Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York

By Annemarie H. Sammartino

In Freedomland, Annemarie H. Sammartino tells Co-op City's story from the perspectives of those who built it and of the ordinary people who made their homes in this monument to imperfect liberal ideals of economic and social justice.

Located on the grounds of the former Freedomland amusement park on the northeastern edge of the Bronx, Co-op City's 35 towers and 236 townhouses have been home to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and is an icon visible to all traveling on the east coast corridor.

In 1965, Co-op City was planned as the largest middle-class housing development in the United States. It was intended as a solution to the problem of affordable housing in America's largest city. While Co-op City first appeared to be a huge success story for integrated, middle-class housing, tensions would lead its residents to organize the largest rent strike in American history. In 1975, a coalition of shareholders took on New York State and, against all odds, secured resident control. Much to the dismay of many denizens of the complex, even this achievement did not halt either rising costs or white flight. Nevertheless, after the challenges of the 1970s and 1980s, the cooperative achieved a hard-won stability as the twentieth century came to a close.

Freedomland chronicles the tumultuous first quarter century of Co-op City's existence. Sammartino's narrative connects planning, economic, and political history and the history of race in America. The result is a new perspective on twentieth-century New York City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three Hills
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501716447

Book preview

FREEDOMLAND

CO-OP CITY AND THE STORY OF NEW YORK

ANNEMARIE H. SAMMARTINO

THREE HILLS

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For the Sammartinos

A father in glasses, his head barely visible, holds three small children on his lap as he sits in an armchair.

My dad, my sisters, and me in our Co-op City apartment, 1983

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: Co-op City and the Story of New York

1. The World’s Greatest Housing Cooperative: Building a New City, 1965–1968

2. Everyone Was Seeking a Utopia: Building a Community, 1968–1973

3. We Remember Picket Lines: Cooperator Militancy, 1970–1974

4. No Way, We Won’t Pay: The Rent Strike, 1975–1976

5. We Inherited a Mess!: After the Rent Strike, 1977–1981

6. "Co-op City Is the Bronx": A Middle-Class Community, 1982–1993

7. The Biggest Housing Bargain in Town: Achieving Financial Stability, 1981–1993

Epilogue: Freedomland Today

Appendix

Notes

Index

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Co-op City and the Story of New York

1. The World’s Greatest Housing Cooperative: Building a New City, 1965–1968

2. Everyone Was Seeking a Utopia: Building a Community, 1968–1973

3. We Remember Picket Lines: Cooperator Militancy, 1970–1974

4. No Way, We Won’t Pay: The Rent Strike, 1975–1976

5. We Inherited a Mess!: After the Rent Strike, 1977–1981

6. "Co-op City Is the Bronx": A Middle-Class Community, 1982–1993

7. The Biggest Housing Bargain in Town: Achieving Financial Stability, 1981–1993

Epilogue: Freedomland Today

Appendix

Notes

Index

Copyright

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Dedication

Contents

Preface

Start of Content

Epilogue: Freedomland Today

Appendix

Notes

Index

Copyright

PREFACE

Ada Louise Huxtable began her 1971 appraisal of Co-op City, The motorist speeding by Co-op City on the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx sees only its looming apartment towers.¹ Thirty-five years later, Ian Frazier’s 2006 New Yorker article about Co-op City contains a similar vista, albeit from a different highway: If you take I-95 North through the Bronx heading out of the city, Co-op City will be on your right. Its high-rise apartment buildings stand far enough from one another so that each appears distinct and impressive against the sky. In slow-motion seconds, they pass like the measureless underside of a starship in a science-fiction movie.² As these two examples attest, authors looking to write about Co-op City often begin by noting how it looks from the road. These stories and others then go on to marvel at Co-op City’s many superlatives. With thirty-five tower buildings and seven townhouse clusters, it is the largest cooperative housing development in the world. It was by far the largest project built as part of the Mitchell-Lama program, a New York State initiative intended to provide middle-income housing that sponsored housing projects developed between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s. Approximately 15 percent of the 104,000 apartments in total constructed under New York State’s Mitchell-Lama program are in Co-op City.³ The $390 million mortgage that was issued to cover its construction costs was the largest such mortgage in the history of the New York State Housing Finance Agency. So much bathroom tile was used in the construction of Co-op City that it could have been used to build a wall five feet high from New York City to Saint Louis. If laid end to end, the pilings driven to support its massive high rises would stretch from New York City to Boston and back again.⁴ If Co-op City were to secede from New York City, it would immediately become New York State’s tenth-largest city. Co-op City is the largest NORC, or naturally occurring retirement community, in the United States.⁵

The reason why most stories of Co-op City begin with the view from the highway is that this is the way that most people encounter the development. Similarly, the list of Co-op City’s superlatives is designed to give outsiders a sense of the scale of this city in a city. Once writers have enumerated all the ways in which Co-op City appears as an alien city . . . a vast, bleak, spreading mass, they often feign surprise at the normalcy of the people who live in this behemoth.⁶ Co-op City is neither the purgatory nor the heaven that its critics and champions predicted. It is a functioning community, Huxtable wrote.⁷ It may be hard for outsiders to comprehend, a resident told a reporter in 1971, but we’re a real community here.⁸

This should not be surprising, because Co-op City is a paradox—it is an extraordinary place that was built for ordinary people—middle- and working-class New Yorkers. In the words of the United Housing Foundation (UHF) that constructed it, Co-op City is a reflection of our desire to provide good, well-built homes—real homes for people at a price they can afford.⁹ This book tells Co-op City’s story both from the perspective of the men and women who dreamed it, built it, and controlled it, and from the viewpoint of the ordinary people who lived in the development.

I am one of them. My parents moved to Co-op City’s Adler Place town houses shortly after the conclusion of the rent strike. They moved there, as so many others did, because it was affordable and because they knew people there. Nearly my mother’s entire extended family had moved to Co-op City as it opened in the late 1960s and early 1970s, happy to leave decrepit apartments and changing neighborhoods on the West Side of the Bronx. As other white families, including most of my relatives, left Co-op City in the 1970s and 1980s for more suburban precincts, my parents stayed.

I should be up-front about the fact that, growing up, I hated Co-op City. Compared to the neighborhoods my friends in high school came from—Park Slope with its gentrified energy, the cultured precincts of the Upper West Side, the risqué but cosmopolitan Village—Co-op City seemed boring, uncultured, and downright provincial. As I looked forward to college, there was nothing I wanted more than to get as far from Co-op as I possibly could. In later years, I have never trafficked in the nostalgia that so many former Co-op City-ites feel. I still remember the child and adolescent who burned with a desire to leave that place, which felt like it was in the middle of nowhere—with no connections to anything real, exciting, or worthwhile.

And yet it was home. In some ways, it still is. When I go back to visit, I do not see the towers that surround me as alien or dehumanizing. I do not get lost in Co-op City’s meandering paths and cul-de-sacs. The words Building 11 or Section Five do not strike me as cold and bureaucratic but rather as the places where my friends and family lived. While doing research for this book, I spoke with an old friend who said that he loves dystopian films because they remind him of home. I knew exactly what he meant.

I spent years trying to get away from Co-op City, and I got as far as Germany, where I lived for several years in Berlin while doing research for my dissertation, which later became my first book. While there, I often found myself trying to describe where I was from to Germans whose image of New York did not extend far beyond its tourist highlights. I would say that Co-op City looked a lot like Marzahn, the massive East German housing development located in the northeast quadrant of the reunited city. Investigating the physical similarity between Co-op City and Marzahn ultimately resulted in an article that examined the two housing developments as exemplars of the global architectural and sociological phenomenon of late modernism.¹⁰ In researching that article, I discovered a history of Co-op City that I had never known anything about. Even though many of my relatives had moved there when the cooperative first opened, I had never heard anything about the United Housing Foundation, the nonprofit group that constructed Co-op City. Even though I grew up playing with the children of the leaders of the rent strike, I had only ever dimly heard of it. Even though my childhood and adolescence spanned the period of white flight, by the end of which most of my relatives had moved out and my youngest sister would be one of only two white students who graduated from IS 180 in 1995, I had never realized that this was anything more than a series of individual decisions by families to leave. As I finished working on the article, I realized I was not done researching Co-op City.

I quickly found that not only did I know very little about Co-op City’s history, but I could find very little that had been written about it by historians. Co-op City’s very location, on the fringes of New York’s northern frontier, a subway and a bus (or an express bus) from Manhattan, means that most New Yorkers and certainly most scholars never venture there. Furthermore, Co-op City fits awkwardly or not at all into the standard narrative of New York City—one that charts the city’s decline amid the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s and its rebirth as a city of wealth and the creative class living in gentrified neighborhoods in now-iconic Brooklyn. Scholars have come to appreciate the complexity of urban renewal, and they have also come to study those whose lives were upended by gentrification, a shock that could be just as jarring as Robert Moses’s construction projects. But other areas—untouched by the toppling hand of privilege—still languish far from the eyes of scholars.¹¹

Co-op City is a standard-bearer for these neighborhoods. It was the home of tens of thousands of working- and lower-middle-class people in 1970, and even if the color of these people’s skin may have changed in the ensuing five decades, their social and economic position has not. New York today is a deeply unequal city, and the need for affordable housing is as urgent as it has ever been. It is no less urgent to understand the complex history and ambivalent lessons of this huge—literally and figuratively—attempt to provide housing to people of moderate means a half century ago.

I hope that this book has a meaning that goes beyond my own particular story; but it is also a deeply personal book. As such, it is filled with deeply personal debts. I must begin by thanking the archivists at Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, including Patrizia Sione and Steven Calco, who not only helped me gain access to the United Housing Foundation files but also helped find some of the fabulous pictures that I was able to include in this book. Archivists at the New York City Municipal Archives, the New York State Archives, and the Bronx County Historical Society, especially Steven Payne, and the Lehman College Bronx Oral History Archive were similarly helpful. Countless librarians at the Baychester branch of the New York Public Library helped me access volume upon volume of the Co-op City Times and City News. The Baychester Library was a haven for me as a child, and it felt like coming full circle to return to it while writing this book. Oberlin College provided generous support in the form of a research status leave, where I first developed the idea of this book, and two grant-in-aid fellowships to fund archive trips.

Many former residents of Co-op City were generous enough to share their time and their memories with me. For that I am extremely grateful. Frank Guridy, Michael Agovino, and Judith Perez Caro are three former Co-op City residents who have written about Co-op City and were generous enough to read the manuscript, share their impressions, and talk though some of my conclusions. Greg Myers contributed several of his own personal photographs, which adorn these pages. Michael Horowitz, former editor of the City News, and Bernie Cylich, Co-op City pioneer and Riverbay board vice president, were generous enough to share their thoughts on parts of the manuscript. Co-op City residents have a reputation for their contentiousness, but all the ones I spoke with were unfailingly generous.

Michael Kennedy, my research assistant at Oberlin, went above and beyond—collating research materials, transcribing interviews, and creating the demographic graphs that appear in the appendix. His insights helped shape this project throughout. Michael McGandy was a tireless champion of this project and a helpful and patient editor. Thanks as well to Karen Hwa, Cornell’s tireless production editor, and Sandy Sadow, for her help with indexing the manuscript. I am also very indebted to the feedback provided by the two reviewers of this manuscript. Brian Purnell, who agreed to be identified, was particularly generous in discussing the manuscript with me in a later and extremely helpful conversation.

American urban historians may have been perplexed by the fact that a German historian decided to write a book about the Bronx, but they always responded to my work with kindness and curiosity. I am so grateful to Peter Eisenstadt, Robert Fishman, Benjamin Holtzman, Suleiman Osman, Susanne Schindler, Robert Self, and Adam Tanaka for clarifying conversations at various stages of this project. My colleagues at Oberlin, and especially my fellow historians, have provided me with an intellectual and professional home that I can’t begin to thank them for. Oberlin is what it is because of its students. Their curiosity, generosity, and willingness to examine historical questions with the seriousness and moral urgency they deserve have pushed me to be a better scholar and better person. I particularly need to thank those who took several iterations of History 479: Readings in Twentieth Century Urban History, for listening to my inchoate thoughts about this project and helping me think through its significance and conclusions.

Eli Rubin and I first met because of our shared interest in modernist housing. His enthusiasm for Co-op City the first time we visited together helped me realize that I had a story worth writing. I am grateful for that and for his close readings of and long conversations about each and every chapter. He is an intellectual partner, a life partner, and he is very meaningful to me. Like me, Lucien and Ezra cannot remember a time before they became acquainted with Co-op City. Seeing the development through their eyes has opened my eyes to another side of the cooperative, just as they have expanded my perspective and my heart in countless other ways. There are many Rubins—Nancy, Neal, Isaac, Oliver, and Eloise—who have no connection to Co-op City but have become an invaluable part of my life and my family during the time that it took to bring this project to completion. As such, they have earned an important place in these acknowledgments.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents and my sisters. If my parents, Anthony and Pearl Sherman Sammartino, had not chosen to move to Co-op City, this book would not exist. My father died just as this book neared completion. As an Italian and a Brooklynite, he never felt altogether at home in Co-op City, but his delight in the place’s idiosyncrasies is part of what made me want to learn more about it. My mother, always one to downplay her experiences, never understood why I wanted to write a book about Co-op City, but I hope that she can recognize, as I do, her influence and her perspective on every page. My sisters, Tory and Gabry, shared our apartment (and for too many years, a single bedroom). Their stories are theirs to tell, but conversations with them have immeasurably enriched my understanding of the place we all called home.

Introduction

Co-op City and the Story of New York

Shortly after nightfall on July 13, 1977, New York City was plunged into darkness. The blackout is remembered by many New Yorkers as the city’s nadir. Looting and vandalism hit neighborhoods across the city, in poor areas like Morrisania in the Bronx, middle-class neighborhoods like Flatbush in Brooklyn, and even the wealthy Upper East Side of Manhattan.¹ One firefighter described the Grand Concourse in the West Bronx, where so many of Co-op City’s original residents had come from, as a battlefield. In fifteen years on the force, he said that he had never before seen fires rage on both side of the boulevard.² New York City’s electric utility Con Ed declared the blackout an act of God, nothing more than a lightning strike at the wrong place at the wrong time. Mayor Abraham Beame nevertheless accused the utility of gross negligence and spoke out against the violence and vandalism, decrying the fact that we’ve been needlessly subjected to a night of terror in many communities that have been wantonly looted and burned.³

In 1975, New York City had barely escaped bankruptcy. Now, less than two years later, the blackout appeared to reveal the anarchy and crime that lay just under the city’s thin veneer of civility. The orgy of looting and pillage that engulfed New York was, in the words of one reporter, a prophecy fulfilled.⁴ The author James Goodman later summarized, Back in the 1970s, New York had been in desperate straits, wracked by stagflation, strikes, arson, drugs, graffiti, cynicism, a serial killer, stinking subways, white flight, high crime, fiscal crisis, and racial strife.⁵ The summer of the blackout was also the summer that New Yorkers were terrorized by the Son of Sam serial killer, a former Co-op City resident, who killed eight New Yorkers and wounded seven others before he was finally apprehended that August. Even good events had their dark side that year. During game two of the World Series in Yankee Stadium, a helicopter shot of the surrounding neighborhood revealed a fire burning out of control in a nearby elementary school. Ladies and Gentlemen, Howard Cosell announced, the Bronx is burning.⁶

FIGURE 1. Map of the Bronx, with neighborhoods, parks, and major housing developments labeled, is shown within the context of Manhattan to the west, Westchester to the north, Eastchester Bay to the east, and the East River to the south.

FIGURE 1. The Bronx. Created by Mike Bechtold.

In 1977, the Bronx may have been the premier literal and figurative symbol of urban decay. But there was an exception, and it was a huge one: Co-op City. When the power failed, Mayor Beame was actually in Co-op City, giving a speech in a synagogue as part of his reelection campaign. Before he was hurried out by his aides, he joked that the blackout was not related to Co-op City’s failure to pay its electric bill.⁷ This joke did not sting as it might have even a few weeks earlier. The very week of the blackout, Co-op City and the State of New York agreed to a final settlement to the largest rent strike in US history, which had lasted from June 1975 to July 1976. As part of this settlement, the state agreed to cede operational control of the development to Co-op City’s residents.

As the lights began to go out across the city, one area at a time, a group of teenagers in Building 2 looked out as the nearby Boston Secor housing project went dark. They began to chant Co-op, Co-op, hoping that they too could enjoy the blackout. Two minutes later, their chants were answered as the entire cooperative lost power.⁸ Volunteers worked under the guidance of Co-op City security to keep the cooperative safe, escorting returning residents home from the garages.⁹ Elevator operators climbed the hundreds of stairs to the roofs of the tower buildings to manually move the elevators to allow trapped cooperators to escape.¹⁰ Others, armed with candles and flashlights, assisted residents in the lobbies, while still others comforted those stuck in elevators when the lights went off or helped elderly and infirm neighbors. There was no looting and only three reports of attempted robbery (two of which were foiled) in the entire community of over fifty thousand residents. Residents who did not want to trudge the many flights to their apartments gathered in and around the lobbies on the warm summer night. Capri Pizza in Section One gave out free pizza and soda to neighbors who had helped retrieve their delivery truck.¹¹ Residents came downstairs with flashlights and portable radios.¹² One former resident recalled sleeping outside on a mattress that his mother threw down from their twenty-second-floor apartment.¹³ Kids played with glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. The entire affair had something of a block party atmosphere.¹⁴ Co-op City was one of the last places in the city to have full power restored, which did not happen until the following evening. However, by 10:15 on the first night, emergency power had been restored to the elevators and for other essential services.¹⁵

The 1977 blackout was not the first time that Co-op City had appeared as an exception to the urban crisis that engulfed New York in the second half of the twentieth century. The development had, in fact, been conceived of for just this purpose. It was the largest and most ambitious development constructed by the United Housing Foundation (UHF), a cooperative-housing developer that was responsible for over 5 percent of the housing constructed in New York between 1945 and 1975.¹⁶ Planning for Co-op City, comprising over fifteen thousand apartments, began in 1964, and city and state officials viewed it as an effort to keep middle-class families from moving to the suburbs. However, the aims of the UHF for the development were even loftier. The UHF marveled at the development’s planned tower buildings: Height . . . man’s ability to move up to clouds and outer space . . . is something new for our species! . . . The views of our City, a wondrous and growing phenomenon, will enchant our future Tower residents.¹⁷ And most importantly, the UHF sought to use Co-op City and similar cooperatives to create a better society. In a 1971 publication designed to celebrate twenty years of its existence, the UHF explained its aims: Co-operative housing as a way of life extends beyond buildings. It includes the development of a cooperative community with shopping centers, pharmacies, optical dispensers, furniture stores, [and an] insurance company. The approach is best typified by the statement of the purpose of United Housing Foundation: ‘All that we do is directed towards utilizing the methods of cooperation to enable people to enjoy a better life and to achieve a better society.’¹⁸

In its first years of existence, Co-op City appeared poised to fulfill its promise. Even as it was decried by architects and urban planners as a set of "scattered towers [that] stand on wasteland, hemmed in by a hopelessly polluted and commercialized ilet [sic] . . . a gross debasement of the masses," it nevertheless remained very popular with potential residents, who flocked to get on its waiting list as soon as it opened to the public in 1965.¹⁹ As whites left the city in droves in these years, Co-op City was an exception: a neighborhood to which middle-class, white New Yorkers wanted to move. Although Co-op City did not keep records of the racial makeup of the development, estimates and census records indicate that approximately 75 percent of its initial population was white, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jewish. These figures nearly matched the racial dynamics of New York City as a whole, where census figures indicate a city that in 1970 was 78 percent white.²⁰ At a time when racial turmoil may have roiled the rest of New York, former residents of all ethnic and racial backgrounds saw Co-op City as a relatively successful example of integration.

Cost overruns plagued the development from the start, and as the extent of Co-op City’s economic problems became more evident, as reflected in a series of increases to residents’ monthly carrying charges starting in 1970, Co-op City residents began to organize in opposition both to the UHF and to the state that held the development’s mortgage.²¹ This organizing culminated in the rent strike of 1975–76, which was led by a young, fiery, self-described Maoist named Charles Rosen. The strike, which commanded the support of approximately 75 to 80 percent of residents, overlapped with New York City’s own financial crisis. The city’s crisis ended with devastating cuts to city services, including fire stations, hospitals, and schools, which a wave of protests and strikes were largely powerless to stop. In contrast, Co-op City’s strikers achieved full resident control of the sixty-thousand-person cooperative. A conclusion to the strike, negotiated by Rosen and his allies, was ratified by 74 percent of households who voted in a referendum.²² Once again, in July 1977, Co-op City appeared exceptional, and there was reason to believe, as many Co-op City residents did, that the development would continue to thrive, even as the rest of the Bronx burned.

It was not to be. As Co-op City residents soon found, control of Co-op City meant responsibility for Co-op City’s debt. Hundreds of millions of dollars needed to repair construction defects added to the nearly half-billion-dollar mortgage. This was a bill that the middle-class residents of the cooperative could ill afford. As debt continued to mount, residents found themselves paying yet higher monthly carrying charges. In part as a result of Co-op’s financial instability, and in part owing to the racial dynamics that prompted white flight elsewhere in New York and around the United States, white families began to move out in increasing numbers in the late 1970s and 1980s. By the mid-1980s, crime had begun to rise, and test scores in the development’s schools had begun to fall. It may have taken an extra decade or two, but it appeared to many in Co-op City that New York’s urban problems had finally reached the Bronx’s northeastern corner. Meanwhile, New York’s 1980s and 1990s renaissance, anchored in finance capital and the gentrification of the kinds of neighborhoods Co-op City’s residents had left, passed Co-op City by. Co-op City was too remote from the city’s core, its cooperative ownership structure did not offer the possibility of a financial windfall, and its housing towers were scorned by gentrifiers longing for character and Old World charm. Co-op City, the largest and most lasting symbol of New York’s institutional commitment to assist its poor and middle class in the decades after World War II, existed uneasily in the regime that took over the city in the final decades of the century.

In retrospect, Co-op City’s apparent crime wave of the 1980s was more a reflection of anxieties about its racial transition than the actual—tangible but not huge—increase in crime, which began to decrease in the following decade as crime declined across New York. Furthermore, in part because of its own stabilizing finances, and in part as a response to the fear that Co-op City’s size and crusading residents inspired, New York State began in the late 1980s to pursue a less punitive approach toward Co-op City, investing money and pursuing policies that allowed carrying charges to stabilize. The neighborhood is now a stable, middle-income pocket of the city. For all the ways that Co-op City has changed markedly since its first occupants moved in, the median household income of its residents has been near the median of the city for its entire existence (see appendix, figure 27). The people who live there enjoy the privilege of affordable housing in an increasingly unaffordable city. The Co-op City of today would be unrecognizable to the UHF that built it in the mid-1960s, but it nevertheless remains affordable for New Yorkers of moderate means in a city with all too few places for them to call home.

The construction of Co-op City was the apotheosis of a vision of affordable housing that stretched back to the teeming tenements of the immigrant Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century. Radical Jewish unionists at the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) and the ACWA (Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America) were interested improving the lives of workers beyond the factory floor. Even before World War I, they saw cooperatives as a way to translate the collective action of workers to the consumer realm.²³ After the war, union interest in cooperatives grew, with Sidney Hillman, president of the ACWA, proclaiming in 1919 that consumer cooperatives will bring a large measure of democracy and human happiness into industry.²⁴ At the same time, New York housing activists became interested in the European innovation of limited dividend (also known as limited profit) housing. In limited dividend housing arrangements, private developers agreed to limit their profit and the rent paid by residents to prescribed maximum levels, and in exchange were provided with either direct subsidies or state tax exemptions.²⁵ Housing activists such as Catherine Bauer brought this funding scheme to American shores, where it was first used in 1924 for Sunnyside Gardens in Queens (developed by the City Housing Corporation) and then enshrined in the 1926 New York State Housing Law.²⁶

Taking advantage of this new law, in 1927 a series of housing cooperatives for mostly Jewish left-wing or union workers opened in the Bronx: the United Workers Cooperative on Allerton Avenue (known as the Coops), the Sholem Aleichem Houses near the Jerome Park Reservoir, the Farband Cooperative on Williamsbridge Road, and the largest and most ambitious of them all, the Amalgamated Houses off Van Cortlandt Park.²⁷ The last of these was spear-headed by Abraham Kazan, who would later head the UHF. Kazan was born in 1891 and was part of the great migration of Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement to the United States. Like many Jewish immigrants, Kazan found a home on the political left. In particular, he was drawn to an idiosyncratic mix of trade unionism and anarchism, in which cooperative housing was a natural fit. In the historian Peter Eisenstadt’s words, while other unionists dreamed of political power, for Kazan, the creation of cooperatives was an end in itself. . . . Create successful cooperatives first, he argued, and the political support would come.²⁸

Kazan’s ambitions were much larger than the Amalgamated Houses; he hoped to create an entire cooperative sector of the economy. Such dreams were made both more urgent and less attainable by the Great Depression two years later. Kazan took the opportunity of a national conversation about the need for affordable housing to agitate for cooperatives that would both provide housing to the needy and teach them the ideas of self-help and self-reliance through mutual assistance.²⁹ Although Kazan and others came tantalizingly close to national funding for cooperative construction, under pressure from private housing developers the 1934 and 1937 National Housing Acts did not include provisions for cooperative or co-owned housing. Instead, both acts focused their efforts on single-family homeownership mortgage guarantees and tax incentives for the working and middle classes and public housing for those who could not afford to own their own homes.³⁰

Even without federal support, New York City committed to assisting a broader swath of New Yorkers to afford urban apartments during the Depression and World War II. The New York City Public Housing Authority (NYCHA) allowed working-class families to apply for public housing. Politicians also authorized the construction of several middle-class housing developments sponsored by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town on the East Side of Manhattan, the Riverton Houses in Harlem, and Parkchester in the East Bronx.³¹ Despite these efforts, the housing situation in America’s largest city was revealed to be dire once the war concluded.³² According to one analysis, New York had a shortage of 430,000 housing units, with much of the available housing judged substandard.³³ Large-scale labor protests in 1946 led Mayor William O’Dwyer to reinstate public housing for a broader population.³⁴ O’Dwyer also took measures beyond public housing to encourage the construction and maintenance of affordable housing. Taking advantage of the 1926 law already on the books, his administration also offered limited-dividend housing subsidies to a range of developments. Cooperative developments such as Electchester, built by Harry Van Arsdale Jr., president of the New York City Central Labor Council, and Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in New York City took advantage of these funds. Built in 1949, Electchester contains 2,400 units in thirty-eight six-story buildings. The 1950 Queensview Cooperative in Astoria was aimed at a similar demographic. It contains 620 apartments and was the brainchild of a number of NYCHA veterans.³⁵

Struck by the great need for affordable housing and seeing an opportunity to bring his cooperative vision to a greater number of people, Kazan founded the United Housing Foundation in 1951, with the backing of a coalition of labor groups, including the ACWA and sixty-one other unions, civic organizations, and housing cooperatives.³⁶ Unlike the Amalgamated Houses or previous cooperative housing ventures, the UHF was explicitly apolitical and did not reserve apartments for union members.³⁷ The UHF’s first project was a one-building addition to the original Amalgamated Co-ops in the Bronx, which was completed in 1955 with space for 123 families.³⁸ Each successive UHF development was larger than the previous one.³⁹ After forays into housing in Manhattan, such as Penn South, which comprised a total of 2,820 apartments in ten buildings and was completed in 1963, the UHF moved back to the outer boroughs for its largest pre-Co-op City project, Rochdale Village, a 5,860-unit development in eastern Queens, on land that had previously been home to the Jamaica Racetrack.⁴⁰ Altogether, in the 1950s and 1960s, the UHF was responsible for more than half the publicly subsidized, limited-income housing built in New York City, including Co-op City, its last and largest development.⁴¹

The UHF was part of a broader program of postwar urban liberalism that built upon the political coalitions of the New Deal era. Urban liberalism was not unique to New York; however, it reached its fullest flower in America’s largest city. During the years between the end of World War II and the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, New York City government expanded to offer a wide array of social services to its residents. New York’s largesse was indebted to the power of its large and politically engaged labor movement, as well as a long tradition of urban activists and policy makers with transatlantic connections and influences.⁴² These factors combined to foster a homegrown version of social democracy that made life in New York unlike anyplace else in the United States.⁴³ New Yorkers could benefit from free college at the City University of New York (CUNY), a network of high-quality public hospitals and medical clinics, a vast and modestly priced public transportation system, expansive municipal welfare provisions, and publicly subsidized arts institutions. All these things existed in other US cities, but in its size and generosity, the level of social investment in New York was unmatched.

Nowhere was the uniqueness of New York’s social democracy more apparent than when it came to housing. In cities from Los Angeles to Detroit, the white middle and working classes were encouraged instead to purchase single-family homes within the city and its suburbs. Meanwhile, public housing was reserved for the most destitute. This bifurcated approach was enshrined on the federal level in the 1949 Housing Act, which provided funding for slum clearance and the construction of public housing, as well as monies to extend the federal mortgage insurance program for single-family homes.⁴⁴ The result of this approach was the massive expansion of American suburbia. New York was not untouched by the national move to the suburbs. Over the 1950s, New York City’s suburban population grew by 2,180,492, while its urban population declined by 109,973. Nassau County on Long Island, home to Levittown and other sprawling new suburbs, grew by 141.5 percent. By the end of the decade, metro New York’s suburban population exceeded its urban one for the first time.⁴⁵

However, unlike many other cities, New York did not wholeheartedly embrace either the suburban solution for the middle class or the assignment of public housing for only the very poor. Instead, the city offered a grab bag of approaches to affordable housing for residents of modest means. One approach was a massive push to construct new public housing, with 75,403 new apartments built in the 1950s alone.⁴⁶ While public housing became a symbol for the failures of urban governance in Chicago and other cities, NYCHA navigated a relatively successful path in its attempt to provide housing for New Yorkers.⁴⁷ In 1950, New York State also took over and made permanent the rent control measures that had previously been a wartime measure of the federal government.⁴⁸

Cooperative housing was another initiative—this time in a partnership between the city and state—that was fostered in New York to provide affordable housing to the middle class.⁴⁹ Already in the 1920s, cooperative housing had taken advantage of state-sponsored limited-dividend financing. Building