Integrating Co-op City

Co-op City, located in the northeast Bronx, consists of 15,389 units housing over 50,000 residents. Today it remains the largest cooperatively owned and operated residential community ever built in the United States. As the largest, and one of the last, cooperative housing complexes to be union-sponsored, Co-op City represents the culmination of almost fifty years of effort by union leaders in New York to organize not only around wages and hours but also around affordable housing — arguably one of New York's greatest needs. At the same time, from vision to completion, the realization of Co-op City took almost a decade and occurred during a time of extreme political and social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s. In many ways, Co-op City's completion marked the end of one era and the beginning of another.

The Union Housing Movement

As one of the last cooperative housing complexes to be sponsored by the United Housing Foundation (UHF), Co-op City's completion in 1973 represented the pinnacle of almost fifty years of union-sponsored cooperative housing. Beginning in 1927 with the completion of Amalgamated Houses — located in the Bronx and the first project to benefit from the New York State Limited Dividend Housing Corporations Law of 1926 — Abraham Kazan and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) initiated a series of planned residential communities. It wasn't until the ACWA partnered with 61 other labor unions, civic groups, and housing cooperatives in 1951 to establish the UHF (Farrell, 1968), a development agency committed to the creation of cooperative housing, that Kazan and his partners began to realize their vision on any significant scale.

Prior to the formation of UHF, just over 1,600 units of union-sponsored housing were built in New York City during a twenty-five-year period. After the formation of UHF, more than 30,000 units of union-sponsored housing were built in New York City in less than twenty-five years. Of those more than 30,000 units, Co-op City represented over fifty percent. But while some thought Co-op City was simply one more in a series of ever-larger union-sponsored cooperative housing projects, its early troubles in fact crippled the UHF and forced it into bankruptcy. This bankruptcy, coupled with the ever-widening gap between wages and the cost of construction, marked the end of an era in New York's housing.

To best assess the successes and failures of Co-op City and the project's continued potential, it is necessary to first understand the context in which the vision for Co-op City came about. In 1966, as that vision continued to evolve, New York City suffered from an unemployment rate of 4 percent (Alden, 1966) that Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller declared "dangerous" — and in response to which he sought to stimulate construction in the city (Kihss, 1966). Co-op City certainly satisfied the Governor's desire. The project was granted almost a half billion dollars in government support (McQuade, 1968), including a $263-million mortgage loan under the state's Mitchell-Lama Law (Bennett, 1965), and was estimated to employ an on-site labor force of 2,000 at a cost of $115 million over the five-year period from 1967 to 1972 (Ennis, 1965b).

At the same time, the City Planning Commission was concerned that a project of Co-op City's scale would siphon off a large number of families from fragile areas such as the Grand Concourse in the central Bronx (Knowles, 1966; Roberts, 1967; Roberts, 1968; Robbins, 1969) and argued that the city should concentrate all major capital improvements in "ghettoes and other areas of greatest need" (Bennett, 1966) rather than in a project located on the outskirts of the city where services were not yet provided.

Robert Moses and the Site

More powerful interests were at play. Like the UHF, Robert Moses — perhaps the most powerful man in New York City — was committed to slum clearance and the creation of middle-income housing. It was Moses who first suggested that the 300-acre former Freedomland amusement park site be turned into a housing development, citing exasperation with "silly" schemes to cut holes in tenement roofs in order to lower in shiny new kitchens, living rooms, and bathrooms. As Moses saw it, every time a project of even one-third the scale of Co-op City was completed, the area vacated by the relocating tenants should be rebuilt. He claimed that if this were done across the city, "in 10 years there would be no more slums" (Farrell, 1968). Assisting Moses and the UHF was the state's Mitchell-Lama Law, passed in 1955, designed to help the construction of middle-income housing by providing low-interest mortgages and local tax exemption (Asbury, 1966a).

Prior to Moses' suggestion for a housing project, the 300-acre site — bounded by the Hutchinson River Parkway, the New England Thruway, and the Hutchinson River — was home to the failed Freedomland amusement park. Envisioned by realty man William Zeckendorf Sr., Freedomland was meant to be the East Coast's answer to Disneyland in California. Designed to allow visitors to explore American history, the park was shaped like the continental United States and, when completed in 1960, cost $65 million — or almost four times what Disney spent on his park in 1955 (Naish, 2001). Freedomland initially opened to wide acclaim and unmanageable crowds. Unfortunately, its success was short-lived and the park declared bankruptcy in 1964, quickly regarded as "a spectacular venture that spectacularly failed" (Fried, 1968a). When the park closed its doors it left behind little but its remains and what was still largely undeveloped swampland. That such a large parcel of land in New York City was still vacant in the 1960s speaks to the difficulty of building on it.

In order to build the 35 apartment towers, 238 garden townhouses, 8 parking garages, 7 schools, 3 shopping centers, 3 community centers, a power plant, firehouse, police station, and library (Ennis, 1965b) that would eventually form Co-op City, the Riverbay Corporation had to first transform a site that was mostly below grade and an extension of Eastchester Bay during high tide. To do this they had to drive more than 50,000 pilings — nearly 2 million linear feet — (Cheslow, 1994) and transport 4 million cubic yards of hydraulic fill at a cost of $25,000 per acre from the sandy bottom of Gravesend Bay off Coney Island to raise the site a total of 12 feet ("Gravesend Sand Fills Bronx Site," 1966). They also had to install bulkheading along a quarter-mile stretch of the site fronting the Hutchinson River (Ennis, 1965a). This site preparation lasted more than 18 months and, when completed in December 1967, provided the design team with a dry, level platform on which to build.

The Architect

Unlike most mega-projects today, Co-op City's architect was no celebrity despite being considered an urban housing expert by architects and government agencies around the world. Born in Ukraine in 1894, Herman J. Jessor immigrated to America with his grandparents in 1906. Settling in New York City, Jessor attended Stuyvesant High School and later the Cooper Union at night for civil engineering while working during the day in the architectural office of Springsteen and Goldhammer. It was while working there as chief draftsman that Jessor was first exposed to the social ideals of the unions — working on the 1927 Amalgamated Cooperative Apartments. His affection for the unions and their ideals regarding housing would shape the rest of his career, and ultimately be the end of it as well.¹

Those assisting Jessor with the design for Co-op City were not nearly as enthralled with the unions' social ideals. The landscape architects Robert Zion and Harold Breen were recommendations of the City Planning Commission, as Co-op City marked the first time Jessor's housing design schemes would be applied on such a large site with so little of it given to buildings. While Zion and Breen helped Jessor deal with the 80 percent of the 300-acre site not taken up by building footprints, the structural engineering firm of Farkas, Barron and Partners developed solutions for the complications of constructing so many large towers on sandy soil. Unfortunately, while the engineers' solutions ensured the buildings a sturdy footing, they did not prevent the ground around them from sinking soon after completion — a problem that would haunt Co-op City for decades.

The Design

The original design for Co-op City called for 39 towers (Ennis, 1965b) with units for 60,000 residents. As the design scheme went through the city's review process it was revised, ultimately ending up with 35 towers designed by Jessor, 238 townhouses designed by Gerhard Graupe (Jessor's chief draftsman), and the support facilities mentioned above. The design also included tot lots, basketball and tennis courts, baseball diamonds, sports fields, a jogging and bike path, and scores of benches (Cheslow, 1994).

While Jessor was responsible for the design of the 35 towers, the basic design prototype for the units in each tower — as well as two of the three tower types — were developed earlier by Jessor's mentor Springsteen, in response to parameters set by Kazan. Graupe then adapted these basic prototypes that formed the basis for all UHF housing. Jessor's real strengths lay in the legal and technical aspects of construction, vital to UHF housing projects since they served as their own general contractor (Schuman). His technical expertise is one reason Co-op City was the first UHF project not to minimize corridor length: with the introduction of mechanical ventilation, cross ventilation was no longer essential, freeing the building form considerably.

Accordingly, Jessor placed three tower types in a regimented scatter pattern across the site. Of the 35 towers-in-the-park: 15 have a cross-shaped plan and are 33 stories tall, simply called the "Tower;" 10 are slightly-curved slab buildings with long double-loaded corridors, 24 stories tall, dubbed the "Chevron;" and 10 have a triple-core plan, 26 stories tall, known as the "Tri-Core." Together these towers contain over 97 percent of Co-op City's units. The remaining units are distributed among the 238 townhouses arranged in seven clusters among the towers.

Unlike many apartment buildings, Co-op City's towers offered a wide range of unit options, from 3-room apartments with 900 square feet to 6-room apartments with 1,500 square feet (Ennis, 1965a). With each unit starting with a purchase price of $450 per room and a monthly carrying charge of $25 per room, Co-op City was regarded as a "rare opportunity for comfortable family living" ("Display Ad 1549," 1966) by many middle-class New Yorkers. Prospective buyers who walked through the display unit commented favorably on the wooden floors, the central air-conditioning, the ample closet space, the eat-in kitchens, and the entrance foyers (Farrell, 1968) — amenities that remain uncommon in New York City today. Many apartments had balconies with views toward Pelham Bay Park or back toward Manhattan's skyline. By March 1965, more than 14,700 applications had been submitted — well before site construction had even begun ("14,700 Applications Made," 1965).

The Architectural Controversy

Despite easily measurable early success, Co-op City suffered harsh criticism before the Riverbay Corporation broke ground. The majority of this criticism was aesthetic in nature, attacking the formal composition of the site and its buildings. Where Jessor saw the creation of "the greatest amount of open and unencumbered space" (Ennis, 1965a) in his decision to place the apartments in 35 towers, his detractors saw "the negation of the ideals of the Great Society" (Farrell, 1965), "cookie-cutter" design, and the stereotypical "mediocre mold" of UHF housing design ("New York Program," 1965).

The organized opposition took two distinct forms. The New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, represented by Maurice W. Kley, presented largely constructive criticism at the City Planning Commission: they urged that shopping, recreational, and community centers be "better integrated" into the residential portions, to avoid a "ghetto of bedroom usage" drained of activity during the day by off-site jobs and shopping ("Planning Board Backs," 1965) — a problem never fully resolved (Garvin, 2002).

In sharp contrast, a group of leading architecture teachers and students from Yale, Columbia, Cooper Union, and Pratt — led by Percival Goodman — sent a letter directly to Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner. They did not seek to improve Jessor's work but to replace it entirely, calling for either an open design competition or a board of review led by architects and planners. In particular, they expressed dissatisfaction with the "extreme" height of the buildings, which they claimed created "gross towers that would create a feeling of alienation in anyone who lived in them," and called the design a disgrace, saying that the Great Society does not ask how much but how good (Farrell, 1965).

Kazan's response was unambiguous. He called the committee's criticism "worthless talk" that dealt with "abstractions" and did nothing to produce "housing that working people could afford," and challenged anyone in the group to produce a "practical plan for producing housing at $21 or $23 a room" ("Co-op City Housing," 1965). UHF Vice President George Schechter responded to the specific charge that towers create alienation:

"We don't believe height creates alienation. This depends on whether you have a community, which depends on whether there are facilities to draw people into common participation."

— George Schechter, UHF Vice President (Fried, 1968b)

Speaking for many residents, New York Planning Official Roger Starr defended UHF at the City Planning Commission's public hearing on Co-op City:

"Far from being inhuman, far from crushing the spirit, far from presenting people with an inhuman environment, inhumanly scaled, UHF built developments which have been subscribed and oversubscribed, in which people have now been living for many, many years, and as nearly as can be made out — living successfully and happily at a price considerably lower than comparable new, conventionally financed housing."

— Roger Starr, New York City Planning Official

What Starr was clearly responding to was the fact that there were "plenty of $100-a-room apartments" in New York City but few that provided "good living under $25-a-room" (Asbury, 1966b). As the Times noted in May 1966, Co-op City was "not only the most ambitious but also the most progressive of the mass housing centers in recognizing that people need beauty as well as shelter for the good life" ("Co-op City," 1966). While the editors did not consider the gardenlike setting to have the "venturesomeness" of new towns like Reston, Virginia, they argued its planners had succeeded at shedding the "barrackslike monotony" and "red-brick badge of cheap housing" associated with most giant urban housing projects — without pricing out middle-income families.

Early Failures

Co-op City was plagued with problems from the very beginning. Located so far from the existing urban fabric, it required more than 30 city agencies to coordinate their efforts with those of the Riverbay Corporation — and for some time, that coordination failed to materialize (Ennis, 1967; "Planning is Essential," 1968; Farrell, 1968; Fried, 1968b). When the first of Co-op City's residents moved in on December 10, 1968, they were met with shortages of schools, streets, utilities, and public transportation. Critics who had attacked the physical design now turned to attack the lack of coordinated planning ("Co-op City Lesson," 1968). The plans for a $2.9-billion Second Avenue subway that would reach Co-op City were shelved (Witkin, 1968a; 1968b), and while Co-op City was estimated to bring the city $7 million a year in taxes (Farrell, 1968), its tax exemptions made the actual contribution considerably less.

In addition to the problems with delayed city services, Co-op City suffered from a lack of physical integration with the surrounding neighborhood. Veritably one massive gated community, with fences made from highways and rivers, its insularity made it, in Alexander Garvin's assessment, a housing project and not a planned community (Garvin, 2002). Twenty years after its completion, a resident wrote to the Times to list its many drawbacks — among them the mass migration of residents from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx who sought safety and security "only to find it in a barren wilderness" (Vasti, 1994). Little has changed since.

Co-op City also suffered from sustained structural failures. While the Riverbay Corporation charged that most of the project's structural deficiencies were the fault of the state housing agencies that oversaw its construction, it did not begin to find legal relief until the early part of this century, and defects are still visible. In 1983, leaks abounded and resulted in numerous vacancies (Daniels, 1983). A decade later, almost 150 of the 605 vacancies were the result of construction defects that had made the apartments uninhabitable (Cheslow, 1994). More seriously, the ground around the buildings has been sinking since Co-op City was completed — a consequence of building on hydraulic fill — causing entrance stairs to crumble and making more than 10 percent of the 11,000 spaces in the parking garages unsafe due to crumbling concrete (Cheslow, 1994).

Successes Despite the Criticism

Perhaps surprisingly, despite the plentiful criticism Co-op City suffered before, during, and after construction, the project is successful by many measures — if not necessarily those of the design community. These successes may have little to do with the architecture of Co-op City, and more to do with the community that UHF and the Riverbay Corporation helped to create even before the first of Co-op City's 55,000 residents moved in.

The UHF had from the beginning pursued not just affordable housing but integrated housing. In 1968, when just under 15 percent of applicants were non-white, UHF publicly stated that they intended for 20 percent of the 55,000 residents to be Black (Farrell, 1968) — and when Co-op City opened, this was the case. UHF achieved this in part through policies such as their 1969 commitment to Operation Open City, reserving more than 1,000 of the 15,500 remaining apartments for Black and Puerto Rican families, and going so far as to use the Co-op City credit union to finance the initial $500 deposit required to secure an apartment ("Co-op City Holding Apartments," 1969).

Such precise population management was not confined to Co-op City's founding. To this day the 15-member board of Co-op City continues to sustain policies that foster an integrated middle-income population. In 1991, after a failed attempt by the state to relocate Soviet Jewish émigrés at Starrett City, the Co-op City board approved a plan to settle 250 émigré families in partnership with the state (Tomasson, 1991). Such sustained policies are one reason E. Ostroff argued that moderate-cost cooperatives were essential not only to keep families in the city who would otherwise join the suburban exodus, but to create diversified neighborhoods (Ostroff, 1967). While most of the original residents were Jewish, Italian, or Irish, the population has shifted over time: from 80 percent white in 1972 to 55 percent Black, 25 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent white as of 2008 (Brenner, 2008). Despite these marked demographic changes, with a vacancy rate below 1 percent, Co-op City continues to be a fully integrated middle-income community, home to many of New York's police officers, correction workers, civil servants, and blue-collar workers.

The most dramatic demonstration of what the UHF had actually built came in 1975. When the Riverbay Corporation proposed increases in maintenance charges, Co-op City's cooperators collectively held a rent strike — and sustained it long enough that the UHF entered bankruptcy (Tomasson, 1975). The community that Schechter, Ostroff, Kazan and the other UHF leaders had worked to foster manifested itself as the force that destroyed the very organization that built it. The organization that had spent fifty years building cooperative housing was undone by a community acting cooperatively.

Conclusion

Today there is surprisingly little written about Co-op City. What is written continues to focus on its built environment while overlooking its remarkably successful social one. Adapting in a controlled manner to changing times, Co-op City's community continues to ensure that its members come from all walks of life, represent all races and creeds, and use the same schools, stores, and churches. However, with one of the highest concentrations of elderly residents in the city, there is room for further exploration of different social and environmental possibilities.

Whether such a controlled environment would survive an effort to better integrate its built environment and community with those around it is a question worth further exploration. Perhaps the relative utopia that Co-op City's cooperators enjoy can only survive as long as the highways, rivers, and lack of plentiful public transportation isolate their sizeable population. That is not a comfortable conclusion — but it may be an honest one.

¹ For a thorough study of Herman J. Jessor and his work for Kazan and the UHF, see "Labor and Housing in New York City: Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing Movement" by Tony Schuman, professor at the College of Architecture and Design at New Jersey Institute of Technology.