First Houses: A Monument of the Past, A Model for the Future
A lecture and discussion with Warren Shaw

Dedicated in 1935 as the first publicly sponsored housing complex for the poor, the East Village’s landmarked First Houses on Third Street and Avenue A helped inaugurate the era of urban renewal. While critics have derided urban renewal as an aesthetic and sociological failure, recent phenomena such as staggering real estate inflation and the “up-marketing” of affordable housing such as Stuyvesant Town make it necessary to re-examine the legacy of public housing. In this recapitulation of his January 2007 lecture for Village Preservation, Warren Shaw, Assistant Corporation Counsel in the Real Estate Litigation Division of the New York City Law Department, will consider these questions as he traces the history of the First Houses and discusses their present-day implications.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Neighborhood Preservation Center.