Union Park Gardens (Wilmington)
Union Park Gardens is a historic residential neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware, developed as a World War I-era workers' housing project intended to address the urgent need for employee housing near the city's wartime industrial facilities. Planned with considerable attention to landscape design and urban form, the neighborhood stands as a notable example of early twentieth-century community planning in the Mid-Atlantic United States. Its design brought together nationally recognized talents in landscape architecture and building design, resulting in a cohesive residential district that has retained much of its original character into the twenty-first century.
Background and Origins
The development of Union Park Gardens emerged from the pressing circumstances of World War I, when the rapid expansion of Wilmington's industrial base created an acute shortage of housing for the workers flooding into the city. Wilmington had long been a center of manufacturing and commerce, and wartime production demands placed enormous strain on the existing housing supply. Federal authorities and private developers recognized that providing decent, planned housing for workers was both a practical necessity and a component of the broader war effort.[1]
Union Park Gardens was conceived as a large-scale housing project to meet this need, and its development placed Wilmington alongside other American cities that were experimenting with planned workers' communities during this period. The project drew on contemporary thinking about urban planning, garden city ideals, and the relationship between the physical environment and the health and productivity of working people. The design reflected a belief that well-ordered, attractive housing could improve the lives of residents and contribute to stable, functioning communities.
Design and Planning
The design of Union Park Gardens brought together two significant figures in American planning and architecture. John Nolen (1869–1937), a prominent landscape architect, was engaged to lay out the neighborhood's plan. Nolen had studied under figures associated with major civic design projects in New York City, and he brought to Union Park Gardens a sensibility shaped by the garden suburb movement and the broader tradition of landscape-informed urban planning.[2] His approach emphasized the integration of streets, open spaces, and housing lots into a coherent whole, rather than treating each element in isolation.
The architectural work was handled by the Philadelphia firm of Ballinger & Perrot, which was active during the early decades of the twentieth century. The firm was responsible for the design of the individual structures within the neighborhood, including the rowhouses that came to define the streetscape of Union Park Gardens.[3] Emile Perrot, a principal of the firm, was the architect most directly associated with the project's building designs. Perrot also worked on other large housing initiatives in the region during this period, including the Industrial Village development at Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, demonstrating the demand for planned workers' housing across the broader Delaware Valley industrial corridor.[4]
The collaboration between Nolen and Ballinger & Perrot produced a neighborhood organized around the principles that informed progressive housing practice of the era. Streets were laid out with attention to pedestrian movement and neighborhood cohesion. The rowhouse form, which Perrot employed extensively, provided efficient use of land while offering individual households a sense of domestic identity within the larger collective form of the block. Houses built around 1918 established the neighborhood's architectural character, with brick construction and modest but carefully detailed facades contributing to a streetscape of considerable uniformity and consistency.[5]
The Rowhouses of Union Park Gardens
The rowhouses of Union Park Gardens represent the neighborhood's most visible and enduring architectural legacy. Constructed beginning around 1918, these structures were built to provide comfortable and functional homes for working families employed in Wilmington's industrial economy. The rowhouse typology had long been a staple of mid-Atlantic urban housing, and its use at Union Park Gardens reflected both practical considerations of cost and density and the aesthetic preferences of the era's planners and architects.
Each rowhouse unit was designed to offer residents adequate interior space while maintaining the coherence of the block as an architectural unit. The exteriors were typically finished in brick, with details that varied subtly from block to block while maintaining the overall visual harmony of the neighborhood. The relationship between the houses and the street was carefully considered, with front setbacks, stoops, and entrance treatments giving each unit a sense of individual address within the larger planned ensemble.
The survival of a significant number of these original rowhouses into the present day speaks to the quality of their initial construction and the attachment of successive generations of residents to the neighborhood's character. Community groups and individual homeowners have worked to maintain the historic fabric of Union Park Gardens, recognizing the rowhouses as both architectural artifacts and living parts of a functioning residential neighborhood.
Sale and Post-War History
Following the end of World War I, the circumstances under which Union Park Gardens had been developed changed considerably. The wartime housing emergency had passed, and the federal government moved to divest itself of properties that had been developed under emergency conditions. Union Park Gardens was among the properties offered for public sale in the early 1920s.
The process of selling off the housing stock attracted attention from real estate interests and raised concerns about the welfare of existing residents. The United States Shipping Board, which had overseen some wartime housing developments, announced measures intended to protect home buyers at the sale of Union Park Gardens, signaling awareness that the transition from public wartime housing to private ownership required careful management to prevent exploitation of prospective buyers.[6] The auction was conducted by Gerth's Realty Experts, and the conditions of sale were structured to impose obligations on successful purchasers, with those obtaining parcels required to meet specified payment conditions.[7]
The transition to private ownership marked the beginning of Union Park Gardens' life as an ordinary residential neighborhood, no longer defined by its origins as emergency workers' housing but settling into the fabric of Wilmington's urban landscape. Over the following decades, the neighborhood evolved in response to the broader social and economic changes affecting Wilmington and American cities generally.
Neighborhood in the Twentieth Century
Union Park Gardens occupies a place in Wilmington's social and urban history that extends well beyond its origins as a wartime housing project. As the twentieth century progressed, the neighborhood became embedded in the life of the city, its residents participating in the civic, economic, and cultural transformations that reshaped Wilmington across successive generations.
The neighborhood's history intersects with broader patterns of urban change in Wilmington, including the demographic shifts and policy challenges that affected many American industrial cities during the mid- and late twentieth century. Wilmington's experience with issues including desegregation and urban renewal played out in the context of neighborhoods like Union Park Gardens, whose physical fabric and community character were shaped by forces operating well beyond the individual block or household.[8]
The neighborhood's relatively intact historic housing stock has made it a point of continuity within a city that has seen considerable physical transformation in some of its other districts. The preservation of the original rowhouse character has contributed to Union Park Gardens' identity as a neighborhood with a tangible connection to Wilmington's early twentieth-century history.
John Nolen and the Planning Tradition
John Nolen's involvement in the design of Union Park Gardens places the neighborhood within a broader tradition of American community planning that was active in the early decades of the twentieth century. Nolen, who lived from 1869 to 1937, was among the leading figures in the emerging profession of city and regional planning in the United States. His work on Union Park Gardens was consistent with his broader practice, which emphasized the importance of thoughtful site planning, the integration of green space, and attention to the needs of residents as the foundation of good neighborhood design.[9]
The garden suburb and planned community traditions that informed Nolen's approach had roots in British and European urban reform movements of the nineteenth century, as well as in the landscape design philosophy associated with figures like Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City. The Facebook community source notes that Nolen was a student of the Central Park architect's tradition, reflecting the lineage of ideas that shaped his planning practice.[10]
Nolen's contribution to Union Park Gardens was primarily at the level of site planning and neighborhood organization rather than individual building design, a division of labor that was characteristic of collaborative projects of this scale and complexity. His work established the framework within which the architectural designs of Ballinger & Perrot were realized, with the two sets of expertise complementing one another to produce the finished neighborhood.
Emile Perrot and Ballinger & Perrot
Emile Perrot Sr. was a trained engineer and architect who worked as a principal of the Philadelphia firm Ballinger & Perrot during the early twentieth century. His involvement in Union Park Gardens was part of a broader practice that encompassed large-scale institutional and industrial building as well as residential design. The firm's work on Union Park Gardens and on the Industrial Village at Marcus Hook demonstrated a capacity for designing housing at the scale demanded by wartime and industrial development programs.[11]
Perrot's dual training as both engineer and architect was reflected in the practical quality of the housing he designed, which balanced aesthetic considerations with structural efficiency and construction economy. The rowhouses of Union Park Gardens have proven durable over the course of more than a century, a testament to the soundness of the original construction.
Legacy and Significance
Union Park Gardens remains a functioning residential neighborhood in Wilmington, its original rowhouses still inhabited and its street plan largely intact. The neighborhood's survival as a coherent historic district reflects both the quality of its original design and construction and the ongoing commitment of residents and community organizations to its maintenance and preservation.
As a product of the World War I workers' housing movement, Union Park Gardens represents an important chapter in the history of American housing policy and urban planning. The project brought together federal initiative, private architectural and planning talent, and the practical needs of an industrial workforce in a manner that produced lasting physical results. The neighborhood's history also illuminates aspects of Wilmington's development as an industrial city and the role that planned housing played in shaping its residential landscape.
The involvement of John Nolen and Emile Perrot gives Union Park Gardens a place in the broader histories of American planning and architecture, connecting this Wilmington neighborhood to national currents in professional practice and urban design thinking during the early twentieth century.