In August, 1949, a team of seventeen building industry professionals from Great Britain toured the United States, seeking American “know-how” to help their home country rebuild after WWII. Under the auspices of the “Anglo-American Council on Productivity,” a spinoff from the Marshall Plan, the group toured seven U.S. cities, observing federal projects in Washington, the United Nations Building under construction in New York, and various housing developments throughout the country. It was in Chicago, however, that they found “the only completely modern things” being built in America.[i]
Those modern buildings were a new round of Mutual Ownership projects being designed, financed, and constructed by the Holsman organization. Henry K. Holsman, now in his early 80s, was in the midst of a renewed career in the heated postwar housing market. After a run of successful co-ops in Hyde Park and South Shore, he and his sons had expanded their vision, finding sites for development throughout Chicago and its suburbs. New sites in Grand Crossing, Rogers Park, Evanston, and River Forest proved fertile territory for Holsman’s clever re-working of cooperative financing arrangements; he found eager markets of middle-class residents seeking the benefits of home ownership in dense urban settings far beyond Hyde Park.
Holsman’s designs, too, evolved in this era. His earlier projects, whether mid- or high-rise, had adopted a standard developer’s classicism, using red brick and terra cotta to blend with surrounding traditional houses and apartment buildings. But with this generation of buildings, he and his design team adopted a moderne style that expressed simple planes of brick accented by trademark windows that gently curved outward, and a Scandinavian-influenced approach to interiors that opened living areas to one another.
It was the construction of these, however, that the British team found strikingly new. “The walls were built differently,” one of the touring architects told Architectural Forum.
“The floors were laid differently; the wiring was run differently; the heating was designed differently; the windows were framed differently; the ceiling[s] were finished differently; even the grading was done differently. In fact, so many things were done differently that it might be shorter to list their points of similarity than their points of difference from the usual garden apartment.”[ii]
Mutual Ownership, Holsman explained, naturally emphasized innovation in construction. Typical co-op developers walked away from a project once it had been built and sold, leaving the group of owners responsible for the building’s maintenance and repair. Those developers were, therefore, incentivized to build quickly and cheaply. Because his organization took responsibility for operating and maintaining each “Trust” after its buildings were completed, though, Holsman had an interest in the quality and durability of the finished product, too, leading him and his team to search for methods and materials that could combine rapid, inexpensive construction with long-term performance. The construction sites and finished buildings that the British team toured, therefore, were full of innovative techniques that Holsman either pioneered or refined.
Among these were left-in-place joist pans, similar to those he had used on the 1934 Model Country House at the Century of Progress Exhibition. These pans were fabricated with integral reinforcing bars, welded to bulkhead plates at their ends, which eliminated the time-consuming placement of rebar in situ. Once these were placed, precast floor slabs were laid on top of them, pipes for radiant heating and conduit for electrical outlets were woven between them, and a single pour of concrete filled the pans, locked the slabs to one another, and provided a leveling top layer that could be rapidly squeegeed to provide a smooth floor finish.[iii]
The resulting floor was just 3” thick, supported by joists that took up only 8” of space, on 3’-0” centers. Exposing these in the space below, as he had done in his earlier projects, allowed Holsman to achieve 8’-1” ceiling heights throughout most of the resulting apartments with just an 8’-4” floor-to-floor height. Combined with his earlier “English basement” technique, which buried the first-floor apartments halfway into the ground, these projects could provide four floors of residential accommodation with staircases of just 43 steps. “You can’t find a conventional apartment in Chicago where the walk up to the third floor isn’t more than that,” he told Forum.[iv]
Holsman explained that these sectional efficiencies alone made his approach more affordable than any conventional construction, gaining 33% more floor space for the same volume and avoiding the need for elevators in the resulting four-story structures. But he also innovated in these projects’ masonry walls, developing a reinforced, rowlock method of brick construction that relied on a central core of poured concrete to achieve adequate structure for four floors in walls that were just 8” thick. Windows were framed in precast concrete units, which served as jigs for the surrounding brickwork, eliminating the need for precise coordination during bricklaying. Inside, Holsman adapted the prefabricated stair design he had developed for the Cabrini Row Houses, again speeding construction while guaranteeing quality. Together, Holsman claimed that these innovations allowed him to build apartments for $1500 per room and to run them for $50 per room per month ($20,000 and $740 in 2026 dollars), about 17% less than typical construction and almost 40% less than market operating costs.[v] These innovations enabled projects like the 88-unit Lunt-Lake Apartments (1946-48) and Winchester-Hood (1949-1951).
Among these projects, Parkway Gardens, at 6330-6546 South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, stands out as both an exemplar of Holsman’s techniques and the ends to which they were directed. Financed by a local waiter’s union whose members were frustrated with the discriminatory housing market in Chicago, the project was announced in early 1950 and constructed over the next two years on the site of the derelict White City amusement park. The Holsmans were hired as experts in Mutual Ownership, and together with a board of local, Black businessmen, the project was financed with mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Authority. Holsman laid out 24 walkup buildings on gentle diagonals, surrounding 11 eight-story elevator buildings, all of them using techniques from the organization’s growing toolbox. Nearly 700 units of five or six rooms each were planned throughout, with a target rental of $21 to $41 per month ($288 to $561 in 2026 dollars) after initial investments of $2500 per unit ($34,500).[vi] The project’s initial impulse, to provide “modern, comfortable homes for waiters and their families,” became the largest mutual ownership project in the nation and one of the largest and most successful efforts by the private sector to provide quality housing for Black families. Civil Rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune, after attending the complex’s opening, wrote in the Defender that
“…our vision and our pocketbooks, stimulated by our great need, have found a meeting place, at last. It means that another lesson has been learned in security through unity.
“We have learned to recognize the mutual ownership of housing as an important forward step, much more important, possibly, as a measure of group advancement, than the occasional acquisition of princely mansions by individuals.”[vii]
Holsman and Holsman, Architects, were named to the Chicago Defender’s “Honor Roll” in 1950 for “developing a mutual ownership housing plan which enables low-income groups to provide themselves with decent housing, and particularly for their role in the construction of Chicago’s Parkway Gardens Homes,” along with local and national figures who had championed integration.[viii] Parkway Gardens would become the childhood home of Michelle Obama, among many others.[ix]
Holsman would deserve recognition for all of this alone, but he was most important to Chicago’s architectural history as a mentor and financing consultant. In the 1930s, he hired a young University of Chicago student for a part-time internship. That intern, originally from St. Louis, had attended Yeshiva University in New York but, after a change of heart, had come to Chicago to study in Mortimer Adler’s Great Books program. Put to work on the River Forest Garden Apartments project, the new hire clearly picked up both Holsman’s interest in advanced building techniques and his mission to yoke these to a grander civic vision. Years later, after that intern emerged from Holsman’s organization as a developer himself, one of his collaborating architects would say that he “began with an idea of the social consequences of his work,” and “discovered along the way that he was also a very good business man.”
That architect? Mies van der Rohe. And that young protégé of Holsman? Herbert Greenwald.
[cont.]
[i] “British Builders Admire Our Ways: Group, On Tour For ‘Know-How’.” The New York Times, Aug 4, 1949. 8.
[ii] “Pioneering Construction Ideas.” Architectural Forum, Vol. 92, no. 1. Jan., 1950. 79.
[iii] Robert W, Glasgow, “Unusual Design Features Produce Savings in Chicago Apartments.” New York Herald Tribune, Nov 6, 1949. D5; See, too, Henry T. Holsman, US Patent # US3059380A, “Block Wall Reinforcement,” granted Oct. 23, 1962.
[iv] “Pioneering Construction Ideas,” op. cit.
[v] Clayton Kirkpatrick, “Expect Most Building Since Boom Of 1926.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan 12, 1947. A7.
[vi] “Parkway Garden Homes.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, certified Oct. 11, 2011.
[vii] Mary Mcleod Bethune, “Chicago’s Parkway Gardens Symbol Of Growing Economic Unity And Strength.” The Chicago Defender, Oct 28, 1950. 6.
[viii] “Eight Of Outstanding Americans On Defender 1950 Honor Roll.” The Chicago Defender, Jan 6, 1951. 1.
[ix] “Parkway Gardens Apartments: A New Idea in a New Era.” Chicago Defender, Oct. 7, 1950. 23. Parkway Gardens suffered a long decline after its ownership changed, first to the federal government in the 1970s and eventually to profit-minded developers who failed to invest in maintenance and repairs.