Katie Mingle
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
But it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows and housing for the working class.
In the speeches that day, between the self-congratulations, you can hear something else.
The people responsible for building this massive housing development are defensive.
And here's Robert Moses addressing the audience after Kazin.
Robert Moses was infamously dismissive of his detractors, saying once that the critics build nothing, and also this classic.
Those evicted residents could apply to live in the new cooperative buildings, but a lot of people couldn't afford it.
The UHF was stubbornly, philosophically committed to the equity deposit.
They felt like this investment was a crucial piece of what they were building.
This in-between housing that kept the middle class in the city by offering them apartments they could afford and empowered them as co-owners.
The tide was shifting against modernist architecture, against Robert Moses and his urban renewal policies, and soon against the project of big government liberalism that made all of this building possible.
But for now, the United Housing Foundation and Robert Moses still had momentum and money, and their biggest project was still ahead of them.
Not just their biggest project, actually, but one of the biggest residential housing developments ever constructed.
35 skyscrapers that would house more than 15,000 families.
This is an advertisement for Freedomland, an amusement park in the North Bronx that aimed to teach children about American history through interactive experiences.
After Freedom Land went bust in 1964, Robert Moses saw an opportunity to buy a 400-acre parcel of land for relatively cheap.
This would be the site of the United Housing Foundation's biggest project yet, that cluster of 35 skyscrapers that I would marvel at years later from the Greyhound bus, Co-op City.
Building Co-op City on the site of a defunct amusement park, which itself was built on a swamp, meant that no one would need to be evicted.