Fairview District

About this property

Fairview, originally named Yorkship Village, is a neighborhood located in southern Camden, in Camden County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. According to the 2000 United States census, Fairview Village has a population of 5,947. Much of the neighborhood is part of a historic district listed on the state and federal registers of historic places. The neighborhood was a federally funded World War I planned community of approximately 1000 homes located near New York Shipbuilding of Camden, New Jersey, and was intended to provide housing for the shipyard's workers and their families. New York Shipbuilding had more than tripled in size due to war contracts, and the influx of shipyard workers was overwhelming the Camden housing market. The United States Shipping Board through its Emergency Fleet Corporation used funds from a $50,000,000 appropriation for housing to alleviate a housing shortage threatening its shipbuilding program. Actual construction was managed by the Department of Housing and Transit, United States Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation which selected Electus Darwin Litchfield as architect. The site chosen was just upstream from the shipyard on the South Branch of Newton Creek. The 225-acre (0.91 km2) parcel, then located in Haddon Township, had formerly been the Old Cooper Farmstead. The village's design was influenced by the garden city movement developing in England at the time. Litchfield envisioned Yorkship Village as "a place of light rooms and clean yards, with adequate playgrounds and amusement fields; a place of beauty and appropriateness and cleanliness so great that a man returning from his daily toil would receive new strength and recreation; a place where the man who could save a fraction of his income would be able to obtain with it, for himself and for his children, a share of play and education, literature and music, and other uplifting things." Litchfield's plan for Yorkship Village included narrow, winding residential streets (soon to be tree-lined), a central village square, broad green boulevards, and brick duplexes and row homes with both front and back yards. Architecturally, the village is now considered an example of American Federal style. The "village" character would be further emphasized by physical isolation, since it was bordered on three sides by Newton Creek. Construction began with ground-breaking on May 1, 1918. The United States Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation bore the estimated $11 million cost of construction, but required the local community to provide utilities, fire hydrants, and fire and police protection. The cost of those services was beyond the means of Haddon Township, which ceded Yorkship Village to the City of Camden on July 8, 1918.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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