Roof Garden Girls: Female Empowerment and Exploitation in the Elevated Green Spaces of American Cities, 1860–1930

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American cities experienced a golden age of roof gardens which has largely been forgotten. Women— or “roof garden girls,” in the parlance of Gilded Age New York— were prominent creators and users of these spaces. Above townhomes and tenements, factories and theaters, women of different social backgrounds drew health and happiness from elevated green spaces, even as critics acknowledged that the price of entry was sometimes moral danger or strenuous labor. Many women took the initiative in roof garden culture, designing and constructing private spaces for their own use as well as public civic gardens for the use of others. Print media blurred the distinction between the private and the public, broadly presenting roof gardens as an exemplary spatial type that might help liberate women from some of the hardest aspects of modern American urban life. Roof garden girls were city dwellers, workers, reformers, and designers who rolled up their sleeves to claim the promises that elevated green spaces made in these years.