Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housing

By Peter Eisenstadt

From 1963 to 1965 roughly 6,000 families moved into Rochdale Village, at the time the world's largest housing cooperative, in southeastern Queens County. The moderate-income cooperative attracted families from a diverse background, white and black, to what was a predominantly black neighborhood. In its early years, Rochdale was widely hailed as one of the few successful large-scale efforts to create an integrated community in New York City or, for that matter, anywhere in the United States.

Rochdale was built by the United Housing Foundation. Its president, Abraham Kazan, had been the major builder of low-cost cooperative housing in New York City for decades. His partner in many of these ventures was Robert Moses. Their work together was a marriage of opposites: Kazan's utopian-anarchist strain of social idealism with its roots in the early twentieth century Jewish labor movement combined with Moses's hardheaded, no-nonsense pragmatism.

Peter Eisenstadt recounts the history of Rochdale Village's first years, from the controversies over its planning, to the civil rights demonstrations at its construction site in 1963, through the late 1970s, tracing the rise and fall of integration in the cooperative. (Today, although Rochdale is no longer integrated, it remains a successful and vibrant cooperative that is a testament to the ideals of its founders and the hard work of its residents.) Rochdale's problems were a microcosm of those of the city as a whole—troubled schools, rising levels of crime, fallout from the disastrous teachers' strike of 1968, and generally heightened racial tensions. By the end of the 1970s few white families remained.

Drawing on exhaustive archival research, extensive interviews with the planners and residents, and his own childhood experiences growing up in Rochdale Village, Eisenstadt offers an insightful and engaging look at what it was like to live in Rochdale and explores the community's place in the postwar history of America's cities and in the still unfinished quests for racial equality and affordable urban housing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780801459689

Peter Eisenstadt

Peter Eisenstadt is the author of several books, including Rochdale Village (Cornell UP, 2010) and Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman (UVA Press, 2021). 

Book preview

Rochdale Village

ROBERT MOSES, 6,000 FAMILIES,

AND NEW YORK CITY’S GREAT EXPERIMENT

IN INTEGRATED HOUSING

Peter Eisenstadt

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

To the light of my life, Jane DeLuca

And to two who have left us, my beloved brother Freddy

and my darling mother, Betty

Contents

Preface

Introduction: When Black and White Lived Together

1. The Utopian: Abraham Kazan

2. The Anti-Utopian: Robert Moses

3. The Birth of a Suburb, the Growth of a Ghetto

4. From Horses to Housing

5. Robert Moses and His Path to Integration

6. The Fight at the Construction Site

7. Creating Community

8. Integrated Living

9. Going to School

10. The Great Fear and the High-Crime Era

11. The 1968 Teachers’ Strike and the Implosion of Integration

12. As Integration Ebbed

13. The Trouble with the Teamsters

Epilogue: Looking Backward

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Preface

This book had its genesis in 2002, when I received an e-mail entitled Nahamies Babies, from Barbara Brandes Roth, who wanted to know if I was the same Peter Eisenstadt who had been her classmate in Mrs. Nahamies’s sixth grade class at P.S. 30 in Rochdale Village. I was. I soon discovered that Barbara had created a chat room for old Rochdale residents. After I’d spent a few months catching up with old friends and making new ones, it occurred to me that the history of Rochdale was a fascinating, untold tale, and one that I very much wanted to tell.

When Rochdale Village opened, in 1963, it was the largest housing cooperative in the world, with almost 6,000 families. It was also the largest integrated housing development in New York City in the 1960s, and perhaps the largest such development in the United States. Located in South Jamaica, Queens, the third largest African American neighborhood in New York City, it nonetheless opened with a majority (about 80 percent) of the apartments occupied by whites.

Rochdale became a vibrant integrated community, with its residents proud of what they had accomplished, but it did not last. Whites started to move out in large numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in time the complex would become almost entirely African American. The story that I have tried to tell in this book is of the initial promise of integrated housing and education in Rochdale, and its subsequent failure.

One of the families that moved to Rochdale Village soon after it opened was my own. We arrived in 1964, when I was ten years old, and left in 1973. It was in Rochdale Village that I completed elementary school and attended junior high and high school, was bar mitzvahed in a local synagogue, and weathered the storms of adolescence. I moved to Rochdale Village a boy and left a man. This book is in part my story, but it is also the story of the 5,859 other families who lived in Rochdale; Rochdale Village’s neighbors in the surrounding communities; its creators, especially Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses; and more generally all those in New York City and elsewhere who tried to make sense of the tangled imperatives of race in the America of the 1960s. Given my personal connection to many of the events covered in this book, it was probably inevitable that from time to time personal reminiscences enter into the narrative, yet this is not a memoir but a history of Rochdale Village and its broader significance.

Heretofore, with only a few meritorious exceptions, Rochdale Village has largely escaped the notice of historians, and this book rises on the solid foundations of primary research. I have made use of a number of archival collections. The extensive discussion of Robert Moses and his connection to Rochdale is garnered almost exclusively from his papers, to be found in several archives in New York City. Rochdale’s developer was the United Housing Foundation (UHF), and their records, located at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, have been an invaluable resource. In addition to plowing through the relevant archives, I have also made extensive use of newspapers and other contemporary notices from and about Rochdale. However, pride of place in my research goes to the fifty or so people who consented to be interviewed by me. They include my former classmates, teachers, and neighbors; some who achieved a modicum of renown or notoriety, and many who did not; Jews and gentiles, whites and blacks; those who are still bitter about their years in Rochdale, and those who look back in fondness. In all, I hope my book reflects the diverse spectrum of backgrounds and opinions that made Rochdale such an exciting and sometimes such an infuriating place to live. Writing this book has been a reminder of a lesson that historians like to preach to others but often fail to apply to their own lives: that the extraordinary historical forces that shape the destinies of nations are composed of ordinary people, just trying to get by.

I am one of those ex-Rochdalers who look back at their years there with a tincture of nostalgia, though I hope I am alert to the pitfalls of this and have kept the narrative from getting too cloying. Rochdale was where I grew up, and it was a great place to grow up. It was also one of the few places in the 1960s where New Yorkers collectively tried to grow up and to deal with, as practically as possible, the dominant political question of the day: whether it was possible for whites and racial minorities to ever drop their mutual suspicions long enough share the city peacefully, and perhaps even learn to live together.

Though this book focuses on Rochdale’s early years, when integration was first tried and then abandoned, this is not intended to slight the subsequent decades of its history, when it has continued to flourish as the largest predominantly African American cooperative in New York City. And if the fate of integration in Rochdale is the dominant story in this book, it cannot be separated from the broader effort of the United Housing Foundation in the 1950s and 1960s to make attractive, affordable, low-cost, limited-equity cooperative housing available for all New Yorkers. But by the early 1970s, New York City was undergoing a sea change in its politics, its economy, and its racial attitudes. The United Housing Foundation, beset by multiple problems, ceased operations, and its vision of limited-equity cooperatives was widely ridiculed as an idea whose time had passed. Integration slowly dropped out of our working racial vocabulary and was dismissed by all sides as little more than a sentimental folly that had been dissolved in the acids of the era’s racial tensions. And for the most part, that is where we have remained, in a city whose housing stock has become increasingly unaffordable, with its neighborhoods and schools still largely divided into a welter of racial and ethnic turfs. It is my hope that in some small measure my book on Rochdale will take readers back to an era in the history of New York City and the nation when both affordable housing and genuine integration seemed within our grasp, and people will ask themselves why we might not live in such a time again?

Introduction

WHEN BLACK AND WHITE LIVED TOGETHER

We were as twyned Lambs that did frisk i’th’ Sun

And bleat the one at th’ other

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (act 1, scene 2, lines 81–82)

In November 1966 in a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine, the veteran radical journalist Harvey Swados wrote of the vast confrontation between black and white now taking place not only across the United States but throughout the world. South Africa had apartheid; the United States had its own version. If the explicit legal proscriptions of Jim Crow were beginning to vanish, the unwritten rules of neighborhood separation and segregation were proving more sturdy, with white and black enclaves separated by a Gaza Strip or a 17th Parallel, enforced by the heavy weight of custom, political complicity, and, if necessary, knuckles, baseball bats, or worse.¹

This was not just a Southern problem, and Swados thought (and in late 1966 he was hardly alone in this) that it was getting worse. Integration, the favored remedy of the decade of civil rights, was, he argued, proving to be far more difficult to implement than first imagined, if it was not an outright delusion. Minuscule doses of integration, such as one black family moving into a white neighborhood, were still enough to rouse usually placid homeowners into a fury against the disturbers of their racial status quo. And those who had a vested interest in painting a rosy picture of race relations touted laughably meager results as evidence of some profound breakthrough. Does belief in racial progress, Swados wondered, always require a willing suspension of incredulity?

Figure 1. Aerial view of Rochdale Village, with John F. Kennedy International Airport in the background, ca. 1964/65. Note the Quonset huts of PS 30 between sections 1 and 5. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

The only thing we can all agree on is that someone else is to blame for our growing problems. The catchphrase of the day was becoming less We shall overcome and more What do they want? What do they want?

But Swados’s purpose in this article was not a wringing of hands. Accompanying the rather fearsome images of racial war invoked in the article’s opening was an illustration of a curved plastic sliding pond in a playground, with a young black girl at the bottom of the slide, and a white and a black boy waiting their turn at the top, as a white parent calmly observed the scene, a tall, red-brick terraced apartment building in the background. This was a photograph of Rochdale Village, a huge housing cooperative in South Jamaica, Queens, the subject of Swados’s article. He was writing about Rochdale because it seemed to be a possible exception to the baleful trends he gathered in the opening of his article; Rochdale Village then was a place where the rest of the country could see what happens, as the title of Swados’s article indicated, When Black and White Live Together.

Swados described Rochdale as the largest interracial cooperative of its kind anywhere. The interracial modifier was not necessary. When it opened in 1963, with its 5,860 apartments, it was the largest housing cooperative in the world, period. Rochdale was the most ambitious effort to date of its developer, the United Housing Foundation (UHF), to create affordable and attractive cooperative housing for the working people of New York City. As a conscious and deliberate effort at creating an integrated community, in housing of any sort, nothing on the scale of Rochdale was attempted anywhere else in New York City in the 1960s, and very likely, nowhere else in the United States.

Map 1. Rochdale Village in metropolitan New York, ca. 1968

Rochdale Village represented the marriage of two social ideals; the culmination of a half-century struggle for inexpensive cooperative housing for New York City’s workers, and a more recent fight for integrated housing and education in the large urban centers of the North. It seemed to embody, in the words of the historian Joshua Freeman, everything the civil rights movement, then at its height, called for, an interracial community that promoted mutualism and mutual understanding through joint endeavors. Although Rochdale was built at the apogee of the great exodus from the city’s racially changing neighborhoods to the vast suburban plains on its circumference, Rochdale was able to attract thousands of white families to South Jamaica, which by the 1960s was the third largest African American neighborhood in the city, after Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The racial percentages when the cooperative opened are a matter of some dispute—hard figures are not available—but it probably was about 80 percent white and 20 percent black. Stable, integrated housing developments on the scale of Rochdale simply did not exist elsewhere. Writing in 1964, Abraham Kazan, the president of the UHF, claimed that the significance of Rochdale Village was that white and non-white people will be living next to each other as neighbors. Never before in private or public or cooperative housing has there been such an opportunity to demonstrate that people can live together. The public will be focusing its attention on Rochdale. Every step will be judged with a critical eye.²

But despite Kazan’s expectations, and despite the potential significance of the social experiment at Rochdale noted by Freeman, the complex was and has remained surprisingly obscure. It was relatively little noticed by contemporaries—Swados’s article was by far its most prominent press coverage in the first decade of its existence—and has received scant attention from historians since.³ Perhaps this inattention is a function of Rochdale’s nondescript appearance; apart from its size, it’s more or less indistinguishable from any number of other housing developments that sprang up in New York City after World War II. And its location, so close to the flight paths of Kennedy Airport, so far from the haunts of Manhattan’s opinion makers, added to its virtual invisibility during the contentious racial debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Just about the only people who paid attention to what was happening in Rochdale, Freeman noted, were the people who actually lived there.⁴

And the people who lived in Rochdale were typical representatives of the city they lived in, with no particular aspiration to become the ingredients of a noble experiment. Whatever else Rochdale Village was in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not a racial utopia, and it was never granted a sociological dispensation from racial tensions or problems prevalent elsewhere. Its residents, black and white, were amply supplied with the full range of common prejudices and biases. This only makes the integrated community they created in Rochdale’s early years all the more remarkable. It did not last. By the early 1970s whites were moving out in vast numbers, and by the late 1970s there were few white families left. Rochdale Village has undergone many twists and turns since then, but it remains today a vibrant, self-governing limited equity cooperative, and the largest predominantly African American cooperative anywhere. It is the story of a potential exception to the iron law of racial separation and bifurcation that has long dominated American urban life. That in the end the experiment failed is perhaps to be expected; exceptions do not prove rules, and inevitably succumb to them. What is remarkable about the story of integration in Rochdale Village was that it was tried in the first place.

It was on February 16, 1960, that New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, announced that the largest housing cooperative in the nation would be built on the grounds of the former Jamaica Racetrack. The negotiations for building housing on the spot had been going on for a number of years, and had increased in intensity after the final race at the old track the previous August. At the center of the negotiations had been Robert Moses, who had been the greatest champion of using the site for low-cost cooperative housing. Moses was nearing the end of his long career, but he was a still a figure of legendary ubiquity and formidability in city and state politics. The negotiations had been long, complex, and arduous, and had called on all his strengths: his trademark bluster was engaged, to be sure, but to get the deal done, Moses also had occasion to wheedle, to horse trade, to concede, and, when necessary, he wasn’t too proud to beg. In the end, as generally happened with Moses, he got what he wanted, primarily by securing the support of Nelson Rockefeller. All but $10 million of the $86 million needed to build Rochdale would come from state agencies and state-controlled pension funds.⁵

But if Moses provided the political muscle, the inspiration came from Abraham Kazan, the president of the United Housing Foundation. Kazan, with his roots in the Jewish labor movement of the turn of the twentieth century, had been, by the time Rochdale was built, a single-minded exponent of the cooperative ideal in housing (and in just about everything else) for half a century. Although Kazan had been building and managing housing cooperatives since the late 1920s, the UHF was only created in 1951, relying on a consortium of labor unions for its backing. Generally in partnership with Moses, the UHF built more than 33,000 units of cooperative housing in New York City from the early 1950s through the early 1970s.

Rochdale Village, like all the UHF’s projects, was a limited-equity cooperative, which meant that while in some sense every resident owned a proportionate share of the cooperative, and could vote for the management of the project (in elections conducted on the basis of one apartment, one vote), the apartments were not individually owned, and could not be privately resold for a profit. The cooperative was governed by a board of directors chosen directly by the tenants, or to use the UHF’s favored term, its cooperators.

If by the 1960s Kazan and the UHF’s ideological pronouncements were more muted than in decades past, Kazan’s core beliefs remained much as they had been since the beginning; housing cooperatives were more than just nice, inexpensive places to live; they were a harbinger of a new social order and form of economic organization, one in which the profit motive had been eliminated, a world without either avaricious landlords or downtrodden tenants, and one that provided a more rational and more efficient form of economic organization than conventional capitalism. If these utopian tidings were not widely shared by the residents of Rochdale, most of whom knew little and cared less about the cooperative movement before moving in, many residents (aided by the incessant educational efforts of the UHF) liked the fact that they were now living in a cooperative, and appreciated its many distinctive features (which included the ability to vote UHF representatives out of office, a prerogative Rochdale residents would frequently exercise). And the UHF supplied a sort of trickle-down utopianism. A sense of specialness, of being a model for the future, one that the world was watching (or at least, that the world should be watching), suffused the political culture of early Rochdale. Utopias seek to bring about social change by setting a good example, by inspiring imitation, and the role this played in the cooperative’s experiment in race relations was subtle, but was surely present.

When announced by Rockefeller in January 1960, the new Jamaica cooperative still lacked a name. Robert Moses, who by late 1959 was already annoyed by having to call it the Jamaica Racetrack site (referring to a new housing project by its former function, he thought, was to summon the wrong associations, to look backward, and not forward), suggested Jamaica Town.⁶ The UHF did not want a name so bereft of ideological connotations. There was some thought, when it became available, of reusing Robert Owen Houses, the name of a recently canceled UHF project in the East Village, honoring the pioneering British utopian socialist. This name was rejected—perhaps it was thought to be bad luck—but the UHF stuck with the theme, the heroic years of early nineteenth century British communitarianism. By March they had decided to name the cooperative in honor of the Rochdale Pioneers, the twenty-eight weavers and other artisans whose cooperative store, opened on Toad Lane in the gritty English Midlands industrial town of Rochdale in 1844, inaugurated the modern cooperative movement. By 1900, under the aegis of the Cooperative Wholesale Society, there were over 1,400 cooperative societies in England alone, to say nothing of the movement’s expansion throughout Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. The cooperative movement pursued their aims largely outside of the political realm, concentrating on building a nonrevolutionary alternative to capitalism, through concentrating and maximizing workers’ purchasing power.⁷ The lives of the Rochdale Pioneers were honored, the Rochdale cooperative principles they promulgated revered, and their former store on Toad Lane became a place of pilgrimage for persons from distant continents. The namesake Rochdale had been bestowed on many cooperatives, but none grander or more ambitious than Rochdale Village.

If the UHF had to debate to come up with a name for the cooperative, there were no prolonged deliberations over the choice of architect. Herman Jessor, like Kazan a man whose roots in the cooperative housing movement dated back half a century, who had been the architect for all the UHF’s cooperative developments, would design Rochdale. And he would do so in his familiar style; functional redbrick apartment complexes on a large superblock, well-designed, practical, sturdy, but a bit homely, puritanical in their lack of adornment or frills. Places where people could live well and inexpensively. (His critics would say he was plodding and unimaginative; he would retort that architectural imagination generally did not provide much value for the dollar for working-class families desperate for decent housing.) After some negotiation, the plans were reduced from the originally announced 6,300 units to 5,860 apartments, to be divided among twenty, fourteen-story apartment buildings.⁸ Each building had three separate and identical sections (sections A, B, and C), laid out along a long internal corridor. Each section had its own mailboxes and own elevator bank (with one elevator for the even floors and one for the odd floors, a cost-saving measure). We lived in apartment 11A7G, in section A (that is, the section closest to the main doors) of building 11, on the seventh floor, in apartment G. Our apartment had the largest available design in Rochdale, six and a half rooms, with three bedrooms and a pretty, pink balcony. (One of Jessor’s few concessions to external aesthetics was to vary the color of the plastic that enclosed the terraces from building to building.)

The twenty apartment buildings of Rochdale were clustered into five groups or sections of four buildings each, each section connected to the outside world of vehicular traffic by a cul-de-sac. Within the Rochdale superblock, pedestrian paths replaced city streets. The paths cut through neatly manicured lawns, fenced off and bristling with Keep off the grass signs. The paths were rectilinear, in part reflecting a penchant for symmetry over convenience, and they sometimes obliged rule-obeying residents to take fairly circuitous routes from point A to point B. (The design of the paths also reflected the insistence of the NYC fire department that if necessary, fire equipment could make its way to the center of the huge superblock.)⁹ There were ample playgrounds, basketball courts, park benches, playing fields, fountains, and, in the early years, a giant sandlot, which until it was properly landscaped was the favored venue for adolescent sporting contests. Rochdale’s 170 acres would contain two malls, the larger mall enclosed and designed by the nation’s leading mall designer, the onetime Austrian socialist Victor Gruen. There would be three schools built within the cooperative on land donated to the city, and a few other buildings, of which the most impressive was the community center, which contained rooms for meetings and a large auditorium that seated almost 2,000 persons. And across Bedell Street, outside the superblock but still part of Rochdale, was Abraham Kazan’s pride and joy, a large power plant that supplied Rochdale with all its heat and electricity, and Kazan’s answer to the arrogance and monopolistic practices of Con Edison. The UHF was typically focused and aggressive in keeping to a tight and unrelenting construction schedule, and less than four years after Rockefeller announced the plans, the first families moved in to Rochdale’s building 1 in December 1963. By March 1965, when the last families filled out building 20, all of Rochdale’s 5,860 apartments were occupied.

A few stories of those who came to Rochdale. Olga Lewis was a practical nurse, a single mother with a young daughter, living in East New York, in Brooklyn. She had grown up in the area when it was predominantly white, and had often been the only black person in her school classes. But by the early 1960s the racial mix in East New York was rapidly changing, and Olga did not like some of the trends she saw there. She had learned about cooperatives in school, and had a brother-in-law living in South Jamaica who urged her to move to his neighborhood. She knew she couldn’t afford a private house, and even Rochdale was a considerable stretch. She worked two jobs to pay for the down payment for the apartment. She moved to Rochdale because, she said, I thought I needed to elevate myself and elevate my child. I knew I was going into a nice neighborhood, Rochdale’s houses were good, and [the people in] the surrounding area were homeowners, and East New York was beginning to go down. I was raised in East New York and it was a wonderful place, [but now] I wanted out, I wanted better for Evlynne. Her daughter, Evlynne Braithwaithe, vivacious and outgoing, was my classmate in fifth and sixth grades.¹⁰

The first friend I made in Rochdale was Joe Raskin. This was hardly an accident. We were the same age, our families moved in within a few days of each other, and we lived in the same building, in the same section, on the same floor. Joe’s parents, Jack and Sue Raskin, had lived in Brooklyn on the borders of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, an area that had been largely Jewish, but was now also becoming largely African American (and where garden-variety American Jews were becoming rapidly outnumbered by Lubavitcher Hasidim). Jack Raskin worked for an office furniture firm, and was a shop steward for the Retail Workers Union, and Sue was a worker at the union headquarters. Their income was less than $100 a week. The Raskins didn’t object to the racial changes to their old neighborhood. But what they did mind was their apartment, which was small and crowded. Joe and his sister shared a bedroom, Jack and Sue slept in the living room. While they had a long history as labor activists and had long been interested in the cooperative movement, the affordability of Rochdale was its most compelling feature: three bedrooms, a big kitchen, and a rent of $126 a month.¹¹

Cal Jones grew up in Harlem in the 1930s and ’40s (he remembers selling newspapers in front of the Cotton Club during its heyday, and having the famed Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen as his English teacher in junior high school). But by the early 1960s, Harlem was changing, and in Jones’s opinion not for the better, with growing problems of crime and poverty. He heard about Rochdale and decided to move there. He was worried about the long commute to Manhattan, but he and his wife concluded that a stable, integrated housing cooperative would likely have better schools and present a more suitable environment than was available in Harlem.¹² Jones, who worked as an accountant for the city, was typical of many of the middle class blacks who moved to Rochdale, because they, as Swados suggested hoped that their children would benefit educationally from leaving a ghetto neighborhood for a community with a stable white majority.¹³

Some families moved to Rochdale as part of migratory chains. My grandmother originally moved to Rochdale because she thought the idea of cooperative housing was innovative and ‘modern,’ one man related. Then when his parents separated, he said, My mother, sister, and I moved in my grandmother’s apartment, and then into a larger apartment in a different building.¹⁴ Indeed, for many, one of the attractions of Rochdale was that it afforded an opportunity for family members to once again live in close proximity, with a mother or adult sister or cousin living nearby in an adjacent building.

Some had deeper reasons for wanting to move to the new cooperative. Francesca Spero’s Italian American mother had married a black man in the late 1940s, but she couldn’t stand the disapproval of her relatives and community, and in a very wrenching and painful decision, had the marriage annulled, and eventually married an Italian American man. When she heard about this new community in Jamaica that was supposed to be integrated, she knew she had to move her family to Rochdale Village.¹⁵

The reasons my family moved to Rochdale were quite typical. I spent my earliest years in the Bronx. My first home was an apartment building on Crotona Park East, across the street from the field where, as local legend had it, Hank Greenberg learned to play baseball. In Greenberg’s day the neighborhood was overwhelmingly Jewish. By the time I came on the scene, in 1954, it was becoming less so. (Our apartment building remained largely Jewish because our landlady refused to rent to non-Jews, that is, to the blacks and Puerto Ricans who were moving into the neighborhood in large numbers.)¹⁶ The local elementary school, three blocks from where I lived, was located on Charlotte Street, which by the 1970s would become the most notorious block in all New York City, if not all the United States, where the Bronx burnt, and where Jimmy Carter came to muse among the ruins.¹⁷ Back in 1959 the school already had the reputation of being a tough school, with a student body in 1959 that was 62 percent Puerto Rican and 15 percent black.¹⁸ I never went there.

Instead, we moved just before I was to start kindergarten (I was the oldest of three brothers) only a few miles away, to the East Tremont section of the Bronx, to a new cooperative development that was about one-twentieth the size of Rochdale, about 250 apartments in two buildings. This was one of the first cooperatives built in the Bronx under the provisions of the state Mitchell-Lama housing law of 1955, which encouraged the building of middle-income cooperatives. (Rochdale too was a Mitchell-Lama cooperative, and when I was growing up Mitchell and Lama were as familiar a duo in our house as Abbott and Costello or Mantle and Maris.) East Tremont was a predominantly Italian rather than Jewish neighborhood, with bocce courts instead of delicatessens, but it had the same basic social dynamic as Crotona Park East; the neighborhood was changing, whites were leaving, and many had doubts about its future, as these East Bronx neighborhoods were conceptually moved during the 1960s into the new geographic catchall description for the borough’s woes, the South Bronx.

My dad was a commercial artist who designed advertisements for placement in magazines; my mom was a housewife until, after completing her college degree in the late 1960s, she became a high school social studies teacher. They were persons of the left, and both had been members of the Communist Party; they had left the party by the time I was aware of things, but without moving that far ideologically or culturally. For all that, I’m not sure that my parents’ politics had much impact on their attitudes about where they wanted to live. They wanted out of the East Bronx, and before moving to Rochdale, they certainly had checked out several suburban locations. I think that when they decided to move to Rochdale, they were disappointed in some way, but they soon reconciled themselves to their decision. I, on the other hand, was utterly delighted by Rochdale from the first time I set eyes on it, with its newness, its incompletion and its attendant messiness, and its overwhelming size; all these people were my neighbors, and all these buildings were my home.

There are many more Rochdale stories to tell. But most have a common cast and common themes, with people from the same economic stratum, the ambiguous region between the lower middle class and the upper working class. Most families had similar reasons for wanting to move: dissatisfaction with where they were living, and an attraction to Rochdale’s promise, with its modern, spacious, inexpensive, and well laid out apartments, all part of what they hoped would be an exciting and vibrant place to live. And in this, there was very little difference if the family moving to Rochdale was white or black.

They were the applicants for Rochdale Village…retired couples, youngsters just married, or those with engagement rings and sparking eyes who would be married soon. There were those with a toddler in one hand and a baby in the arm. There were single people, as well as couples with sophisticated teenagers carrying indispensable pocket transistor radios. These were the people who make up the city; white, brown, yellow, and black. Catholics, Jews, Protestants, from Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Richmond, as well as from Hicksville [Nassau County] and Mount Vernon [Westchester County]…. There were those who sought facts, and those who believed rumors. There were those who loved their fellow man, and a few who said, I hate to ask this question, but how many Negroes will live in this cooperative? There were those who thought $21 a room housing beyond their means, and those who thought it the greatest bargain in the city.

Figure 2. Informational meeting for Rochdale, Grand Street headquarters of the United Housing Foundation, January 1963. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Photograph by Emjay Photographers.

This is a description in a UHF publication of the first informational meeting held for Rochdale, in May 1960.¹⁹ The informational meeting was a show-and-tell put on by the UHF, with lectures and slideshows, and was one of the basic tools it used to interest prospective residents in new cooperative projects. For previous cooperatives, the informational meeting had been the most important element of the UHF’s public outreach. One thing that the UHF had not needed to do—before Rochdale—was to advertise extensively for their cooperatives. The UHF had gotten by on a fairly rudimentary if you build it, they will come marketing strategy for a product they were convinced was self-recommending. All they needed was word of mouth. On the first day that applications for a new cooperative were accepted, often a line several blocks long would snake around the UHF’s Grand Street headquarters on the Lower East Side, full of people waiting to put in their applications. For those wanting a bit more convincing, the UHF would hold informational seminars. For its previous cooperatives, before the first families moved in, there was already a substantial waiting list of those wanting apartments. The UHF might place an announcement in friendly newspapers and union journals, and perhaps print a few brochures. A widespread advertising campaign in the main newspaper outlets was deemed an unnecessary expense.²⁰

But there were important consequences and limitations with the word-of-mouth approach. It tended to round up the usual suspects. There were not many minority families in UHF cooperatives, as critics such as Charles Abrams noted.²¹ In 1963 the New York Amsterdam News complained about the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx (the first cooperative built by Kazan) being lily-white. This might not have been technically true, but with the meager presence of minorities it might as well have been.²² Although the UHF was proud of its open housing policy, with no racial, ethnic, political, or ideological preferences for those seeking apartments, in practice, as they acknowledged in 1960, a word-of-mouth policy meant that most of those who lived in UHF cooperatives were either Jewish, involved in the labor movement, or liberal/social democratic in their politics, and often were a combination of all three.²³

Kazan was aware of the gap between UHF rhetoric about integration and the rather paltry results in their cooperatives. At a 1960 conference on cooperatives, Don Elbertson, a UHF official, said, We have had great difficulties in securing Negro applicants for our projects. Most of them are located in predominantly white areas.²⁴ Rochdale was the chance to prove that UHF cooperatives could indeed be an important part of the solution to the nation’s racial crisis. Kazan told the UHF board in April 1960 that Rochdale could attract a more integrated population, [with] more non-white families than have been participating in our previous activities.²⁵ The UHF welcomed this prospect. Indeed some in the UHF management assumed that Rochdale would be predominantly black. The question they pondered was whether Rochdale would attract more than a handful of whites.²⁶

In any event, the outreach for Rochdale would have to be different from any previous UHF cooperative. For one thing, it was more than twice the size of any predecessor; for another, it was located far from the comfort zone of familiar Jewish neighborhoods. Although the UHF had contacted its usual allies, the labor unions, to encourage their members to submit applications, they also contacted a more general audience.²⁷ The UHF’s first advertisements for Rochdale Village appeared in the New York Times and the New York Post (at the time, the Post was the favorite newspaper of the city’s Jewish liberals) in January 1961.²⁸ Rochdale Village did not sell its apartments quickly. As of August 1960, only about 1,200 applications had been submitted.²⁹ The early advertisements were clearly intended to attract families pining after greener pastures. Enjoy country living in Rochdale Village! they proclaimed. Now you can have practically all the advantages of owning your own suburban home without the usual upkeep and maintenance headaches, the advertisements helpfully suggested.³⁰

Nonetheless, sales of apartments remained sluggish, though they evidently picked up in October 1961 when the advertisements first mentioned that all the apartments in Rochdale would be equipped with central air-conditioning. Kazan was proud that Rochdale Village would provide this service and eliminate the protruding square air conditioner as a signifier of luxury and privilege and make it accessible to every household. Indeed air-conditioning in every room, a rarity in middle-income developments in the 1960s (and made possible only because Kazan had insisted that Rochdale build its own power plant) was a considerable inducement for families to decide to move to Rochdale.³¹ Rochdale Village was fully subscribed when the first cooperators moved there in December 1963.³² As Bernard Seeman wrote in Inside Rochdale, a weekly, privately published newspaper, in September 1967, We have weathered the initial prediction of failure made by many because of our location by filling Rochdale to capacity prior to the opening of the first building.³³

Figure 3. Advertisement for Rochdale Village, New York Times, January 8, 1961. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

The success Rochdale had in attracting white families surprised the UHF itself, prepared as they were for Rochdale to have few white families. Harold Ostroff, the executive vice president of the UHF, said in 1968 that the most important lesson of Rochdale was that integration worked when you offer such an attractive economic buy that people will not be able to afford their natural prejudices.³⁴ A similar sentiment was expressed by another UHF official: People can put up with a lot of integration when they can get good housing at an attractive price.³⁵

One good way to get into an argument with a Rochdale resident was to imply that their reasons for moving there had been a reflection of their inner idealism, their deep commitment to racial harmony. Although there were exceptions, Harvey Swados reported that it would be a grave mistake to assume that white families moved to Rochdale from conviction, eager to put their liberal, all-men-are-brothers beliefs to the test. Instead, he wrote, It is nearly unanimously agreed that the whites are there, not from conviction or commitment to the cause of cooperative living, but rather because the apartments represented such an unusual bargain that the pressing need for economical housing overcame fear and uneasiness.³⁶

Still, many white families who considered Rochdale had second thoughts after attending informational meetings with more African Americans than they felt comfortable with, or after walking or riding through South Jamaica.³⁷ According to Harvey Swados, thousands of families had second thoughts after making their initial inquiries.³⁸ Those who moved to Rochdale did so knowing they were moving to the third largest African American neighborhood in the city.

On the other hand, the UHF was surprised by how difficult it proved to attract black families to Rochdale. Some would blame the UHF for this, and there is some debate on how assiduous was the effort to reach out to blacks. A UHF official told the New York Herald Tribune in 1965 that they made no conscious effort to ‘integrate’ Rochdale, though all Negro applicants who met the income limitations were treated equally with whites.³⁹ Harvey Swados argued in his New York Times Magazine article that there was considerable foot-dragging by the UHF in their approach to black potential residents.⁴⁰ Perhaps the UHF underestimated the difficulty of attracting blacks to Rochdale, but they did place advertisements for Rochdale in the black press. At the same time that the first advertisements appeared in the Times and the Post, in January 1961, a notice in a column on local Queens and Nassau County affairs running in the nationally circulated Pittsburgh Courier declared, It’s Official: Rochdale Village with its 5,860 apartments has been fully approved and construction is due to get underway as soon as weather permits.⁴¹ The black press continued to run positive blurbs and vignettes on Rochdale while it was under construction, as in this rhapsody from the Amsterdam News in March 1963:

Alice and Jap Steward are among many Queensites awaiting the opening of Rochdale Village following the trend towards modern living; when the brood is raised mom and pop decide to stop fighting the weeds and leaky pipes and live a little. So when the Stewards move, just park your copter outside and step onto the balcony of their penthouse, they’ll be on the upper floor. (The first section of this fabulous city within a city is scheduled to open in late spring or early summer.)

The same adjective, fabulous, would appear in the Amsterdam News again when, in 1965, an advertisement touted a house as being adjacent to the fabulous Rochdale Village.⁴² Over the several-year application process, the UHF became more successful in attracting blacks. The number of black faces in informational meetings increased over time,⁴³ and the four buildings that made up section 5, the last section to be built and the last section to fill with people, had notably more blacks than the four buildings in section 1.⁴⁴

Harold Ostroff, Abraham Kazan’s protégé and by the mid-1960s (with Kazan’s declining health), the dominant figure in the UHF, speculated that one reason that blacks were at first reluctant to move to Rochdale was a basic unfamiliarity with housing cooperatives. While this to some extent ignores the quite lengthy history of African American cooperatives from the 1920s on, it is certainly true that there were not a lot of African Americans living in limited-equity cooperatives before Rochdale.⁴⁵ At first glance Rochdale looked like a lot of the ubiquitous projects built by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the sort of housing that many upwardly mobile middle-class black families were eager to escape, and the difference between Rochdale and a typical NYCHA project had to be explained again and again, both to prospective residents and to neighbors in South Jamaica.⁴⁶

The unfamiliarity with middle-income cooperatives would lead to some suspicion and hostility on the part of some local black residents. Initially black homeowners in Springfield Gardens worried, Harvey Swados reported, that Rochdale would bring down property values. Juanita Watkins, a prominent local politician, remembered that when Rochdale was announced blacks had bought this little house for a semisuburban lifestyle, and for many of these middle-class blacks in South Jamaica and Springfield Gardens Rochdale looked like ‘projects’ at first. They felt these huge buildings were like an invasion…. Swados in his article was wrong when he thought it was about race or religion; it was about lifestyle and the fear of the homeowners that they would be taken over by a huge influx of apartment dwellers. They were concerned because it changed the nature of the community. Co-ops and co-op living were new, and unfamiliar, and they didn’t want this new and different thing in their midst.⁴⁷

However, this was by no means the universal reaction to Rochdale among local blacks. Many thought the cooperative would help revive southeastern Queens, and quite a few moved to Rochdale. Some, like Alice and Jap Steward, did what a later and more avaricious age would deem unthinkable and gave up their private houses (and the pleasure of accumulating equity) to live in a not-for-profit cooperative. Hugh Williams, who was living in South Jamaica, told me that he moved to Rochdale because he was an apartment type of person, not so much a private house type of person. I didn’t like the idea of shoveling snow, and I like the idea of apartments. Swados wrote of black middle-class families in Rochdale who had owned their own homes, giving them up because the burden had grown wearisome with the years. (The Jews who moved to Rochdale overwhelmingly had been apartment dwellers.)⁴⁸

The converse of the local fears that Rochdale would be a low-income housing project that would lower property values was that Rochdale would be a comfortable middle-class cooperative for whites that would not really welcome black residents, and that the application process would be accompanied by the subtle hints and nervousness indicating that they were not really wanted.⁴⁹ Hugh Williams would regularly walk past