About Preserving Parkchester

This microsite centers on Parkchester, a planned community located in the Bronx, New York City. Built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in the early 1940s, Parkchester was created for middle-class families, and only permitted White people to live in the community.

Parkchester was designed with a utopian, garden-city vision in mind, the perfect blend of the urban and suburban. Hundreds of Works Progress Administration (WPA)-era sculptures dot the buildings throughout Parkchester, and many have fallen into disrepair due to lack of resources allocated to their preservation. As of 2020, over 30,000 people call Parkchester home[i], but its architectural and cultural significance are rarely acknowledged in the same way as comparable developments in New York City.

Additionally, the complex is not landmarked, despite attempts made to elevate Parkchester's status.[ii] This microsite invites visitors to explore: why? By clicking through text and image from three different time periods in Parkchester’s history and one case study of the landmarked Tudor City in Manhattan, this microsite encourages visitors to examine how transparency – or lack thereof – shapes New York City's landmarking process.

Parkchester's stalled campaign toward landmark designation exposes a flaw in the Landmark Preservation Commission’s (LPC) landmarking process, where even the greatest efforts by community advocates may be rendered moot, leaving unclear who decides what parts of the city, and whose stories, are worth preserving. Parkchester's deteriorating WPA-era sculptures shed light on the consequences of lack of landmark designation: public art created through a federal program to support artists and enrich public life is now decaying. What does this lack of accountability mean for the city's built environment, past, present and future?

The aforementioned flaw manifests in the microsite through the two icons that appear on the page: the checklist icon, representing the LPC survey process, and the calendar icon, representing when a site up for landmarking moves from LPC’s survey process to calendaring, a prerequisite to landmarking. Parkchester has never moved beyond the survey phase, which was conducted in 1978.

Parkchester Path 1 → Clicking through this series of images and text, you’ll see the beginnings of Parkchester: advertisements of the new development selling a dream, the first appearance of the WPA sculptures around the community, and black and white photos from the late 1930s to early 1940s when Parkchester was being constructed.

Parkchester Path 2 → Clicking through this series of images and text, you’ll see Parkchester fully constructed, before its first inhabitants arrived – here you can take in the sheer scale of the complex, along with its natural beauty. You’ll also see news articles from the 1970s-1990s detailing problems popping up in Parkchester, from quality of life woes due to “shoddy construction” to units found in violation of NYC housing code.

Parkchester Path 3 → Clicking through this series of images and text, you’ll see Parkchester’s gradual return to grace: a repositioning of sorts. Window and plumbing upgrades were on the list of improvements from the 1990s onwards. Parkchester began to appear in films, and major publications finally began to acknowledge the complex as noteworthy. Clicking through further, you’ll see everyday life in Parkchester: children filling the many playgrounds, interacting with the sculptures on the buildings, and the famous Parkchester oval, complete with sculptural fountains. Tudor City Path 1

Professor Melisa Tekin, Farmingdale College, 2026.