8. Integrated Living
Rochdale Village has established a pattern for integrating ghettoes which can and should be duplicated elsewhere.
Harold Ostroff, 1968
In the beginning of 1965, as the final families were moving into Rochdale, Abraham Kazan wrote about what he thought was the most important aspect of the new cooperative. “The most significant achievement of these activities was the bringing about of racial integration at Rochdale Village in a constructive and practical manner…. At Rochdale Village, approximately 4,700 white and 1,200 Negro families have jointly built a cooperative-housing development where they intend to live together, and equally enjoy all the benefits that they may expect from this cooperative development.” For Kazan and the UHF, integration in Rochdale wasn’t just highfalutin talk or a parade of good intentions. It was the genuine article, the thing itself. “It is one thing for people to attend political or union meetings or even religious or social functions where there is integration for a few hours and then return to their segregated neighborhoods. It is quite a different thing, however, to achieve an integrated community where white and Negro families live next door to one another.” In Rochdale “children share the same play areas, attend the same schools,” and “adults participate in the same community activities.” Integrate housing, and everything else will follow. “Volumes and volumes of all kinds of theories are being written on how to achieve better human relations. However, if we could concentrate our efforts on one phase—housing—we would be attacking the root of our other problems.”1 (And there, of course, is the rub, since the subsequent half century has demonstrated that America can make racial progress in some areas—even elect a black president—without seriously challenging the prevailing segregation in our neighborhoods and schools, without seriously “attacking the root” of our continuing racial separation.)
Figure 11. Two boys fixing a bicycle, 1968, with building 16 in the background. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.
For the UHF it was also very important that integration in Rochdale be “natural,” by which they primarily meant that it was accomplished without governmental sanctions or mandates. No one was forced to move to Rochdale, no one was bused to make Rochdale’s schools integrated, and no homeowner had to be coerced to rent to minorities. Blacks and whites lived together in Rochdale because they wanted to. “It is a natural result, that by integrating our neighborhoods we will, at the same time, create well balanced communities with integrated schools, churches, recreational and social activities.”2 A UHF official told the New York Herald Tribune in 1965 that they made “no conscious effort to ‘integrate’ Rochdale,” and “all Negro applicants who met the income limitations were treated equally with whites.”3 The belief that integration could be natural, requiring simply the decision of people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds to live together, was one of the initial strengths (and in the end, perhaps, one of the underlying weaknesses) of Rochdale’s racial experiment. Harold Ostroff would write in 1968 that Rochdale “is a well integrated community racially and economically. The influx of white families into this neighborhood have naturally integrated the schools and other neighborhood facilities.”4
Rochdale’s residents did view its integration as natural and unforced. The weekly newspaper Inside Rochdale reported in 1966 that while “the residents of Rochdale are no different from people anywhere” in their racial attitudes, “we [at] least gave integrated housing a try.” As a result, the cooperative “may easily become a national name as the advocates of Open Housing may look to Rochdale and say to the nation that integrated housing exists and works!” The article went on to say that “another summer has come and gone and Rochdale Village still exists in a strong and healthy condition. We have weathered our first three years of existence despite all sorts of gloomy predictions that this ‘experiment’ would not work.” Although there were possible storm clouds on the horizon, “our total community must still be a showplace for our city and nation to show that responsible integration can work.”5 No doubt the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society in 1965 had a keener appreciation of the challenge of integration than almost any other organization in Rochdale, but they too agreed that unforced proximity, like ocean waves washing over and eroding pebbles on a beach, would in time rub away the hard edges of prejudice and bias. “Rochdale, because it is a voluntarily integrated community, can become an outstanding example of how this American problem of mutual distrust, fear and distortion can be resolved.”6
By the mid-1960s, “natural” integration, UHF-style, was coming under attack by some civil rights groups as inadequate, though as usual it was Co-op City, rather than Rochdale, that bore the brunt of the attacks. Some civil rights groups complained that the projected percentage of minorities in Co-op City—the same as Rochdale’s at 15 to 20 percent—was too low, and that “natural” integration needed to be augmented by direct governmental intervention to improve the numbers. The UHF demurred, and Harold Ostroff promised in 1968 that “we can have integration without the involvement of the government” and that the UHF preferred the “voluntary” approach to integration.7 It is perhaps too easy in retrospect to criticize “natural integration” for its naivety, for its belief that individual volition can somehow trump the heavy weight of social forces that tend to keep races separate. But in the end, in a democracy, no amount of prodding, official encouragement, or even government sanction, will make people live together unless they want to and think it is in their interests to do so. However it was achieved, Rochdale Village in its early years was an integrated community whose residents, white and black, genuinely wanted to live there.
Nevertheless, the adjustments to living in Rochdale, for members of all races, were considerable. New arrivals had to adjust to their new neighbors within the cooperative and to living within South Jamaica. Given the predominantly Jewish character of Rochdale, it was the non-Jews, who included almost all the black families, who had the biggest adjustments to make to living within the complex. Faced with the overwhelmingly African American character of the surrounding neighborhood, it was the Jews and other whites who had to make the greatest adjustment to South Jamaica. There were successes and failures in both endeavors.
Blacks (and other non-Jews) who moved to Rochdale found themselves living amid a public culture that was overwhelmingly Jewish, both in its demography and its character. As Harold Ostroff said, one reason why whites moved to Rochdale in large numbers was that it was “a large enough community it wasn’t going to be a little isolated co-op in the midst of a black community.”8 A number of families moved to Rochdale because they felt that its environment would be more Jewish than their changing original neighborhoods. One man remembers, “My father had died and my mother didn’t feel up to dealing with a house on her own. We were also one of about two or three Jewish families in a huge Irish Catholic enclave and she wanted us to grow up knowing other Jews.”9 They weren’t disappointed, as Rochdale soon had three synagogues, and early High Holy Day services, jointly conducted by the Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, that filled the 2,000-seat auditorium in the Community Center.10 A 1965 survey found two-thirds of Rochdale’s residents were professing Jews.11
Furthermore, a large number of residents were Jewish by cultural background and considered themselves secular Jews. This was the orientation of the UHF and most of its staff, the product of the secular Jewish culture of the Jewish labor movement in early twentieth century New York. (Harold Ostroff would have a second career after leaving the UHF in 1975 as president of the Forward Association, publisher of the venerable Yiddish paper the Forverts, and was the main creator of its English-language weekly, the Forward.)12 Among older people, Yiddish was still widely spoken, and there were occasional advertisements in Inside Rochdale in Yiddish; the Senior Citizens Club would have occasional Yiddish poetry nights. Libby Kahane, the wife of an Orthodox rabbi, remembered that “a great many residents of Rochdale Village were retired tailors and seamstresses, who had arrived in the United States in their teens and whose mother tongue was Yiddish. Wherever I went in Rochdale Village, I heard people speaking Yiddish, and I thought intolerantly, ‘So many years in the country and they haven’t learned English yet!’” If a rebbitzin (rabbi’s wife) felt that Rochdale was in some sense “too Jewish,” non-Jews doubtless had greater difficulties.13
It was on the level of personal interaction that some of the complexities of integration became most apparent. Elderly blacks felt out of place in the senior citizens’ clubs. Although blacks were welcomed—“we try to urge Negroes to come in but they are shy; maybe they want to keep away,” said one woman—it is easy to why blacks might have been diffident about joining a club that was described as consisting of “dozens of elderly men and two women playing pinochle and gin rummy, many speaking in Yiddish.”14 If, by common consensus, black senior citizens tended to spend nice afternoons indoors, perhaps enjoying the air-conditioning, elderly Jews treated Rochdale as Miami Beach North, and loved to spend their afternoons sunbathing seated on park benches, grouchily complaining about those who disturbed their reveries. They complained about noisy children and speeding bicyclists, and adopted a proprietary attitude toward their perches, and according to some accounts informed those who had the temerity to preempt their accustomed seats, “‘You’re sitting on my bench,’ as if they owned it.”15
Some blacks felt submerged in Rochdale’s profoundly Jewish culture, and perhaps experienced some cultural insensitivity, a sense that the openness to blacks was an invitation to join the Jews on their terms. One man recounted his single session at a folk-dance group; he never went back because many of the dances and folk songs were Jewish. One black man told a reporter in 1965 that “we have no anti-Semitic feelings, but we don’t want to be overwhelmed by Jewish culture.” He complained that his seven-year-old son was having “problems about his identity” and wanted to stay home from school on even minor Jewish holidays.16 A black woman said her son’s best friends were some “lovely Jewish boys” but she wished that he would show a greater interest in his black heritage.17
There were more serious complaints. Some blacks were irritated at being referred to by the derogatory Yiddish term for blacks, schwartze. “Do they really think,” one woman told Harvey Swados, “that we’re incapable of learning the one Yiddish word that refers to us?”18 One man, of mixed African American and Jewish parentage, said many years later, with a bit of exaggeration to make a point, “When I first moved in to Rochdale I thought schwartze was my father’s nickname.” (He also complained that the Rochdale Co-operative Supermarket never had a black person behind the deli counter, actually touching the cold cuts and other “appetizing” sold to customers.)19 There were differing opinions on whether “the stare,” that primal form of racial interaction, had been banished from Rochdale. One black man told a reporter in 1965 that in Rochdale “the best feeling is that there is no feeling, no hostility, none of those stares when you get off the elevator.” One black woman said that when she did her laundry in her own building she had no problem, but once, when she had to go to a different laundry room, she was the recipient of “the stare.”20
As was and is generally the case, black teenagers were particularly likely to be targets of suspicious glances, though once again there are differences of opinion as to the pervasiveness of the hostile once-overs. Some blacks who were teenagers in Rochdale remembered little in the way of getting the fish-eye from residents or shopkeepers; others did.21 One common means of retaliation was to exploit white fears. Black teenagers walking several abreast on Rochdale’s pathways might enjoy the sight of white teens scattering meekly before them. One man remembers that when he and his friends went to the Co-op Supermarket to purchase a drink and cupcake for a quarter, “we always had a sense of being watched by the supervision, and it soon became a game; three of us would each go down different aisles so they would have to choose to follow only one of us.”22
At times subtle class differences also came into play within the African American families in Rochdale and between whites and blacks. Some blacks in Rochdale complained of the “Sag Harbor crowd,” a reference to the dicty haunt on eastern Long Island for well-to-do blacks. “They have their summer houses and boats and two cars and we don’t see them much.”
If the black bourgeoisie lived in Rochdale, the Jewish bourgeoisie lived elsewhere, in places like Great Neck on Long Island or Scarsdale in Westchester. As one reporter wrote in 1965, “Many of Rochdale’s Negroes feel that they are superior to their White neighbors in education and social attainment.”23 Rochdale was home to lower-middle-class Jews and solidly middle-class blacks, reflecting both the difficulties blacks had in finding decent housing and the slipperiness of class distinctions. Blacks who moved to Rochdale often felt that in some sense they had “made it,” while many Jewish families felt they were just getting by. Given the prevalence of civil servants among Rochdale’s black families, including many teachers, it is entirely possible that there was a higher percentage of blacks with college degrees than whites. As Harvey Swados suggested, middle-class blacks found themselves living “in a Jewish community composed substantially of simple working-class people or their children” and often cringed at the perceived cultural differences.24
Not to put too fine a point on it, some blacks found their Jewish neighbors somewhat slovenly. Since many black families had moved to Rochdale from private homes, this perception may in part reflect unease with the greater intimacy of apartment-house living. Cal Jones said a number of black families had “moved from private homes and had sold their homes to move to Rochdale, and some were terribly dissatisfied about it—when you lived in a home you might have kept your lawn manicured and here someone is leaving garbage in the back hall. In your own home, you could lavish special attention on things; now they were just a door on a floor.”25 One black housewife was appalled that Jewish women hung their blankets and bed linen over the balconies. “I didn’t know what to think. Nobody ever did that where we used to live.”26 One black man saw an elderly Jewish man spit on the floor of the building near the entranceway, and told him he thought it was disgusting. “What’s the matter?” the man replied. “The porter will clean it up.”27
Others found Jews overinquisitive and overintrusive, or in common parlance, a bit “pushy.” One woman complained that Jewish women were friendly, but when they visited her apartment they seemed surprised to see that she was a tidy housekeeper. Other Jewish women would ask how much the furnishings cost, and then shake their heads knowingly, telling her that she paid too much, informing her where she could have gotten them wholesale. One day a black woman, perhaps in an effort to better understand her neighbors, was in the laundry room reading Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, a popular murder mystery of the day with a pregnant and comely female corpse discovered on the grounds of a synagogue. She was told angrily by another woman not to read the book, because “it’ll give you all the wrong ideas about us.”28
By no means were all the opinions of Jews negative. Indeed, philo-Semitism was one reason many blacks moved to Rochdale, assuming that Jews would make the perfect partners for an experiment in integration, because, according to one person interviewed by Swados, Jews were (in comparison to other whites) “more concerned than most with the quality of their children’s education, but that they are more cultivated, more sensitive, more liberal-minded.”29 Cal Jones, for instance, moved to Rochdale in part because he knew “an overwhelming majority of the community would be Jewish, and I thought the fight for quality education would be somewhat easier having Jewish neighbors who were familiar with the education system.”30 But of course close proximity can disabuse a person of positive as well as negative stereotypes, and what most people discovered was that their neighbors, however committed to integration, were not particularly elevated in either their ideals or actions, and had the same gamut of prejudices to be found elsewhere.
Rochdale’s playgrounds and other recreational areas afforded other integration test sites. Because Rochdale’s facilities were in much better shape than comparable local grounds, they were heavily used both by Rochdale residents and by members of the surrounding community. This seems to have worked well, perhaps because sports is a relatively unself-conscious activity, and doesn’t require much in the way of preliminary discussion or friendly overtures. You just choose up sides and play. As one man remembered, “When we needed one more for punchball or stickball it didn’t matter if the kid was black or white, Jewish or gentile.”31 As someone else told me, “If everyone in Rochdale had been a jock, there never would have been any problems.”32
Playing sports was one thing; friendship and greater degrees of intimacy was another. Children generally got along fine. Their elders had more difficulty. Whenever Evlynne Braithwaithe, aged ten or eleven, would visit the home of a white classmate, she remembers that “[the parents] were kind of surprised that so-and-so had a little black friend.” With the onset of puberty and dating racial divisions sometimes created an additional barrier between young people of different ages. The great teenage hangout was the area in front of the Community Center, with its own complex social scene and informal rules. One woman remembered that she would leave her house at seven o’clock and sit on a bench until ten o’clock, just talking. “If you had a boyfriend you snuck off into the bushes and made out, but if you didn’t have a boyfriend you just sat on the bench and gossiped.” Although it was far from the rule, interracial dating (which at least in one instance led to marriage) was not uncommon.33 However, many of the cliques and groups that formed in this setting were consciously monoracial. As one white teenager explained to Harvey Swados34
There’s no problem between us [blacks and whites] here at Rochdale…. We never even think about it, at least when we see each other individually. It’s only when we get together like here, as a bunch, that we tend to separate—I don’t know why. There must be 15, 20 gangs like ours, and it’s true that they’re mostly separate, Negro and white. But the fact that we [white teenagers] hang out together doesn’t mean that we don’t get on swell with the Negro kids.
As it was with the teenagers, so it was with their parents. Although plenty of interracial adult friendships grew in Rochdale, most residents, white and black, tended to form their closest relationships within their own race. It was no doubt true, as a reporter stated in 1965, that integration in Rochdale “produced neither an easy assimilation of Negroes into the community nor [an] intimate social contact between the races.”35 A black cooperator said in 1969 that most of his friends were black, though he had made a few white friends as well. Rochdale wasn’t all “love thy neighbor, but I get along fine.”36 This is perhaps all that one can or should expect. Jane Jacobs argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that “overcoming residential discrimination comes hard where people have no means of keeping a civilized public life on a basically dignified public footing, and their private lives on a private footing.”37 If she could have overcome her prejudices against cooperative housing, she might have found what she was looking for in Rochdale.
However, there were distinct limitations in thinking of integration in Rochdale as a natural and almost casual process. It left many Rochdale residents thinking that integration was simply a matter of getting along with interracial neighbors, a problem to be solved personally and individually. And many Rochdale residents felt that they had already done their bit for the cause, and to ask them to go further or do any more would be unfair. In response to a sense of pressure of this sort, a white resident of Rochdale wrote in 1965 that while many praise the cooperative as a great experiment in integration, “we came to Rochdale, not as fighters for integration, but as people who have accepted integration as a way of life.”38
Integration as “a way of life” basically meant passive integration, integration by a sort of social osmosis, something that happened to you, rather than something you sought out. Now, it is true that all Rochdale cooperators, by the mere act of living in Rochdale, had done more to realize integration as a practical ideal than almost any other group of New Yorkers. But ultimately it would not be enough. To conquer the centrifugal forces that always threaten to pull experiments of this sort apart, especially during the polarizing racial climate of the 1960s, the push for integration had to be on some level deliberate and self-conscious, consciously striving to a predetermined goal. To preserve what had been created in Rochdale it was necessary to strive for more, in order to place integration in Rochdale on a more secure and stable basis. Some recognized this early on. The Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society wrote in 1965 that both whites and blacks “live in an unreal world, created out of the distortions and suspicions that usually accompany separation and distance.” To really work, integration had to be “a two-way street with benefits flowing in both directions.”39 This would always be a challenge.
The formation of the Negro Cultural Society provides some insight into the dilemmas faced by blacks in Rochdale’s early years. Despite the huge number of Jewish organizations in Rochdale, there was no unanimous support among blacks in Rochdale for forming their own organization. There was some feeling that if they formed a separate organization “we were just segregating ourselves all over again,” and that instead they should join other organizations and participate fully within them. This was the position of the highest-ranking African American UHF official in Rochdale, the assistant manager Leonard Bridges. The UHF exerted subtle pressure against a separate black organization, on the grounds that “whenever blacks organize whites become concerned that we’re coming after them.” (Those who formed the several score Jewish organizations in Rochdale evidently had few fears that they would be seen as separatist and unwelcoming to non-Jews.)40
In any event, the Negro Cultural Society was formed out of a spirit of admiration and emulation of Jewish organizational abilities. Cal Jones for one was impressed by the political skills of Jews and their penchant for forming themselves into an ever-growing array of clubs and associations. He told a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in 1965 that “I guess you have to make it easy for Negroes to join things,” because they were “Johnny-come-latelies to organization.”41 In my discussion with Mr. Jones forty years after the comment, he said that what he meant was that the formation of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society was in part inspired by the plethora of Jewish organizations in Rochdale, and the desire to create a kindred group for blacks. After some discussion, it was decided to form an organization that would not be a branch of an existing group (such as the NAACP or CORE) but would be indigenous to Rochdale, and would not be explicitly political in its character. A poll of the blacks in Rochdale determined that the focus of the new group would be black history and culture. It would go out of its way to proclaim its inclusive character. In its initial announcement it claimed that the purpose of the society was to “promote fellowship and cooperation amongst Negroes and all other cooperators of Rochdale Village,” and that membership would be “open to all cooperators.”42
The Negro Cultural Society addressed the concern among many blacks in Rochdale that their culture was being submerged in a sea of Jewry. One member said in 1965, “Most Negroes are just discovering their past—how can we expect white people to respect us when we are afraid to organize or take pride in ourselves?”43 But the Negro Cultural Society was never meant to be the focus of its members’ associational life in Rochdale, and it encouraged its members to participate fully in other aspects of cultural life at Rochdale, and to join as many organizations as possible.44 Many whites attended meetings and functions of the Negro Cultural Society.45 The first dance was totally packed. “We had to save tables for other organizations in the community, because we didn’t want them to think that they weren’t wanted.”46 Looking back, Jones argues that the RVNCS and its successor, the Rochdale Black Society, was at its peak when Rochdale was integrated, and he attributes this to the healthy competition with Jewish organizations. Within the rich organizational stew that was Rochdale in the mid-1960s, everyone wanted to add their own ingredients.47
* * *
In many ways integration within Rochdale was easier than the integration of Rochdale into the surrounding community of South Jamaica. The relationship in the mid-1960s between the predominantly white cooperative and the overwhelmingly African American neighborhood was never easy, and there were suspicions on both sides, based not only on race, but on differences in religion, class, and culture. But in the end, Rochdale was indeed a part of South Jamaica physically, politically, and jurisdictionally, and often cooperated and collaborated with its neighbors. As with other aspects of the history of integration in Rochdale, the heyday was all too short and was never without tension; its ultimate failure was perhaps preordained. The problems began very early in Rochdale’s history.
One of the things Abraham Kazan most wanted to build in Rochdale Village was a public swimming pool. In a cooperative as large as Rochdale, he hoped, every type of amenity could be provided. Rochdale had enough park space to accommodate not only the usual greensward, but augmented recreational facilities including a pool. Kazan had never built a cooperative in an area that was so relatively ill-served in terms of public recreation—there were no large swimming pools in southeastern Queens. As Kazan said in his memoirs, “I thought that we should have a swimming pool in the development in view of the fact that the area is quite inland, and a good many of the people can’t afford to go to the beach by car.” A swimming pool would benefit the residents of Rochdale, and it would be an overture to the surrounding community, a tangible sign of the benefits accrued from the building of Rochdale.48
Large public swimming pools had long been one of the defining projects of midcentury urban renewal and revitalization. Probably nothing built by Robert Moses was received with as much acclaim, or has retained more of its luster, than the chain of swimming pools he built under the auspices of the WPA in the mid-1930s. However, even with Moses’s extensive building program, large areas of the city were without pools; an announced pool in St. Albans Park at Merrick Road and Linden Boulevard was never built, and the two public pools in Queens, in Astoria and Flushing Meadows, were far from South Jamaica.49 The pools were public facilities, tokens and reminders of the ability of government to play a positive role in improving the lives of average citizens. But the swimming pools were also what architectural historian Marta Gutman has called “spaces of public informality,” where, within a crowd, people could swim and cavort, mingle or tryst, and carve out a personal space within the anonymity of a large crowd. And it was this informality, this public intimacy, that would account for much of the controversy that so often has surrounded their use.50
The ardor for public swimming pools in New York City had considerably cooled by the early 1960s. No municipal pools had been built in the city in the fifteen years after World War II.51 Nonetheless, by the early 1960s there was some renewed interest in building a new generation of pools in minority neighborhoods, such as the Rochdale pool. These were intended to be much smaller than the grand public WPA monuments. In 1963 the City Planning Commission approved a plan for the UHF to turn over twenty-four acres of the Rochdale site to the City Parks Department—15 percent of the entire complex—for the purpose of building a combination athletic center, swimming pool, and ice-skating rink.52 In 1963 plans were published for the athletic complex, which included an up-to-date field house equipped with a quarter-mile track, basketball courts, tennis courts, and spectator stands, as well as space for relatively exotic field sports that I do not remember seeing on other playing fields of southeastern Queens, such as shot-putting and pole-vaulting. The City Planning Commission approved $107,200 to build the facilities, to be supplemented by $20,000 from the UHF. The recreation facility, it was stressed, would “be open to residents of Rochdale and the surrounding area.”53
But the proposed athletic complex ran into problems almost immediately. In that same month a Jamaica Swimming Pool Committee that had been engaged in a long struggle to build a pool in southeastern Queens was outraged that Jamaica’s pool would be located at Rochdale, and would be built with public funds but located on private property (the latter was not true technically, but it would no doubt have been known to all as “the Rochdale pool”). Above all, the committee was worried about the potential that “Rochdale residents would crowd out those who need the pool more.”54
Evidently little was done to push the proposal forward over the next year. As was its wont, the UHF concentrated its efforts on opening and filling the buildings, leaving all the landscaping projects to a later day. But by the spring of 1964, with the first two sections largely moved in, and a giant sandlot occupying the location of the proposed recreational facility, it was time to make the final decision on whether or not to proceed. Community opposition to a Rochdale pool continued. The Southeast Queens Interfaith Committee, which had a wide representation of Jewish, Protestant, and Roman Catholic congregations in the area, opposed the location of the pool at Rochdale, preferring a location in an undeveloped area of nearby Baisley Pond Park, about four blocks from Rochdale, and in a neighborhood that was almost entirely African American. Herbert Kahn, a representative of the Rochdale Village Jewish Center (the Conservative synagogue), seconded that suggestion, and argued that the Baisley Pond Park location would be a “more appropriate location to serve all of Queens rather than one section.”55
But if local community groups generally favored locating the pool outside the cooperative, some were willing to let the issue slide, out of fear that if the deal with the UHF and the Parks Department fell through there would be no Jamaica pool at all. Even some of those who favored a Baisley Pond Park site for the pool worried about the avidity with which some Rochdale residents argued for a location outside of the cooperative; and there was indeed a great deal of opposition to the swimming pool from Rochdale’s recently arrived residents.56 The NAACP and its branch president Paul Gibson urged Rochdale Village “to live up to its role as a part of the community at large,” and hoped “no walls—real or invisible—would separate the cooperative from the surrounding areas.”
In early May of 1964, a public forum was held to discuss the pool controversy. Five hundred to six hundred persons, primarily from Rochdale Village, crowded into a local church. The Queens borough president, Mario J. Cariello, wrote Newbold Morris (who in 1960 had replaced Robert Moses as city parks commissioner): “The majority of those present were unanimous in their opposition to the swimming pool and ice-skating rink being located at this site. One of their objections was that it could increase tensions among the residents of Rochdale Village and the surrounding community. Also, statements were made that they did not want a Coney Island within the Village.” Rochdale residents subsequently attended other meetings, both in and outside the cooperative, complained to Kazan and the UHF, and wrote letters to politicians, some of which are quoted below.57
There were, in different variations, two main reasons Rochdale residents gave for opposing the pool. The more understandable of the reasons was that a pool would be noisy and messy, a trysting place for the amorous and the boisterous, who would leave the detritus of their adventures behind them. Who indeed would want to live in close proximity to a large public swimming pool? Although the pool would have been at some distance from the residential sections, it was certainly close enough that the calm of a summer’s day in Rochdale would have been frequently pierced by aquatic squeals. This sentiment was perhaps especially keen for the large number of senior citizens at Rochdale: “Since I have left the Boro of the Bronx for a cooperative apartment called Rochdale Village, with the knowledge that the balance of my God-given years will be spent in peace and quiet. Sir, as a citizen and life long Democrat, I urge you, honorable Sir, to veto that decision [for the swimming pool]. Sir, 100% of all the citizens in the development are positively against your decision.”58
The other reason for opposing the pool was more troubling: the best way to maintain peace with the surrounding community was by limiting contact. One Rochdale resident wrote to Mayor Wagner in 1964 that “there are currently many points of friction and resentment on the part of the neighboring community with reference to Rochdale Village. The proposed site [the pool] further aggravates the current situation.” The writer suggested that not building the pool would increase the “harmony” between Rochdale and its environs. “A swimming pool for the public would open the entire Rochdale area for everyone, destroying privacy, eliminating the community atmosphere which many of the cooperators found an attractive reason to buy.”59
What residents wanted in Rochdale, perhaps more than anything else, was stability, a sense that they were the masters of their own destiny. The pool, an alien, outside element, could disturb this, and almost everyone moving to Rochdale had experience with the vagaries of sudden neighborhood change. “We are not people of means and felt that Rochdale Village was our answer to our housing problem, but it certainly won’t be the answer to anything if this is allowed to be accomplished. The development has all the earmarks and makings of a wonderful little city and would be the answer for so many of our income levels, but it certainly would put a damper on our moving there with a public pool smack in the center of things.”60 Some were blunter: Rochdale was private. “There will be approximately 22,000 in the cooperative without inviting outsiders on the property.”61
The unspoken perception was that it was not just blacks, but poor blacks who would be the pool’s primary users. Perhaps the great age of the public swimming pool had passed by the early 1960s; they were an easier sell in the 1930s, when fewer people had cars. By the time Rochdale opened, most residents had become accustomed, on hot summer days, to get in their cars and drive to Jones or Rockaway Beach, rather than spend the day at a pool. Some questioned how much Rochdale residents themselves really needed or wanted a place for swimming. As was so often the case where race and housing were concerned, racial fears were redefined as protection of the community from outsiders:62
I was told that integration has come up as an issue of the pool on Rochdale Village property. I want to state that this has nothing to do with my objection to the pool [emphasis in original]. I am for integration and I am objecting to this pool as someone who doesn’t want her home messed up and feels that the people in the development would not get any benefits out of a pool—only the mess.
Even though Rochdale residents did not yet have any direct control over cooperative affairs—Kazan and the UHF were calling all the shots, and would be doing so for a number of years—the strong and apparently more or less unanimous opposition to the pool forced Kazan’s hand. As he wrote to Newbold Morris in May, a number of groups opposed the pool: Rochdale residents, African American homeowners in the immediate vicinity, who evidently shared the same fears as many Rochdale residents about the noisy eyesore the pool would create, and community groups that were pushing for a Baisley Pond Park site:63
The opposition comes from cooperators of Rochdale Village who are afraid of disturbances from the large number of people attracted by the pool, as well as from private home owners in the area.
This opposition is also fostered by the group which has been trying for years to get a pool elsewhere in Jamaica and which now claims that by putting the pool close to Rochdale Village apartments, [it] would be a private pool for that development.
In view of the strong opposition, I would suggest that you find another location.
Newbold Morris would have none of it, and sounding much like his predecessor as city parks commissioner, he told Kazan that the pool would be built in Rochdale or there would be no swimming pool. The only reason the project had any support, Newbold replied, was that Kazan had convinced the mayor that the project had to be built in Rochdale. Morris was evidently skeptical from the start, and saw the siting controversy as a way to withdraw from the project altogether. “There are a lot of other claims on the city’s borrowing capacity and I don’t believe this would be a top priority.” Sometime over the summer of 1964 the Rochdale Village pool died a quiet bureaucratic death.64 No pool was ever built in Rochdale, and no pool was ever built in Baisley Pond Park or elsewhere in Jamaica, and if this was a victory, there were many people, black and white, who shared the credit. For his part, in his memoirs Abraham Kazan thought those who had opposed a swimming pool complex in Rochdale had made “a grave mistake.”65
The decision not to build a swimming pool was in many ways Rochdale’s first act as a cooperative, charting its own destiny. It marked the first time that the cooperators successfully challenged the leadership of Kazan and the UHF. The swimming pool controversy was concluded before half the families had moved in to Rochdale. It was largely forgotten, and remembered, if at all, as an example of the guarded insularity of Rochdale’s residents toward the surrounding community.66 The episode demonstrates, beyond a doubt, that as the white residents frequently claimed, just because they had moved to Rochdale, that didn’t mean they didn’t share the same biases, prejudices, and misgivings about racial integration as any random group of New Yorkers in the mid-1960s. With the pool controversy as context, it makes the strides that Rochdale would achieve in creating an integrated community all the more remarkable.
In the end, the story of the unbuilt Rochdale swimming pool goes beyond the easy identification of heroes and villains. The evidence is clear that community groups in Jamaica were almost as opposed to a Rochdale pool as were the cooperative’s residents. The pool proposal could not overcome the feeling of mutual wariness on all sides. But assigning the greater part of the blame to Rochdale’s residents for the pool fiasco is fair. If Rochdale’s residents had supported the pool, despite the objection of local community groups who favored its location elsewhere, it probably would have been built. The unbuilt pool was an initial act of ungenerosity by Rochdale’s residents. It does not cancel out the genuine efforts made within Rochdale to build an interracial society, but if nothing else the failure to build the pool should have been a warning, a sign that mutual suspicions could doom this experiment in integration. No community is an island, especially not one with professions to racial equality. We do not know what would have happened if the pool had been built; we’re left with a sense of lost possibilities. A woman who grew up in Rochdale remembered the controversy and what Rochdale lacked on steamy summer days:67
No swimming pool was built because they said they could not restrict visitors to the pool and therefore outside people and kids from Jamaica could not be turned away. So instead of practicing this chlorine scented form of discrimination they made these useless fountains. On hot days I’d sit outside the fountain with my friends and hope that a breeze would send the spray of water our way.
Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the boundaries between Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica occurred on the evening of November 9, 1965, when, commencing at 5:27, the lights began to go out all over New York City. The failure of a substation on the Canadian side of the New York State–Ontario border led to a swift cascade of shortages and outages all across the northeast power grid. Customers of Consolidated Edison, the supplier of electricity to almost everyone and everything in New York City, soon found themselves in the dark and without power. In most places in the city, it did not return until the following morning. But in Rochdale the lights never went out. Abraham Kazan had been an opponent of Con Edison for many decades, viewing it as an overprivileged and overpriced monopoly. Electricity was one thing Kazan was convinced could and should be generated cooperatively, and when the UHF and Con Edison fell into disagreement about rating structures for the new cooperative in Jamaica, Kazan resolved to go it alone and build an independent power plant for Rochdale, a “total energy” plant providing, in addition to electricity, heat in the winter and central air-conditioning in the summer, which would have been impossible without the power plant.68 Con Edison officials accused Kazan of a plot to undermine the capitalist way of life, and with the ingrained arrogance that comes with being the only game in town, folded their hands and waited for Kazan’s folly to fail.69 When he tried to build his power plant, one Con Edison official smirked and said, “He will acquire a bit of an education.”70 But the only education Kazan received was in how to build successful power plants. And November 9, 1965, showed an additional advantage of the new power plant. When the northeast grid crashed, and Con Edison customers lost all power, Rochdale Village’s plant continued to generate electricity. It was the largest residential area in New York City that did not lose power.71
Shortly after the blackout commenced people in Rochdale discovered something had gone terribly wrong elsewhere in the city. Most learned about it from the radio, or by word of mouth, as neighbors knocked on each other’s doors and worried about homeward-bound breadwinners. (My dad didn’t make it home until after eleven o’clock, having been caught in a stalled subway train.) Some discovered what was happening just by looking out their windows. “I lived in building 12 and had a great view of Kennedy Airport,” one man remembers. “I can remember standing on the terrace, watching the lights go off, sort of in a wave, not exactly all at once. For a few moments (minutes?) Kennedy was pitch-black too. Then their backup lights came on. And it was Kennedy, darkness all around, and Rochdale, with lights.”72 There were stories—perhaps apocryphal—that JFK used Rochdale as a beacon for flights that were in the air at the time of the blackout.73
As the night wore on and the rest of the city did not get their lights back, the magnitude of the event became clear. In many ways it was a triumphant night in Rochdale, with pride that the cooperative had the know-how and savvy to keep the juice flowing, and pride in somehow being special, being different. One man, who finally made his way back to Rochdale that evening, told the New York Post that it was “shining like a silver lake in a black desert.”74 (As an eleven-year-old, I felt this pride tempered somewhat by feeling deprived in having no “where were you when the lights went out?” stories; I envied my classmates who the next morning in school told tales of a night of candles and flashlights.) For some it was a confirmation that they had been right to move to Rochdale in the first place. One woman wrote the Long Island Press that the first families to move to Rochdale had been “the pioneers, the martyrs” and they had problems (including intermittent power outages), but on that long, cool night when she heard her refrigerator humming, she felt, for the first time, that all those early problems had been worth it, and the basic concept behind Rochdale, of cooperation and community self-help, had been the correct all along. Rochdale Village was “snug and well-lit, a bright island in a sea of darkness.”75
Perhaps never before or afterward were the boundaries between Rochdale and the surrounding community as clear as they were on the night of the blackout. But even in broad daylight, there was no mistaking where the rest of South Jamaica ended, and where Rochdale began, with its twenty fourteen-story new redbrick buildings towering over the surrounding parks and single family homes. And everyone also knew that the boundaries were not merely architectural; when you entered Rochdale, you were leaving an overwhelmingly African American neighborhood for an area that was predominantly white and Jewish. Though the boundaries were primarily social and psychological, for some on both sides, Rochdale’s borders became reified into a racial no-man’s-land.
The barriers were real. If the swimming pool controversy was soon forgotten, there were other irritations. During its first few years, the Rochdale Village Day Camp was not open to the outside community, nor was the Rochdale Village Athletic League. (This changed by the late 1960s.) And although this was not a policy of Rochdale Village itself, the Long Island Press did not hire paperboys living outside of Rochdale to deliver its paper to Rochdale residents.76
And there was undoubtedly tension; suspicion of blacks from the surrounding community, especially teenagers, treading on Rochdale turf, along with Rochdale residents’ sense that they were not particularly welcome outside its grounds. This was not limited to whites; blacks from Rochdale were sometimes called “oreos” (black outside, white inside) by residents of South Jamaica.77
But this is only part of the story. Though the boundaries between Rochdale Village and South Jamaica were real, they were generally porous and permeable, and easily and frequently crossed. If persons from the surrounding community were not effusively greeted on their arrival, they were never confronted or turned away. Rochdale was never a “turf” defended by gangs; there were no southeastern Queens equivalents of the Jets or Sharks. And the reverse is true as well. Those who grew up in South Jamaica knew Rochdale, and those who grew up in Rochdale knew South Jamaica. As big as Rochdale was at 170 acres, most people did not spend all their time within its confines. To go anywhere from Rochdale, you had to pass through the rest of South Jamaica. Indeed there were some parts of Rochdale that did not remain within Rochdale. Some key institutions of the cooperative, including all its synagogues and some shopping strips, bordered on Rochdale from adjacent streets.
By the time adolescence beckoned, most Rochdale teens were exploring Jamaica and South Jamaica, riding their bicycles through the neighborhood, eating at its fast-food establishments, hanging out in the business district of Jamaica Avenue (depending on one’s taste, shopping in the department stores or sampling the wares in the head shops and record stores), changing buses at Jamaica’s bus terminal, or (like me) spending long afternoons after school exploring the holdings of the marvelously capacious main branch of the Queens Borough Public Library in downtown Jamaica, in their brand-new building.
And Rochdale never lacked for visitors. Some came to shop in the cooperative’s market, the first supermarket in South Jamaica (where anyone could become a member) or shop in the other stores in Rochdale’s malls, variously owned by Jews and blacks, with the Soul Brothers barbershop next door to a Jewish delicatessen.78 Rochdale was a magnet. Teenagers came to hang out in front of the community center.79 It was, one man from South Jamaica told me, a great place to meet girls and to party.80 There was a cultural exchange between Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica, in some cases benign (language, slang, and music), and some less so (pot and other drugs). In any event, Rochdale and South Jamaica were linked in countless ways.
Still, these connections didn’t preclude contrasting and conflicting perceptions. Rochdale residents were convinced that they were bringing benefits to South Jamaica through their very presence; those already living there were less sure. It was all too easy for each side to accumulate and nurse their separate grievances: overtures and goodwill gestures spurned, subtle condescensions, newcomers brushing off the advice of longtime residents, old-timers obdurately refusing to recognize that things had changed, white folks who were apparently full of themselves and didn’t seem to really listen carefully to what black folks had to say, blacks who seemed not to like Jews very much.
Perhaps the worst problem was that there was no single venue in which differences were discussed and problems aired. The self-governance of Rochdale forced its residents to meet together regularly, but nothing similar existed for Rochdale and its neighbors, and there was no assumption of common interests. Indeed, many on both sides felt the interests of Rochdale and South Jamaica were inimical. Both the UHF and the city can be faulted for paying relatively little attention as Rochdale was being built to how this interaction would work. Part of the problem was that Rochdale was built in the last days before Jane Jacobs–style protests and other manifestations of 1960s activism made more intensive community involvement and consultation accepted practice. As a onetime resident of Rochdale has noted, drawing on his extensive experience within city government,81
it appears as if it [Rochdale] was just plopped down in the middle of this community without any real efforts at public consultations. The procedures that developers have to follow today (working with Community Boards, environmental impact statements, and so forth) really didn’t exist at the time. In Rochdale’s case, it could have made a difference in establishing a relationship with the surrounding community…. Beyond that, Rochdale was built without a community infrastructure in place to support it. The schools weren’t ready, the street system wasn’t ready, and the transportation system wasn’t either.
This does not mean that there were no efforts to mitigate this lack of planning; many residents of Rochdale, white and black, tried to make connections. Harlem native Cal Jones, who was on the Community Relations Committee of the Rochdale House Congress, saw defusing tension as one of his roles in meetings between Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica. Initial meetings were often “a little hostile” because “Rochdale knew how to wield its political clout.”82 Each side of the divide had their own perceptions. Juanita Watkins remembered that a typical attitude was that “Rochdale was getting schools, police stations, this, that and the other, they were not only invaders, they had everything but the gates, there was a lot of resentment.” Eddie Abramson, editor and politician, remembers this from resentment on the receiving end: “The envy was there, there were about five or so community organizations, and they were unhappy for one reason, before Rochdale was built they didn’t have the resources within the community, and now here comes the benefits, the shopping center and other benefits. They were envious, some guys are troublemakers, they said we were here, nobody came for us, now all of a sudden here come the ‘Jews’ that was the term that was used, one neighbor would tell another.” One example of Rochdale’s clout that rankled local residents: Rochdale from its opening was connected to the New York City water supply, while the rest of South Jamaica had to make do with what was generally considered inferior quality water from the privately owned Jamaica Water Company.83
For Jones, Rochdale was “like this big elephant sucking the air out…. [W]ith the 25,000 people, there generally were a healthy [number of] representatives from Rochdale.” South Jamaicans could easily feel outnumbered and outmaneuvered. That’s why it was particularly important, from Jones’s perspective, that blacks from Rochdale attend these meetings, so they didn’t polarize too neatly along racial lines. And according to Jones, in the end, this was generally what happened: “The anger at Rochdale usually resolved itself by joining forces and coming to a way of working together.”84
Indeed, Rochdale and South Jamaica worked together to prevent the city from building low-income housing adjacent to the cooperative. As discussed earlier, in the mid-1950s black community groups had blocked the efforts to build low- income housing next to Baisley Pond Park, arguing that there was one middle-class black neighborhood in the city, and it needed to stay that way. When similar plans were revived in the mid-1960s, black community groups were now joined by Rochdale. In 1965, the New York City Housing Authority tried to propose a similar five-hundred-unit low-income project at Baisley Boulevard and 167th Street, across from Rochdale’s newly opened PS 30. This proposal, Inside Rochdale reported in April 1965, “had thousands of people upset and thousands more planning mass meetings, demonstrations and protest marches.” A mass meeting, held at the Orthodox synagogue in Rochdale, attracted the participation of at least thirteen organizations from inside and outside Rochdale. The reporter concluded that “Negro community leaders” as well as those in Rochdale “are against a low-rent project in Jamaica.”85
It was difficult to overcome the perception that blacks and whites would naturally align themselves on opposing sides when it came to housing controversies involving low-income projects. An article in the New York Amsterdam News, “Whites Reject Low Rent Housing,” portrayed the episode as a simple black/Jewish dichotomy. “A low rent housing project that would provide 500 apartments for Negroes was opposed Wed night at a predominantly all-white rally at the Rochdale traditional synagogue.” This was not very good reporting: the meeting was hardly all-white, and neither was the PTA of PS 30 (a school that had students from inside and outside Rochdale), the organization that was spearheading much of the opposition. Mary Redic, the president of the PTA, who was quoted in several articles, wrote angrily to the Amsterdam News: “I am very surprised that you did not ascertain before you wrote this article that I, Mary Redic, am a Negro. [And she did not live in Rochdale.] And the decision of our PTA was not reached by the whites of Rochdale but by a very well integrated PTA.”86
The argument could now be made that the additional housing might seriously interfere with the progress of integration in Rochdale. Black and white opponents basically agreed that, with its impact on schools and other resources, the project “would result in an increase of unbalanced integration,” or, in the words of Lenny Vaughan, president of the Baisley Civic Association, it might “create a Negro ghetto.” This opposition was sufficient to make the Queens borough president reverse his previous approval of the project.87 The next year, civic groups in and around Rochdale joined together to kill an extension of the Clearview Expressway through Springfield Gardens.88 When their interests aligned, Rochdale and its neighbors could be a powerful political force in advancing the interests of southeastern Queens.
Cooperation between Rochdale and South Jamaica was more evident in some areas than others. In the fall of 1968, Inside Rochdale, which was expanding its readership, redubbed itself the South Queens Star and Inside Rochdale, and noted that when it was launched, four years earlier, it had focused on Rochdale because “Rochdale residents were new to the community and weren’t that involved in its civic and cultural affairs,” and because Rochdale was “an almost self-contained community” it “naturally tended to avoid outside involvement.” The paper claimed, somewhat hopefully, that this was changing. “In the ensuing years Rochdale Village has become integrated with South Jamaica. Not entirely, perhaps, but enough so that the welfare and the future of South Queens is of concern to Rochdale residents.”89
Perhaps nowhere was integration more apparent than in local politics, where some form of collaboration was essential. As soon as it opened, Rochdale and its 25,000 residents became, all at once, a very important factor in politics in southeastern Queens, a voting bloc to be courted by politicians. At the same time, there was an unease about the impact of Rochdale’s effect on black politics in Jamaica. Black politics in southeastern Queens was just beginning to spread its wings. By 1960 local politicians had demonstrated an ability to make or break area politicians by bestowing or withholding their favors. In 1960 the Jamaica NAACP claimed credit for defeating a Republican candidate for Congress who opposed integrating the local school, and for starting the Democrat, Joseph Addabbo, on a twelve-term congressional career during which he would always be solicitous of black interests.90 But through the fall of 1964 no blacks from Queens sat on the city council, in the state legislature, or in Congress, though Jamaica and South Jamaica had a number of ambitious black politicians who were trying to change this. The Jamaica branch of the NAACP was a proving ground for aspiring black politicians, and Guy Brewer, the leader of the branch in the early 1950s, was establishing himself as a political leader in South Jamaica.91
If Brewer tolerated Rochdale for the economic benefits it might bring, he was not happy about its potential political impact, and looked at it as an accidental gerrymander, whose predominantly white population would dilute black voting strength in Jamaica at its very core. One consequence of the building of Rochdale was that it was, for a while, part of the most populous assembly district in the state, and was divided into two electoral districts.92 Although Rochdale was in his district, Brewer did not want to integrate his club with Rochdale’s residents. He allowed a separate political organization to be formed in the other half of the district, dominated by Rochdale.93
But Rochdale had its political utility as well: its residents were very active, and voted out of proportion to their numbers in comparison to local blacks, especially in primaries, which made their numbers even more impressive. Local politician Juanita Watkins commented, “Our district was different because Rochdale Village, particularly in those [early] days, always had a high voter turnout. We had to work very hard in the one- or two-family-home areas [outside Rochdale] to get them involved.”94 And Rochdale’s voters tended to be very liberal and supportive of civil rights, much more so than whites in other parts of southeastern Queens such as South Ozone Park, Springfield Gardens, or Howard Beach. The electoral alliance bore its first fruits in 1964, when Kenneth Browne, Brewer’s candidate, was running for the State Assembly. Eddie Abramson became the leader of the Democratic party in Rochdale, with Brewer’s blessing, and in Abramson’s words, if Brewer’s attitude originally had been “Oh my gosh [Abramson’s euphemism], it’s an upheaval, the Jewish people could knock out any candidate they opposed,” this changed during the Browne campaign: “Rochdale people didn’t care about color, and they voted for Ken Browne, who defeated a white incumbent.” Browne became the first African American elected to the assembly from Queens County. The presence of an integrated Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, far from dampening black political power in southeastern Queens, strengthened it.95
The need to incorporate Rochdale into the broader fabric of Queens politics helped create several important political careers, of which the most successful and arguably the most unlikely was that of Eddie Abramson, who made the most of his political connections and his visibility as the publisher and editor of Inside Rochdale. It began almost inadvertently. “I didn’t know about politics,” he told me. “I was pushed into it.”96 Abramson was something of a naïf. He was ambitious but not particularly cunning. He had his faults, but abrasiveness and mean-spiritedness were not among them. He was a glad-hander, with a politician’s tendency to promise more than he could deliver (a bad habit that would cause him difficulties at more than one point in his career). But with his urge to be liked came an interest in and skill at creating broad, electable coalitions, both within Rochdale and without.
Before he moved to Rochdale Abramson had little political involvement, except as an admirer of the rising star of New York City politics, the Rockefeller Republican John V. Lindsay.97 His work in public relations and printing had led to professional contacts with Moses “Mo” Weinstein, the Queens Democratic county chairman, and he spoke to Weinstein before moving to Rochdale about Democratic politics in the cooperative. (Whether or not he was a nominal Republican before, Abramson knew that the only party worth considering in a liberal-trending cooperative like Rochdale would be the Democrats.) In consultation with Weinstein and Guy Brewer, Abramson was placed in charge of signing up Rochdale residents for the Democrats. The Johnson landslide of 1964 was a good time to get involved in Democratic politics, and Abramson received good marks for his efforts. An indication that fall of the importance the Democrats placed on Rochdale, not yet fully tenanted, was the appearance one brisk October evening, on a field across from the cooperative, of the heir apparent himself, Robert Kennedy, during his senatorial campaign; an event that this ten-year-old never forgot and for whom it remains an inspiration.98 (Kennedy had planned a return to Rochdale for Sunday, June 9, 1968; instead the community made this a day of mourning for the senator, after his assassination in California on June 6.)99
Abramson founded the Rochdale Village Regular Democratic Association, and in early 1965, finding local newspapers inadequate, started Inside Rochdale, a weekly free newspaper distributed to Rochdale residents.100 The paper was a success, and soon became Abramson’s full-time employment.101 Although the name would suggest otherwise, the paper soon tried to develop a circulation outside the cooperative, and hired columnists from the surrounding community. Most of the revenue for the paper came from merchants on Jamaica Avenue trying to attract Rochdalers to what was already, by 1965, a troubled business district (even though, supposedly, Rochdale residents had a reputation among Jamaica Avenue retailers as fairly obnoxious hagglers).102 Jamaica Avenue stores were struggling to compete with the suburban shopping malls of western Nassau County, such as Green Acres or Roosevelt Field, two places where most Rochdale residents with cars went for their serious shopping. (As mentioned earlier, in an all-too-typical pattern of black political and economic advancement in the 1960s, the civil rights groups who had campaigned for equal access to jobs on Jamaica Avenue in the early 1960s found their victories largely hollow, as they were granted full access just as the shopping district was in free fall.)
Abramson certainly knew the value of publicity. His political opponents, such as the local Reform Democratic club, complained about the conflict of interest inherent in the publisher of Rochdale’s most visible news source constantly promoting his political career in its pages. He shook off such criticism and in 1966 ran for district co-leader, in a new district that included Rochdale.103 It had been the practice for many decades to have male and female district co-leaders, and while Abramson’s Regular Democratic organization was overwhelmingly white—a spring 1965 list of the club’s fourteen officers all had Jewish names—Abramson wanted to run with a black woman, and eventually decided that Juanita Watkins, another protégée of Mo Weinstein and a young woman of growing political stature in southeastern Queens politics, would make an ideal candidate.104 They won, defeating two all-white slates, and Watkins and Abramson became the only integrated pair of district leaders in the city, with Watkins as the first female black district leader in Queens and one of only three in the entire city.105
Abramson’s club became, out of necessity, one of the area’s most important venues for making political contacts and connections. After the election, the club became, in Watkins’s words, “a combination of the people who had been with Eddie [Abramson] before, [and] those people that I had brought into the fold.”106 The Democratic club became a source of power in Rochdale, and many people active in Rochdale affairs were club members. As politicians tend to do, Abramson and Watkins paid visits to other local organizations, and Watkins found herself making the rounds to almost every Jewish group in the cooperative; she told me in 2005 that she meets people “who to this day are shocked that I didn’t live in Rochdale.” To seek a broad electoral consensus, Watkins stated, “part of what of our club tried to do was to pull the insiders from Rochdale and the outsiders from the surrounding community together, and like many situations, once you get to know your neighbors, there’s nothing much to fear.”107
Abramson’s grasp on power in the club he founded was not secure. In 1968 Abramson and Watkins faced a tough race for re-election as district leaders, primarily because Abramson had remained a strong supporter of the war in Vietnam long after it had ceased to be popular among Rochdale residents—one Inside Rochdale poll, conducted in June 1968, found that 85 percent wanted an end to the bombing of North Vietnam, and only 12 percent thought a military victory was either wise or possible.108 He and Watkins were defeated by Bernard Berlly, a longtime Springfield Gardens open-housing advocate and leader of the local Roosevelt Reform Democratic Club, and Rita Essex, like Berlly a supporter of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid.109 The Rochdale Village Regular Democrats were soon in turmoil.110 In 1969 Abramson was deposed by the political club he had founded.111 Despite Watkins’s key role in the ouster, this was not a racial changing of the guard. Almost all of Abramson’s Jewish allies in the club had remained active. According to Watkins, while almost all of them had “been brought in by Eddie [Abramson], and all of the lawyers were brought in by Eddie…when Eddie was forced out, I have to say 90 percent of those folks, including his next-door neighbors and his cousin, stayed in the club.”112 In 1970, under Watkins and Rochdaler Richard Rubin, the Rochdale Village Regular Democrats regained the district leadership. As an effective and dynamic political organization, the club responded to a shifting set of circumstances, and became of necessity a center of practical integration in Rochdale.
By the way, don’t feel sorry for Eddie Abramson, and if Abramson and Watkins went their separate ways, they would both go on to remarkable political careers. Abramson would overcome his reversals, and in 1972 managed to obtain his old club’s endorsement for a seat in the State Assembly, which he won and then held onto for almost twenty years, culminating in service as deputy majority whip. And in the same year Abramson was elected to the assembly, Watkins would become the chair of the Queens County Democratic Committee (the first woman, white or black, to chair a county political committee in the city), replacing Guy Brewer. She would subsequently have a long-time tenure on the City Council for southeastern Queens.
And in many ways the lasting significance of the political careers of both Abramson and Watkins is not how they parted and differed, but what they shared. In Rochdale and South Jamaica in the 1960s and early 1970s, local electoral politics was a story of interracial collaboration. When blacks and whites had to work together, they could and they did. At times, even the often grubby parochial tasks of local politics can speak to the broader horizons of democratic possibility. For Juanita Watkins, this is what made working with the Rochdale Democratic club such a unique experience:113
It was a total mix of black and white, Christian and Jew, small homeowner and high-rise apartment dweller. We had managed to overcome those apparent differences and form a coalition [around] the things we had in common. Those factors included the desire to reside in an integrated community that was attractive and safe with good services. Those things drew us together more than the things that might have kept us apart.