The New Deal Landmark That's Cannibalizing Itself

Go north on Winton Road out of Cincinnati, through Winton Woods Park, and you’ll slice through Greenhills, Ohio, which at first looks like any aging American suburb. It has low-slung homes, a church, a small shopping center, and a village green. Late in the afternoon on a winter Sunday, with the custard shop closed for the season, the laundromat was the busiest joint in town, although a few customers shuffled in and out of the Ameristop food mart. (The lone sit-down restaurant on the Eswin Street strip had closed at 3 p.m.)

Tucked behind the retail strip is a surprise: an Art Deco swimming pool and community center. Behind them stand clusters of older attached houses and apartment buildings. These structures hint at Greenhills’ significance as a radical social experiment of the New Deal. Like its sister cities of Greenbelt, Maryland, and Greendale, Wisconsin, Greenhills was built by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration to provide modern, affordable, community-oriented housing to working-class Americans. (The town’s motto: “Pioneering a Dream.”)