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As World War II approached, New Kensington was truly “The Aluminum City.”

In 1940, there were 7,500 people employed at ALCOA facilities in the city at the riverfront aluminum works, the powder plant along the river in Plum and at the research center along Freeport Road.

Thousands of other support jobs existed such as the restaurants that fed the workers at lunch, railroaders and truckers who brought raw materials to the plants.

Jobs were plentiful … but housing wasn’t.

The U.S. Public Building Administration then entered the picture.

Famed architects Walter Gropius and his partner, Marcel Breuer, were commissioned to design the defense housing project. Gropius managed to escape Nazi Germany in 1937 after designing the Reichsbank Building in Berlin. The bank was placed under direct control of Adolf Hitler in 1937. Gropius, with help from British architect Maxwell Fry, left Germany on the pretext he was visiting Italy for a film propaganda festival.

He then fled to England.

Breuer reunited with Gropius at Harvard University before both came to New Kensington to design what would be called the Aluminum City Terrace.

Ground was broken in June 1941 for the project that called for 35 buildings and 250 housing units. The buildings were designed to conform with the stark topography of the neighborhood.

The design would be scorned by New Kensington residents who were more familiar with single-family dwellings. The 1941 New Kensington mayoral race resulted in an upset because the residents were dead set against the project.

But when the U.S. entered World War II after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the opposition subsided.

The complex’s controversy didn’t stop with the end of World War II. The federal government was going to tear down the 35 buildings, similar to what was done with other defense housing areas across the country.

But the residents liked living there and wanted to stay.

After eight months of complicated legal maneuvers and negotiations with banks and the federal Housing & Home Finance Agency, the tenants formed the Aluminum City Terrace Housing Association in September 1948.

The association is a corporation owned by the tenants and governed by a board of directors. Other than a 1965 renovation that included the upper wooden sun shields replaced by (what else?) aluminum louvers and wooden partitions between the units replaced by brick, the architecture has remained largely intact from the design of Gropius and Breuer 81 years ago.

The terrace includes an activities center.

In 2010, the homeowners association got its own Facebook page, something Gropius and Breuer likely never could have predicted.

George Guido is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.

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