Pueblo Gardens

GIGANTIC HOUSING PROJECT IN TUCSON IS EXPRESSION OF FAITH IN FUTURE OF ARIZONA. DEL WEBB COMPANY IS BUILDING LOW-COST DWELLINGS FOR LIVING IN DESERT PUEBLO GARDENS

There's something new in housing blossoming under the Arizona sun.

It's a home designed for liveability, to bring the outdoors inside, and to advantageously use every square foot of property.

It's a home-or rather, these are HOMES, for some seven hundred units now are completed or in process of construction-created especially for living in the temperate year-around climate of the colorful Southern Arizona desert land.

This is Pueblo Gardens.

One of the nation's largest single-homes projects now being built by private enterprise, it features a modernistic and colorful style of moderate-priced housing which already is winning national attention.

Mushrooming on what less than a year ago was raw desert land on the southeast edge of Tucson, this Pueblo Gardens project is destined to become a $20,000,000 “city within a city,” with a maximum of three thousand homes, a $2,500,000 one-stop shopping center, and upwards of ten thousand residents.

It is the creation of the Del E. Webb Construction Co. of Phoenix, an Arizona-owned and operated firm headed by a one-time carpenter who today is one of the nation's big builders and because his first love was baseball-owner of a half interest in the fabulous New York Yankees and all their baseball properties.

Only in America is a success story like that of Del Webb's believable, or possible.

From carpenter and minor league baseball pitcher to million-dollar construction enterpreneur and vice-president of the Yankees-his is a success story with an indelible marking: Made in Arizona.

And in a nation critically short of adequate housing, one of Del Webb's postwar ambitions has been new and modern homes which veterans as well as the average working man can afford-a dream he now is realizing in Pueblo Gardens' bright, cheery dwellings being marketed from $4,975 to $7.975.

Homes in Pueblo Gardens, Tucson's 3000-unit low-cost housing project, now being built by Del E. Webb Company, are designed for "liveability, to bring the outdoors inside, and to advantageously use every square foot of property." Prices: $4,975 ир.

Pueblo Gardens will become a $20,000,000 city within a city. Gay desert colors, "tie-in" patios give privacy, sunniness.

Continued from page thirty Here, too, is a concrete expression of the faith of one firm in Arizona's future.

Three thousand new homes, even in a single project, might little more than dent the overall picture of a metropolitan city. But three thousand new homes in Tucson not only is a major undertaking, but unprecedented expansion for the city as a whole.

Added to that factor are the benefits of additional hundreds of thousands of man hours employment, and new business for a galaxy of tradesmen, from the furniture manufacturer to the butcher, the baker and candlestick maker.

Basic principle of this new, model community is an up-to-date design for outdoor living.

One wall of each home is essentially glass from floor to ceiling, fronting on a patio which, in effect, becomes an outdoor living room.

For architectural interest the designer, A. Quincy Jones, Los Angeles architect, has introduced the use of attractive fences that "tie in" the garden and the home, the "fences" continuing from the garden through glass walls into the interior.

This gives privacy to the garden, brings the outdoors inside, and yet forms a screening partition in the interior.

Besides insuring privacy for each home owner, detached patio fences in turn make it possible to vary appearance of each dwelling. This functional element surpasses such nonfunctional elements as shutters, bay windows and other such features in obtaining variety throughout the project.

Such an architectural design also permits the ceiling in one room to run through uninterrupted, increasing the visual size of the room. This tends to eliminate a restricted feeling of a room with four walls and small, three-foot-square doublehung windows so common to low-cost housing.

The homes are finished in bright desert colors.

Many exterior walls are of California redwood. A few are brightly-painted, combed plywood. Others are stuccoed and finished in soft to deep brown tones. Roofs are of washed gravel and mostly in bright white, in direct contrast to deep hues on the exterior walls.

Varying setbacks of the homes eliminate regimentation, and every home is landscaped before it is sold.

Instead of the usual type of housing development in which dwellings are set the same distance back from walks or streets, accentuating the road pattern, Pueblo Gardens will be landscaped on an overall basis that its homes will be complimentary to the streets pattern without accentuating it.

Yet each dwelling will be an integral part of the whole, with fences and gardens enabling the builders to "tie together" the community units. In getting away from hedgerow housing, the Webb men have adopted a variable design so adaptable to different placements on the lots as to make use of orientation. Instead of all facing the street, homes are placed with one end or a side to the street, yet oriented to the path of the sun and to climatic conditions. In plot planning an effort was made to eliminate or discourage such a thing as a "backyard," and through novel landscaping to provide a small service yard so oriented that the entire lot is available for living rather than in the normal conception where the living room faces on a front yard which has no privacy. That the kitchen also may be used as a living area, in almost every Pueblo Gardens home the kitchen can be opened into an activity area separated by a buffet counter. In every case the home has an entry hall screened from the living area. Both features seldom are provided in ordinary low-cost housing.

In Pueblo Gardens the cracker-box type of home found in usual low-cost housing units is avoided by use of new building design Many features built in Pueblo Gardens usually are not found in “lowcost” projects. Aim is for beauty and comfort

While the average house has very small overhangs in its roof, Pueblo Gardens homes have been designed with very wide roof overhang to protect both the glass and solid walls from the Arizona sun. This alone has a definite summertime cooling effect. Yet, in addition, the houses are fully insulated. Roofs have double vapor barrier wool batts which provide the advantage of the new heat-reflection principle in addition to conventional insulating properties of wool alone. Wall insulation is provided by the new aluminum-backed gypsum board.

Structurally the houses have been designed to eliminate the normal costly truss type roof as well as the tricky and costly hip and valley framing. The Pueblo Gardens framing system permits sloping ceilings, which have been used to advantage architecturally in visually enlarging the rooms.

The sloping ceiling carries from entry area, and living area, into dining and kitchen area uninterrupted. Separation of these areas is accomplished either by door-height closets or door-height screening partitions.

Chiefly the Pueblo Gardens homes are built of frame, with redwood siding or combed plywood exteriors. In plaster or stucco designs, gunite has been substituted to provide a stronger wall and to eliminate plaster cracks normal in some wood-frame housing.

With an average of seven homes being completed daily by crews directed by Supt. J. N. (Jack) McPhee of the Webb Company, carefully-planned study and research made possible development of the gunite application to a point where plastering time was more than cut in half, thus helping to provide a better structure at lesser cost.

While attention was given throughout site planning to the informal house pattern incorporating varying setbacks. in all cases the final placement of each house on its particular lot was done with the idea of furnishing the best orientation and view, and to make possible privacy for outdoor living. Practical the year-around in the mild Southern Arizona climate.

To accomplish all of the things considered highly desirable for maximum use of the property and houses, an overall landscaping plan was developed by Architect Jones. And it begins by eliminating the usual conception of lining each side of a street with a row of ball-type trees.

The Pueblo Gardens landscaping pattern is based on an interweaving pattern of three heights of planting.

Tall trees, such as Eucalyptus, are planted not only for pattern, but as wind breaks and light control. Trees such as the olive are used to create shady areas so highly desirable in the desert land. Low shrub planting, such as oleander, augment the overall pattern and control dust and air motion.

The immensity of even the first phase of the 3,000-dwelling project is evidenced by the fact that the 700 units require more than 5,000,000 feet of lumber, all of which has been precision cut and packaged at a mill which Webb men erected at the site.

Over five miles of redwood patio fences will decorate the homes. There will be more than fifty miles of pipe in utilities and plumbing, and 120,200 square feet of glass is being incorporated in the homes.

More than 5,000,000 square feet of lawns will beautify the homes, and 5,000 eucalyptus and olive trees are being planted, since landscaping is a part of the sale price.

There will be more than six miles of surfaced streets, and builders are using an estimated 15.000 cubic yards of concrete in the homes themselves, and roughly another 900 cubic yards in sidewalks. About 125,000 pounds of nails are needed.

In conjunction with development of this new type housing, the Webb Company is building a one-stop shopping center destined to become the largest and most complete suburban shopping district in the Southwest, Mr. Webb has announced.

It will have approximately 100,000 square feet of shopping space and off-street parking facilities for 1,500 automobiles in a 14-acre area.

Known as Pueblo Plaza, the shopping center is intended to contribute to the independent, self-sustaining qualities of the new community. Every need-from banks and markets to theaters and medical clinics-is being anticipated.

Combining the most modern ideas with features from a good many successful rural shopping centers in the West, the architectural plans call for no ordinary string of store fronts.

Architect Jones worked out a functional system-plan in which all shops and services a consumer reaches on foot are being placed on an island with no hazardous traffic-bearing roads to cross. Because customers will approach from both front and rear, there will be attractive entrances and show windows at both. Wide sidewalks and carefully-planned landscaping are other features.

All advertising signs are to be uniform, awnings of the same type, and merchants will be required to keep their stores lighted until certain hours in the evening. Each will have the exclusive privilege of his own type of business at the center. The Webb Company is retaining ownership of the business property to maintain absolute control not only of architecture but to develop a proper balance of the various type stores for the size of the adjacent community. Thus the developers seek to avoid a hodgepodge of variously-designed stores common to many such shopping centers in the nation's new community developments.

Because no new residential area of appreciable size would be complete without schooling facilities to supplement its homes and stores, Pueblo Gardens developers deeded ten acres for elementary school purposes and promised a future site for a junior high school. Land also will be set aside for churches for various faiths, Mr. Webb announced.

As a Yankee owner a national figure in major league baseball, and today the guiding genius of a company building multi-million dollar projects in such widely-separated cities as Newark, N. J., Tampa, Fla., New Orleans, La.. Denver, Colo., Portland, Ore., and the San Francisco area, Del Webb still maintains his construction headquarters at Phoenix.

"I never want to forget my friends or the state in which I got my start," he says.

As recently as twenty years ago he worked for wages as a carpenter on a Phoenix hotel at which his firm now is building a $1,000,000 addition.

Mr. Webb arrived in Arizona from his native California in 1929. Armed with little more than a hammer and saw, he went to work for a builder who had contracted to construct a grocery store. Midway in the project, the contractor gave up the job.

That unfortunate happenstance could have thrown Webb out of work, but it proved probably the turning point in his career. He stepped in, took over the contract and finished the job.

A modest but firm personality, ability to get along with people, and an outstanding sense of selecting people to whom he delegates authority all are factors which combined to start Webb as a successful building contractor.

His contracting business expanded steadily from 1929 until the early '40s, by which time the Arizonan by adoption had developed one of the largest and busiest firms in the Southwest. When war came, he was in a position to speedily and efficiently serve the government in construction of military camps, airbases, internment camps, hospitals and emergency housing.

One reason friends advance for Webb's building success has been his ability to select the right men for key positions, and he has surrounded himself with young executives. His executive vice-president and general manager, L. C. Jacobson, a native Arizonan, is thirty-five. And Jacobson came to the Webb organization originally as a $25-per-week carpenter and timekeeper. His rapid rise to the important post he holds today is another success story in Webb Company history.

Webb realized an ambition of his youth to break into major league baseball when he and Dan Topping formed a partnership to purchase the Yankees. He tells of asking the late baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, whether he should purchase the baseball team, and of Landis' picturesque reply: "If when you're making a golf putt, you want to worry; if when you're having your dinner, you want to worry; if before going to bed, you want to worry-well. then go ahead and buy the Yankees."

Which Webb did in January, 1945, and immediately was catapulted into national prominence in the sports world.

Today Mr. Webb's business is as varied as his activities, for he also is financially interested in radio, aviation, manufacturing and even in film production with his close friend. Bing Crosby.

In Webb's mind Pueblo Gardens is by no means the culmination of a career.

To the contrary, he speaks of it and looks upon it now as a proving ground for new methods and new techniques-a model for other American communities with growing pains and housing problems similar to those of progressive Tucson.