Today the Phipps Garden management frequently receives complaints: Children run across the grass and ride their bikes on the pathways, colliding with pedestrians and strollers, and teenagers skateboard down the old steps. Adults feed the Garden’s colony of stray cats, scattering Styrofoam plates on the lawn, and dog walkers fail to clean up after their dogs.
This is the original peephole in Dorothy’s entrance door.
Built in the 1930s by philanthropist Henry Phipps and urban renewal architect Clarence Stein, the Phipps Garden Apartments followed the ideals of the turn-of-the-century English Garden City movement. In high contrast to the dark, dingy and crowded tenement buildings still common in New York at the time, Phipps Garden offered 472 clean, bright and safe apartments to working class families. It even allowed cats and dogs. A private well was dug to water the flora, and old female guards were employed to sit on the courtyard benches and make sure no children tramped through bushes and across lawns.
Landscaped courtyards still take up 57 percent of the development, but the guards have long vanished and the nursery has shut down. The playground was sold to a private developer in 2007.