Katie Mingle
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
This was basically a concession to Jane Jacobs and other critics who'd turned against urban renewal and slum clearance.
Co-op City opened to its first residents in December of 1968.
And this blizzard would be an early test of whether a community could emerge in this new development.
People were just leaving their vehicles right there on the road and setting out on foot all over the city, including on the stretch of I-95 that ran right past the cooperative.
Anne-Marie wasn't there for the blizzard, but she actually did grow up in Co-op City, and she remembers a pretty idyllic childhood there, riding her bike around the vast green spaces that surrounded the buildings, playing with the other kids, and then as a teenager, just wandering around, looking for any kind of fun.
When he died in 1971, Abraham Kazin had built thousands of units of cooperative housing for middle-class New Yorkers.
Co-op City had been the crowning achievement of his vision, but he wasn't there to see it unravel.
During the years of construction, costs rose and rose because of inflation.
And the United Housing Foundation had to take out a larger mortgage from the state to pay for it.
And how did the residents see the UHF at this time?
The residents of Co-op City were in no mood to hear the UHF's lecturing on the collective sacrifices required to live in a cooperative.
Despite being shareholders or co-owners of the place, early on, the residents had very little say in what happened to it.
They were not allowed to be voting members on the board that controlled the co-op.
that made decisions on things like whether carrying charges went up or who they would hire to repair the roof.
Members of the United Housing Foundation controlled Co-op City's board, and they made those kinds of decisions.
Co-op city residents wanted the UHF to get out of their way.
They wanted to run co-op city themselves, and they wanted the state to give them relief on their mortgage.