A New Hometown for Calumet, Aerial Perspective

In the late 1940s, Goldberg worked on a series of projects that connected his early forays into mass production to the expanded field of neighborhood and urban planning. One of the most extensive of these was a town developed for Lester Selig, the president of a large railroad-car producer in the Calumet region. Goldberg’s project, A New Hometown for Calumet, included plans for 4,000 houses for workers from the area’s plants and steel mills, set on 2,500 acres of converted farmland. As a kind of “George Pullman renewed,” Goldberg designed residential superblocks that included everything from sewer and water-supply networks to facilities for shopping, transportation, education, government, health care, and worship. Inspired by garden city movements, he separated pedestrian and automotive traffic in his new town and included large greenbelts for self-sustaining food production. Although Goldberg would later find fault with his Calumet plan, the core concepts—high quality, low-cost housing, reduced travel time between home and work, and an improved interaction between people and their immediate environment—would shape nearly every project of his mature career.