Roman Mars

It was an absolutely massive development in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

15,000 people came to the dedication ceremony for the Penn South Cooperative in 1962.

In attendance was an absolute who's who of power brokerage.

Robert Moses, of course, but also Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor of New York at the time.

Eleanor Roosevelt was there.

And the president of the AFL-CIO, the president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, and oh yeah, the president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy.

The housing battles Moses is referring to is likely the community opposition to the Penn South development and others like it.

During each project, old neighborhoods had been destroyed and residents displaced.

Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, estimated that Moses evicted 250,000 people to build highways in New York City and another 250,000 for urban renewal projects like slum clearance and housing development.

Efforts to rehouse the displaced were half-hearted at best.

In the case of the Penn South Cooperative, the broken eggs were 354 homes demolished, 183 stores razed, and nearly 2,000 residents evicted.

Apart from displaced community members, Robert Moses and the UHF had another prominent critic around this time, the writer and activist Jane Jacobs.

Coming up, a project that will ultimately destroy the United Housing Foundation and the cooperative housing movement that Abraham Kazin had built.

That's after the break.

But in many other respects, the development the UHF had in mind was exactly the kind that Jacobs hated.

Skyscrapers set back from the street and surrounded by green space.

Jacobs had warned that true community could not emerge from places like this.

Great place to be a kid, boring place to be a teenager.

In other words, this place was basically the suburbs.

Co-op City and a lot of other UHF cooperatives were providing alternatives to suburbia that helped convince the middle class to stay in the city.