Preface

This book had its genesis in 2002, when I received an e-mail entitled “Nahamies Babies,” from Barbara Brandes Roth, who wanted to know if I was the same Peter Eisenstadt who had been her classmate in Mrs. Nahamies’s sixth grade class at P.S. 30 in Rochdale Village. I was. I soon discovered that Barbara had created a chat room for old Rochdale residents. After I’d spent a few months catching up with old friends and making new ones, it occurred to me that the history of Rochdale was a fascinating, untold tale, and one that I very much wanted to tell.

When Rochdale Village opened, in 1963, it was the largest housing cooperative in the world, with almost 6,000 families. It was also the largest integrated housing development in New York City in the 1960s, and perhaps the largest such development in the United States. Located in South Jamaica, Queens, the third largest African American neighborhood in New York City, it nonetheless opened with a majority (about 80 percent) of the apartments occupied by whites.

Rochdale became a vibrant integrated community, with its residents proud of what they had accomplished, but it did not last. Whites started to move out in large numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in time the complex would become almost entirely African American. The story that I have tried to tell in this book is of the initial promise of integrated housing and education in Rochdale, and its subsequent failure.

One of the families that moved to Rochdale Village soon after it opened was my own. We arrived in 1964, when I was ten years old, and left in 1973. It was in Rochdale Village that I completed elementary school and attended junior high and high school, was bar mitzvahed in a local synagogue, and weathered the storms of adolescence. I moved to Rochdale Village a boy and left a man. This book is in part my story, but it is also the story of the 5,859 other families who lived in Rochdale; Rochdale Village’s neighbors in the surrounding communities; its creators, especially Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses; and more generally all those in New York City and elsewhere who tried to make sense of the tangled imperatives of race in the America of the 1960s. Given my personal connection to many of the events covered in this book, it was probably inevitable that from time to time personal reminiscences enter into the narrative, yet this is not a memoir but a history of Rochdale Village and its broader significance.

Heretofore, with only a few meritorious exceptions, Rochdale Village has largely escaped the notice of historians, and this book rises on the solid foundations of primary research. I have made use of a number of archival collections. The extensive discussion of Robert Moses and his connection to Rochdale is garnered almost exclusively from his papers, to be found in several archives in New York City. Rochdale’s developer was the United Housing Foundation (UHF), and their records, located at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, have been an invaluable resource. In addition to plowing through the relevant archives, I have also made extensive use of newspapers and other contemporary notices from and about Rochdale. However, pride of place in my research goes to the fifty or so people who consented to be interviewed by me. They include my former classmates, teachers, and neighbors; some who achieved a modicum of renown or notoriety, and many who did not; Jews and gentiles, whites and blacks; those who are still bitter about their years in Rochdale, and those who look back in fondness. In all, I hope my book reflects the diverse spectrum of backgrounds and opinions that made Rochdale such an exciting and sometimes such an infuriating place to live. Writing this book has been a reminder of a lesson that historians like to preach to others but often fail to apply to their own lives: that the extraordinary historical forces that shape the destinies of nations are composed of ordinary people, just trying to get by.

I am one of those ex-Rochdalers who look back at their years there with a tincture of nostalgia, though I hope I am alert to the pitfalls of this and have kept the narrative from getting too cloying. Rochdale was where I grew up, and it was a great place to grow up. It was also one of the few places in the 1960s where New Yorkers collectively tried to grow up and to deal with, as practically as possible, the dominant political question of the day: whether it was possible for whites and racial minorities to ever drop their mutual suspicions long enough share the city peacefully, and perhaps even learn to live together.

Though this book focuses on Rochdale’s early years, when integration was first tried and then abandoned, this is not intended to slight the subsequent decades of its history, when it has continued to flourish as the largest predominantly African American cooperative in New York City. And if the fate of integration in Rochdale is the dominant story in this book, it cannot be separated from the broader effort of the United Housing Foundation in the 1950s and 1960s to make attractive, affordable, low-cost, limited-equity cooperative housing available for all New Yorkers. But by the early 1970s, New York City was undergoing a sea change in its politics, its economy, and its racial attitudes. The United Housing Foundation, beset by multiple problems, ceased operations, and its vision of limited-equity cooperatives was widely ridiculed as an idea whose time had passed. Integration slowly dropped out of our working racial vocabulary and was dismissed by all sides as little more than a sentimental folly that had been dissolved in the acids of the era’s racial tensions. And for the most part, that is where we have remained, in a city whose housing stock has become increasingly unaffordable, with its neighborhoods and schools still largely divided into a welter of racial and ethnic turfs. It is my hope that in some small measure my book on Rochdale will take readers back to an era in the history of New York City and the nation when both affordable housing and genuine integration seemed within our grasp, and people will ask themselves why we might not live in such a time again?