Dr. Joel Schwartz, professor of history at Montclair State University, wrote a ground-breaking overview of New York City's housing policy and it implementation in the 20th century, entitled The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993). The book is out of print but it is available online in PDF format.

The La Guardia and Wagner Archives’ NYCHA Photo Collection originated in the Housing Authority’s need during the 1930s to document the legal imperatives of slum clearance and to portray the progress of the rehousing effort across New York. By any measure, it was a monumental task and — the Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses site on the Lower East Side; a heroic shot of the Smith Houses on the cityscape another panorama shot which shows the enormous job to be done around the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, and an effort of civic will that lasted a generation — the celebration of NYCHA’s 50,000th apartment on August 3, 1950; or the aerial view of the Lower East Side; and the achievement at Fort Greene — the Housing Authority’s single largest project.

As these photos show, public housing became a new icon of modernism. Some of the projects themselves contributed towers to the city’s skyline.

Sharing much of the documentarian zeal of the 1930s, the NYCHA photographer(s) fanned out across the city to record urban misery and the hope for social action. Rarely were the photographs taken from any self-consciously artistic motive (such as a snow-shrouded City Hall ); or an impulse to capture an odd moment. That the photographs often rose to the artistic resonance of a Berenice Abbott or the grainy realism of the New York Photo League is testimony to the professionalism of the NYCHA photographers and to their instincts as New Yorkers. The NYCHA collection contains a wealth of New York scenes, the tableaux in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side — note the Berenice Abbott-type shots of long gone Oak and other streets; or Roosevelt and North Chambers Streets — also obliterated for superblocks.

It provides innumerable glimpses of how the city’s streets were used when most of Manhattan and Brooklyn still had a dense streetscape and people used public space for all kinds of activities (for instance, the remarkable series of sidewalk views along East 112th -113th and East 103rd Streets, the Jefferson and Carver sites in East Harlem. The collection includes earlier versions of familiar spots an urban existence of horse-drawn vehicles and trolleys, of Harlem produce men and handcarts of pushcart markets on the Baruch Houses site, 1950!; also on the Lower East Side; of elevated trains and tenements and gas houses; of cobblestones and filigreed light stanchions; and of odd spots swept away by the era of La Guardia and Robert Moses, by the modern superblocks of public housing. Several pictures show the business corner of 104th Street and Columbus Avenue, with a placard, “Vote ALP for Peace” in the top story, which was demolished for the Frederick Douglass Houses. The American Labor Party, along with the small businesses on the avenue, was victim of the giantism employed by Democratic liberals to fight poverty —and political radicalism — after World War II.