Roman Mars

Special thanks this week to Nathan Proctor at the PIRG.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer.

Delaney Hall is the senior editor.

Kurt Kolstad is the digital director.

The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeon, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lasha Madon, Jacob Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.

You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server.

You can find a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

If you've ever driven into New York City from the north, there's a good chance you've passed by a massive cluster of high-rise apartment buildings just as you enter the Bronx.

35 buildings in total, all of them with identical brick facades, all over 20 stories tall.

99PI producer Emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week.

When Co-op City opened in the late 1960s, people hated the way it looked.

Journalists and architecture critics thought the buildings embodied everything that was wrong with modernist architecture.

Newsweek said, quote, The towers of New York City's Co-op City rise bleak and spectrally through the smog, a prospect so remote and cheerless that affluent commuters often shudder when they pass it.

Diane doesn't pay rent, but she doesn't exactly own the unit either.

Technically, when she handed over that $2,500, she was buying a share in a corporation.

This is how co-ops work.