Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
I remember the first time I saw these buildings, riding a Greyhound bus into the city from Worcester, Massachusetts.
99PI producer Emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week.
I was in my early 20s at the time, and I'd never really seen skyscrapers that weren't office buildings.
Chapter 2: What is Co-op City and why is it significant?
These buildings, I could tell, were people's homes. I could see laundry hanging on balconies way up on like the 22nd floor. There was something thrilling but also almost frightening about contemplating the number of individual lives playing out in just one of those skyscrapers.
It had the effect of making me feel very small and insignificant, the way looking at something incomprehensibly large can sometimes do. I think I assumed at the time that what I was looking at was a public housing project, but I know now that it wasn't. This cluster of high-rises was and is the largest housing cooperative in the world, Co-op City.
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.
Those comments... are exactly why Co-op City is the best kept secret, because it's like hiding in plain sight.
This is Diane Patrick. She lives in Co-op City.
You look at the exterior, you make your judgment, and you just keep moving, and you don't give it another thought.
Diane moved into her Co-op City apartment in 1978.
I think I paid $2,500 for the apartment.
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. The housing development itself is a corporation, and when you buy a share, you are buying the right to live in a specific unit.
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Chapter 3: How did the design of Co-op City receive public criticism?
The central areas are going to rock. There are very few cases where genuine slums can be fixed up in any other way than by tearing them down.
That, of course, is Robert Moses, New York City's most prolific and problematic city planner.
As diehard fans of the show will know, Robert Moses did more to reshape New York City in the 20th century than probably any other single person. After the American Housing Act was passed, Moses became head of New York City's slum clearance committee.
Part of what Moses wanted to do was replace these blighted buildings with public housing. And in the post-war years, he did oversee the construction of a lot of public housing for low-income renters.
But he and others in government also wanted housing for the middle class.
In most other places, municipal governments sort of pursue like a two-pronged strategy for building new housing after World War II.
This is Anne-Marie Sammartino. She's a professor of history at Oberlin College.
On the one hand, there's housing projects for the very poor that are in the urban core. And then there's single family, you know, sort of mortgage support for single family homes. New York's a little bit different because the mayor and other people in city government, they want to keep the middle class.
And when they're saying this, they don't just mean the white middle class, but they mostly mean the white middle class living in New York City.
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Chapter 4: What is the cooperative ownership model and how does it work?
Abraham Kazin got the message. The projects would only get bigger from there.
By the late 1950s, they had finished a project called the Penn South Cooperative. Ten buildings, all of them about 20 stories tall. It was an absolutely massive development in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
Penn South, an extraordinarily ambitious project, was built to provide decent housing for garment workers who could then walk to work, right? You know, talk about an urbanistic utopian vision. You know, that was it.
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.
This union deserves the hardiest commendation. I hope others will follow your example. And I come here today and ask you to continue to work.
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. They seem to feel embattled. Here's Abraham Kazin at the podium.
Contrary to the false impression that this type of redevelopment destroys existing neighborhoods, we are proud to say that developments like this remove from the city a cancerous blight, the breeding ground of crime and delinquency and all other social ills.
And here's Robert Moses addressing the audience after Kazin.
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Chapter 5: Who was Abraham Kazin and what was his vision for housing?
He's lived in Co-op City since the days of the strike.
It kind of forced you to get to know your neighbors as well. I think I've got a picture of my mother sitting in a meeting with other wives or people from the floor.
Noel remembers it all feeling really well organized, which makes sense because a lot of the residents of Co-op City belong to unions. They knew how to run a strike.
The strike lasted 13 months. In the end, the state agreed to help with some large repairs that were needed on the buildings. But the residents didn't get any significant relief on their mortgage. They did, however, get control of Co-op City. The United Housing Foundation was out.
After the residents took over Co-op City in 1976, the UHF would never build another cooperative.
You could say that, like, there was never a greater demonstration of the cooperative spirit than the rent strike that destroyed the United Housing Foundation.
Co-op City itself was the quagmire from which the movement could never escape. That was it.
It wasn't only that Co-op City had been a disaster for the UHF. By the mid-1970s, the project of big government liberalism was over, and a small government neoliberal era had begun. Abraham Kazin had died. Robert Moses was more or less retired.
And although many of the existing Mitchell-Lama developments in New York would continue to receive government subsidies, nothing new would be built under the program after the late 70s.
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