Anne-Marie Sammartino

The architecture did not stand in the way of creating a community at all.

I remember being like 13 years old when there's this big mall that opened and it had the first store that opened, in my memory at least, was a hardware store.

And me and all these other kids my age just went to the hardware store just to like look at wrenches or whatever because there was like nothing to do.

So basically, Co-op City was built, it originally was supposed to have a $235 million mortgage.

That mortgage balloons to $391 million by the time construction is completed.

They'd been duped by the United Housing Foundation.

And they found the United Housing Foundation very condescending.

Because if you were a resident and you went to the United Housing Foundation and you said, hey, I don't like the amount this costs or the air conditioning in my apartment isn't working or whatever complaint you had –

There was this whole sort of like, you don't understand what it means to be in a cooperative.

They would collect all of these checks, but they wouldn't cash them.

They would just hold all of the checks.

Like, OK, well, you now, state, have to negotiate with us.

We have the checks and you can't, essentially, you can't have them.

You could say that, like, there was never a greater demonstration of the cooperative spirit than the rent strike that destroyed the United Housing Foundation.

By 1976, 90% of the people on the waiting list to move into Co-op City are Black and Hispanic.

Co-op City goes from being a majority white development to being one that is not, really over the course of the 1980s.

What Co-op City was undergoing in the 1980s was indeed a racial transition.

And I remember this very clearly growing up.

Like when I was in eighth grade, all these families moved out.

There's all these anxieties about Co-op City's supposed decline.