Roman Mars

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.

Building 35 skyscrapers on top of a swamp had not been easy or cheap.

A bigger mortgage for Co-op City meant that each resident would have to pay higher carrying charges, those monthly fees that went towards the mortgage and utilities.

At least that's what the state wanted.

The residents disagreed.

They'd been promised a certain monthly cost by the United Housing Foundation before construction even began.

But the cost of construction was not the only thing that had changed during the years while Co-op City was being built.

As the 1960s became the 1970s, New York City was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

New York State was not much better off.

Essential services were being cut.

Government workers laid off.