Laurel Homes Historic District

Laurel Homes is a 1930s public housing complex in Cincinnati's West End, built 1936-1938 with Public Works Administration funding on cleared slum land. It holds 1,303 apartments in 25 three- and four-story brick buildings, arranged around courtyards, vistas and axes. Four smaller brick buildings accompany them: two long, low store buildings on Linn Street, a heating plant and a playground building. Two city-owned green spaces, Laurel Park and Laurel Playground, are part of the district. Building coverage dropped from 65 percent of the land in the old slum to 20 percent. The complex ranks as the second largest PWA housing project nationally, after Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn, and was the first and largest public housing project in Cincinnati. It is valued for showing Depression-era planning ideas such as standardization, low density, communal space and attention to light and air, and for its role in local humanitarian and political efforts. Original windows were replaced in 1985, but the complex remains largely intact.