The huge Hampton Gardens apartment complex was built on the old Potters’ Field at the corner of Hampton and Fyler.
I found the apartment complex mentioned in all sorts of government hearings, perhaps involved in some sort of corruption having to do with public housing. It is not clear. It mentions some sort of 608 program, if anyone knows what that is.
Longtime readers know that we visited Mount Lebanon Cemetery near the airport, which is supposedly where the bodies from the Potters’ Field were disinterred.
Beyond that are more small houses, many of them simple Cape Cods, which were built on more City-owned land.
It is a very strange portion of the city, where all of the sudden there is just this large pocket of houses from the 1950s.
Aerial photography from 1937 shows open fields.
I live in one of those all-of-a-sudden 1950s houses. The very last blocks to be built on top of the clay mines, as they switched from brick to frame to get them up faster as people came home from war (by this time, Korea). My dad grew up a few blocks south on Tholozan in a brick house built 10 years earlier. I found a newspaper article that talked about how the mines had been abandoned but the city wouldn’t let them develop the area until someone reopened a shaft (at Regal and Marquette, which is across the street from my house) and went down and kicked out the stilts. They said it’d be find after a couple years of settling and then could build on top. I’d love to know just how much things actually settled.