Public housing was once supposed to save the city. At a time when the poor were condemned to live in execrable conditions, and the government felt that social problems could be solved by throwing money at them, it made sense that government might seek to be a housing provider.

Knickerbocker Village of 1934 was the city’s first government-supported housing, with 1,600 apartments between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. The private developer Fred F. French built it using loans from the federal government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In 1936, the New York City Housing Authority remodeled a group of tenements at Avenue A and 3rd Street, and made over their contiguous rear yards into a park-like setting.

Called “First Houses,” this was the first NYCHA project. It was modest and sensible. The most renowned of the early projects was the Williamsburg Houses of 1937, at the border of East Williamsburg and Bushwick, a neighborhood that’s now a hot locale for impecunious hipsters who live in the old tenements like the ones the project replaced. The project’s buildings are lowrise, set amid pathways and plazas designed for pedestrian delight. The AIA Guide to New York City calls the houses the “best public housing project ever built in New York,” and the project is a designated city landmark.

The Williamsburg Houses, however, were very expensive to build — public housing would henceforward be done much more cheaply.

That was the challenge put before a remarkable group of designers in 1947. Amsterdam Houses, between Amsterdam and West End Avenues and 61st and 64th Streets, is one of the few reminders of the West Side Story days of Lincoln Square, before the creation of Lincoln Center.Looking back on its creators, it’s hard to imagine a more formidable array of design talent than architects Grosvenor Atterbury, Harvey Wiley Corbett, and Arthur Holden, and landscape architects Gilmore Clarke and Michael Rapuano.

The site plan of Amsterdam Houses differs strikingly from what we normally picture as the “projects.” Most projects are “towers in a park,”the towers often skewed from the street grid and covering surprisingly small percentages of the overall site. “Superblocks” is the term for developments (whether a housing project or the World Trade Center) where city streets are demapped so that the development stands as a world unto itself without reference to surrounding streets and sidewalks. Amsterdam Houses is a superblock, but its buildings line up on an axis and the pedestrian pathways don’t lose their reference to the surrounding grid.This makes all the difference in the world, particularly when the pathway aligned with 62nd Street is designed as a beautiful treeand bench-lined mall punctuated at cross-axes by town-square-like plazas. The 10 6-story and three 13-story buildings themselves, though designed with an eye on the budget, are handsomer, too, than our commonly pictured “projects,” with the visual monotony partly mitigated by carefully detailed patterned brickwork.

I’ll leave to others the question of the advisability of public housing projects in general. But in this age when the megaproject is again fashionable, we’d do well to emulate Amsterdam Houses.