# Yorkship Village

Camden, New Jersey. Emergency Fleet Corporation, developer. Electus D Litchfield, architect. 1918

Yorkship Village, now called Fairview, is the best of the government towns built during the First World War. It was built by the New York Shipbuilding Company in 1918 for its workers in Camden, New Jersey, though it was financed through the Emergency Fleet Corporation, an organisation created shortly before the United States Housing Corporation.¹ The architect and planner was Electus D Litchfield, a New Yorker with a family tradition of real-estate development.²

The site was an irregular tract of 225 acres on the outskirts of Camden, cut off from downtown Camden and neighbouring Gloucester by a marshy brook. Litchfield took advantage of the flat, unobstructed site and the single road to Camden by broadening the road to a parkway which he terminated at the heart of the site in a village square with cultural and commercial buildings. He then ran a similar parkway from the square towards Gloucester at an equal angle to the road to Camden. The other roads were planned in relation to those angles, so that the majority of the residential streets had short closed vistas.

The entire plot had space for 2400 lots, but only 90 acres were developed, with some 900 houses and several community buildings. The vast majority of the houses were group houses: in all, there were 243 groups composed of 27 types in 70 different combinations, the longest being 11 houses long.³ Built in a slightly dowdy but comfortable Colonial style, the dwellings were well planned. Like all of the approximately 16 500 houses and apartments built by the Emergency Fleet Corporation under the supervision of the reform architect Frederick L Ackerman, the units were only two rooms deep, providing good light and ventilation for each room.

## Notes

1. Edith Elmer Wood, *Recent Trends in American Housing*. Macmillan, New York 1931, pp 66–69.

2. The most famous member of the family was Edwin C Litchfield, father of Electus B Litchfield. Edwin was one of the first developers of Park Slope in Brooklyn, and lived in a house built by Alexander Jackson Davis in 1857 that was later surrounded by Frederick Law Olmsted's Prospect Park, also in Brooklyn; Electus B was the developer of Blythebourne in Brooklyn in the late 1880s. He was presumably a brother of Electus D's father, a real estate developer named William B Litchfield.

3. Richard S Childs, 'The First Emergency Government Towns for Shipyard Workers. I, "Yorkship Village" at Camden, N.J.' *AIA Journal* 6, May 1918, pp 237–244, 249–251, frontispiece.

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1. General plan of 1918

2. Albemarle Square, 1918

3. Electus D Litchfield, typical houses, 1918

4. North and South Commons, architects drawing