the public eye away from the capitalist system that had produced depression conditions in the first place, telling a visual story of the nation’s recovery from economic crisis through evidence of transformation—“proof” of families raised from the slums.
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J. Nathan Goldberg is a PhD student at Emory University studying modern and contemporary art and architecture. His research interests center on the the intersection of art and architecture, public art, and the politics of space.
Keywords: Atlanta Public Housing, New Deal Documentary Photography, Film, Techwood Homes, Kitchen
Notes
[1] Atlanta Housing Authority, And Now We Live (Long Version), 1940 (Charles F. Palmer Papers, AV1, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).
[2] See Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Homes for Workers, Bulletin No. 3. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1937), 6; “Standards for Low Rent Housing, " Architectural Record (March 1935): 182.
[3] Katie Marages Schank, "Producing the Projects: Atlanta and the Cultural Creation of Public Housing, 1933-2011,” Ph.D. diss., (George Washington University, 2016), 95.
[4] This is a sentiment conveyed by Michael W. Strauss and Talbot Wegg—two significant planners in the PWA—that regardless of any “deficiencies in design,” the goal was to guarantee the long-term stability of public housing while standardizing the ideas of “durability, efficiency, or economical functioning” that came to be associated with federal projects. See Michael W. Straus and Talbot Wegg, "Design for Living,” in Housing Comes of Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 68-69.
[5] Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Homes for Workers, 6; “Standards for Low Rent Housing, " 182.
[6] “Standards for Low Rent Housing,” 182.
[7] See Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1918); Lillian M. Gilbreth, The Home-Maker and Her Job (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936).
[8] The narrator, again, calls the viewer to witness how “indifferent” Techwood was to the “black and rusty iron” that was “left behind” in the slums,
[9] The modern kitchen at Techwood thus articulated a fantasy of American life where the normalized pillars of society (the nuclear family, work, and the home) and its key actors (the husband who goes to work and the wife who cooks and raises the family) were harmonized.
[10] "Standards for Low Rent Housing," 182-89.
[11] “If you count the time you spend in a dining room, you will realize that it is probably not much more than 1 hour a day. But you pay for 24 hours a day use of your dining room.” Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Homes for Workers, 57.
[12] In the bulletin, the Housing Division argued that the primary reason for the lack of improvement in low-cost housing was that the people who needed it had “on the whole done nothing to demand improvement.” It calls on workers to demand their right to the federal government’s model of public housing, claiming that it had become universally attainable due to New Deal activism. Positioning Techwood as a representation of a universally accessible form of dwelling now available due to federal intervention, the Bulletin reiterated and called on readers to witness the transformative social and economic potential of public housing—that it could lift workers out of poverty and raise their standard of living—while simultaneously appealing to the ideas of efficiency and modesty that became associated with the eat-in as the quintessential space of the New Deal citizenry. See the foreword to Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Homes for Workers.
[13] Schank, “Producing the Projects,” 95.
[14] The goal of finding “stable tenants” to fill Techwood had collided with claims made in promotional images that the process of slum clearance would be paired with immediate rehousing. Federal public housing had a clear financial and moral agenda: rents were tailored to those who were “employable”—the lower-middle-class—rather than an impoverished underclass of “unemployable” people who had been previously lived in the slums. Lawrence Vale, Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 88.
[15] PWA Press Section, Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, “Address Delivered by Colonel Horatio B. Hackett, Assistant Administrator, Public Works Administration, at the Dedication for the PWA’s Techwood Homes Slum Clearance,” No. 2062 (1936): 553-564.
[16] John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), XXXIII, 28.
[17] Photographs that emphasized claustrophobic, messy, and rusty materiality for “before” documentation can be connected with the rhetoric of planners that spread fear of fire. As Lawrence Vale has argued, this narrative of transformation became possible in an era of New Deal politics when the problem of longstanding poor housing conditions was recast as a problem of controlling a Black population who, planners and the AHA claimed, spread moral and sanitary ills (disease and crime) and fire to white areas. Significantly, the raising of paranoia about a burning city persisted in promotional materials into the 1940s, effective even after the slums had been demolished and Techwood Homes had been constructed. Through photographs and films of slum kitchens that emphasized gas lamps amidst cluttered interiors this fear continued to be activated, with And Now We Live, for instance, claiming that such spaces were “tinderboxes.” Such “before” images encouraged viewers to recall dramatized fears of hazardous and highly flammable dwellings in Atlanta while holding up the success of Techwood Homes as fireproof public housing. By doing so, promotional photographs and films were able to pivot and celebrate Techwood for its creation of a modern environment for a decent life, one that would itself produce the conditions needed for families, and particularly children, to flourish. The idea of fireproof and safe housing yielded not only a shift in material life for an alleged group of former slum dwellers, but also a dramatic shift in their social and economic landscape. For an account of the racialized narrative of transformation and the reframing of poverty in New Deal Atlanta, see Vale, Purging the Poorest, 72-74.
[18] “Techwood Homes,” 1933-1937, Charles F. Palmer Papers, Box OBV3, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
[19] This image was perhaps the most widely circulated promotional photograph by Palmer and the AHA.
CITATION
If you are citing this story, we recommend the following format using the Chicago Manual of Style:
J. Nathan Goldberg, “Techwood Before/After: Eat-In Kitchens and the Production of a New Deal Citizenry,” Atlanta Housing Interplay, ed. Christina E. Crawford, accessed [the date accessed], https://www.atlhousing.org/techwood-before-after.
Bibliography
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Charles F. Palmer papers, 1903-1973, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University (Atlanta, GA).
Frederick, Christine. The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1918.
Gilbreth, Lillian M. The Home-Maker and Her Job. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936.
Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works. Homes for Workers. Bulletin No. 3. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1937.
Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works. Urban Housing: The Story of the PWA Housing Division 1933-1936 Bulletin No. 2. Washington D.C., August 1936.
Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works. Unit Plans. Washington D.C., May 1935.
PWA Press Section, Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works. “Address Delivered by Colonel Horatio B. Hackett, Assistant Administrator, Public Works Administration, at the Dedication for the PWA’s Techwood Homes Slum Clearance.” Release No. 2062. 1936.
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Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Tagg, John. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Vale, Lawrence. Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.