Epilogue

LOOKING BACKWARD

I wouldn’t have traded my years in Rochdale for anything in the world.

Cal Jones, interview

You can’t go home again, I suppose, but you can go back to where you used to live. Rochdale looks great. In many ways, it looks unchanged. The bus from Hillside Avenue has a new number, but it still takes the same route through South Jamaica, past the main branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, a building with innumerable good memories, and down Merrick Boulevard, past Junior High School 8, a building with a different set of memories. The former St. Albans Naval Hospital closed in 1974—I never quite figured out what it was doing in a gritty urban neighborhood, anyway—and now most of the grounds have been reborn as the Roy Wilkins Park, with a newly refurbished community center. (I was privileged one day to have the person most responsible for the park’s creation, Paul Gibson, give me a personal tour.) The Allen AME Church, which now claims 18,000 members, dominates Merrick Boulevard with a grandiose cathedral. One thing that hasn’t changed is that Merrick Boulevard and South Jamaica remain almost entirely black, though with a difference: a large Caribbean population (primarily Jamaican and Haitian) that was only beginning to take root when I left the area.

When the bus makes the turn onto Bedell Street, all seems as it was. My little white schoolhouse, PS 30, still stands out with its horizontal lines set off against the red brick verticality of the apartment buildings. On the far side of Bedell Street is the power plant, Abraham Kazan’s pride and joy, still whirring away, giving Rochdalers heat in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer. And Rochdale’s apartment buildings seem much the same; they don’t seem quite as imposing as I remember them, but they still loom over and dominate the surrounding area of South Jamaica, with its parks and private homes. The paths seem unchanged, though an urban garden now stands where the park with artificial hills once stood. The skinny trees, once tied to poles for support, are still there, but they are now fully grown (just like me), verdant and leafy bowers. And there are other continuities, lying deeper than one can observe at first glance. Rochdale Village is still a limited equity cooperative, and it remains a place where its residents are proud of their homes and community, and where they have worked and fought to keep it clean, safe, and solvent, and a model of democratic possibility.

Figure 13. Building 11, section A, summer 2009. The four windows on the right side of the seventh floor are in apartment 7G, the onetime home of the Eisenstadt family. Photograph by Joseph Raskin.

After the successful conclusion of the Teamsters strike came a savored moment of glory, and then a long anticlimax. The strike left the cooperative in disarray, its finances in tatters, and with the usual political instability. Some people left. Shortly after the Teamsters strike, Arthur Greene moved on and moved elsewhere. “I left at the urging of my family; it became increasingly unpleasant, I became the whipping boy, and I was taking a lot of heat, so after a while I acceded to the wishes of the family, and we moved.” Some stayed, such as Frank McKanic, and in 1981, with a shift in his fortunes, the United Shareholders won a majority of the board. Having forgotten nothing, and perhaps, having learned nothing from his recall battle at the hands of Concerned Cooperators two years earlier, his first act as president of the Board of Directors was to peremptorily and without notice fire the acting manager, controller, assistant manager, chief of security, security captain, management consultant, maintenance director, and newspaper editor, in an action that became known as the Thanksgiving Eve Massacre.1 Everyone who was not a union member in the management office was fired; those fired were not allowed back into the office to clean their desks, take their possessions, or grab their coats.2 The merry-go-round continued to churn. Almost every change in administration was accompanied by a new broom sweeping things clean, with accompanying court challenges and lawsuits. “Every time the board changes,” Hugh Williams complained in an interview with me, “you don’t need a new management team.” William Greenspan, an attorney who has been on one side or another of Rochdale’s internal political squabbles for many decades, said that if there was one useful by-product of its litigious politics, it was that “a lot of law on the rights and powers of cooperative boards has been made because of Rochdale.”3

The political and social environment of New York City in the 1980s and 1990s was hostile to the survival of cooperatives like Rochdale, with rampant inflation, tight budgets, and soaring rates of crime. Middle-income cooperatives, which had always been supported by subvention, found that after the fiscal crisis, in the words of Louis Winnick, “the subsidy spigots tightened and then almost closed.”4 Rochdale struggled and came close to bankruptcy more than once. As a result of the chaos of the Teamsters strike, Rochdale fell behind at least $500,000 in its mortgage payments, and in the first “work-out” agreement, in 1980, the state allowed Rochdale to backend their late payments to the year 2000 interest free, with the possibility of up to $15 million in new state money going to pay for structural defects at Rochdale and Co-op City.5 Nonetheless problems continued, in part because there had been no increases in carrying charges since the mid-1970s; all Rochdale factions had learned that the penalty for supporting increases was being voted out in the next election. By the late 1980s Rochdale was again in a similar financial position, close to default on its mortgage obligations, and in 1987 a second work-out agreement was negotiated with the state, which granted Rochdale almost $23 million, most of it to be used for rescheduling its debt, and $8.3 million for repairs.6 The agreement also scheduled increases in carrying charges amounting to 45 percent between 1987 and 1991.7

However, the 1987 work-out agreement solved little, because most of the money intended for repairs was used for hiring architects and engineers rather than actually making needed improvements. (In the first years of the agreement, as little as $25,000 of the $8 million was used for repairs, according to William Greenspan.)8 All the while Rochdale’s physical and structural problems grew worse, especially the underground system that brought power and light from the power plant, which was failing badly. Sinkholes opened, and at least one person fell into one and was burnt badly.9 “Rochdale Village was in a slow disintegration that would have made it uninhabitable in ten years,” said David E. McClean, who was elected chairman of the Board of Directors in 1991.10 The 1987 work-out agreement was amended in 1990, making more money available for repairs. Then the Concerned Cooperators gained control of the board in 1990, ushering in a long period of relative political stability, through 2002. They hired the Marian Scott firm to manage Rochdale in February 1991, and they would remain in that position for more than fifteen years. Over the next decade the underground pipe system was replaced, roofs were repaired, and new double-pane windows were installed in every apartment. By 1993 the financial situation was so improved that the board was able to forego a carrying-charge increase.11

Along with its rocky finances and turbulent internal politics, the biggest problem Rochdale faced in the 1980s and 1990s were still-rising rates of crime. Like many predominantly black areas of the city in the 1980s, Rochdale came to the attention of the city at large only when a particularly gruesome crime was committed within its precincts. In 1980 blood dripping from the trunk of a car in a Rochdale parking lot led the police to a double murder.12 In 1982 the rape and murder of an eighteen-year-old college student, thrown naked from the roof of a building, and the murder of a ninety-one-year-old woman, suffocated with a pillow during a robbery, was causing “neighbor to fear neighbor” in the words of an article in the New York Times, especially when it was discovered that the murders were committed by Rochdale residents. One resident was quoted as saying she wanted “to double-lock the door of her apartment and never go out again…. I moved here from Brooklyn because it was getting rough there. Now it’s getting rough here. I don’t know where I’m going.”13 In 1986 two of Rochdale’s security guards were murdered in a hail of bullets; in 1993 three bandits staged a brazen daytime robbery of a bus, brandishing their weapons, shooting into the roof, making off with the valuables and money of the terrified riders, who likened the experience to a stagecoach heist by desperadoes in a western.14

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Rochdale was near the epicenter of a burgeoning epidemic of crack cocaine use in southeastern Queens, which brought with it gangs armed with automatic weapons. What was probably the most notorious crime during the crack era, the machine-gun execution-style slaying of a police officer named Edward Byrne in February 1988, while Byrne was guarding a drug witness, occurred in an area adjacent to Rochdale in South Jamaica.15 In 1987 the 113th Precinct, including Rochdale and Springfield Gardens, had the highest murder rate of any precinct in Queens, with forty-eight murders (up from forty-two in 1986), accounting for 16 percent of all murders in Queens.16 (There were problems in the precinct itself: in 1988, 49 officers, a quarter of those assigned to the precinct—which totaled 143 white and 31 black and Latino officers—were transferred in response to racial slurs and what was termed “racial disharmony.”)17

Rochdale’s schools also remained troubled and rife with criminal activity, and in 1993, Rochdale’s IS 72 was in the unenviable position of having the highest rate of violent incidents of any intermediate school in the city, with eight incidents per one hundred students. The director of operations for the local school district said the school had four security guards on duty but acknowledged that “the school had been poorly run for some time.” (In the rankings among the most dangerous elementary schools in New York City, Rochdale’s PS 80 finished seventeenth, and had the highest level of criminal activity of any elementary school in Queens.)18 Rochdale’s crime rate declined in the 1990s with the ebbing of the crack trade and the general decline in the city’s crime. This is not to say there wasn’t the occasional horrific reminder of how violent Rochdale, and New York City, could be, as in 2004, when a man delivering a Chinese takeout order to a Rochdale address was murdered by two teenagers; his body was dumped in nearby Baisley Pond.19 But terrible crimes of this sort were by then seen more as anomalies and exceptions, rather than grisly confirmations of a general trend.

In the 1980s and 1990s some of the appurtenances of the cooperative life fell away. In the early 1980s the co-op supermarkets closed and were replaced by conventional stores. Powerful voices argued that the markets were expensive relics of a time that had passed, and that Rochdale should install modern, for-profit supermarkets in its malls. A petition drive gathered five thousand signatures, not only from Rochdale but from the surrounding community, to save the stores, and according to one of the petition organizers, the managers “said in an open membership meeting that the decision wasn’t made but the fix was in and the board had already signed with the private company.”20 But the new firm that came in to run the supermarket was not very successful—as usual, it was difficult to find a major supermarket chain to set up shop in a black neighborhood—and there was a general sense that after the switch, service and quality deteriorated. The Concerned Cooperators, who had been behind the move, were voted out at the next election. William Greenspan, the lawyer who had largely engineered the switch and who would be a power in Rochdale for decades, said it was the worst mistake he ever made in Rochdale politics. Without Rochdale the nine cooperative supermarkets that had been set up under the UHF’s aegis could not find economies of scale, and they fell apart.21

By most accounts, the vibrant internal political and cultural life of Rochdale declined as well. A common complaint by longtime residents is that Rochdale has never recaptured the spirit of its early years, when 150 organizations vied for members, and the turnout on Candidates Night could bring upwards of 2,000 to the community center.22 For Hugh Williams, the onetime member of the Board of Directors in the late 1960s, “the biggest change in Rochdale today is that you don’t have a lot of organizations, and you miss that, and because you don’t have that, you don’t have that sort of participation in other things, because when people are active, they aren’t just active in one thing, and if people are used to staying home, they just stay at home.”23

Williams shares with other Rochdale residents I spoke to a sense that civic life in the cooperative is attenuated and narrow. More than ever the power to control the cooperative is vested in the Board of Directors. (After a dispute several years ago, the House Congress was abolished.) Williams said of contemporary Rochdale that “people don’t want to participate, they want people to do things for them. The cooperative spirit, that we should manage ourselves, has died. The feeling is now, I’m paying and I want to be serviced. They don’t realize that you need to put something into it, to get something out of it.” Williams saw Rochdale, in the early twenty-first century, on the rebound after a long decline. “In the 1970s and 1980s there was a sense of decline in Rochdale. After the exodus, all of the people who knew what button to press and who to contact left, and we lost them all at once, not in ones or twos, but in droves. There definitely was a vacuum of leadership, and after the exodus of the whites many people felt that we wouldn’t be able to govern Rochdale by ourselves, it was a real negative feeling, and thank God that feeling is now behind us. But what hasn’t caught up is the feeling that ‘I need to roll up my sleeves and help out’—but Rochdale has come back a long way.”24

Williams’s sense that Rochdale has “come back a long way” over the last decade and a half is widely shared. By the late 1990s, articles about Rochdale were less likely to have titles like “The Death of a Dream” or “A Utopia Fades” and more likely to be upbeat, such as one in Newsday in 1997, “Rochdale Village in Renaissance After Years of Social, Fiscal Ills.” A quiet and modest renaissance, perhaps, but one that was deeply satisfying to long-term residents. Norma Boucher, who moved to Rochdale in 1970, said in the article, “In many ways Rochdale hasn’t changed. I can still see flower gardens from my window. Security is intact and I feel safe here. We have central heating and air-conditioning and if anything goes wrong all you have to do is call and they’ll fix it.”25 For many there was a sense of continuity and improvement. Herb Plever, who has lived in Rochdale since its opening in 1964 (and is now, with his wife, only one of a handful of white families remaining) talked to me in 2004, in an apartment filled with plants of all kinds, crowded with flower pots and hanging gardens: “[Rochdale] is better managed now, by far. It’s cleaner, the staff is more diligent, the grounds are nicely maintained and they keep the place clean, the horticulture is on a top level, and financially it is fairly secure. There was the first rent increase in eleven years this past year, crime is down but people are still complaining about security…. Where else in the city can you get a six-and-a-half-room apartment with a balcony, where the basic rent is $800 a month?”

One of Rochdale’s greatest challenges came not with the hard times of the 1970s and 1980s, but the flush years around the turn of the twenty-first century, when there was increasing pressure on limited-equity cooperatives to privatize, to vest each household with the right to sell their apartment at market value. Given that a family’s initial investment was at most several thousand dollars, there was potentially much profit to be made in privatizing, and several former UHF cooperatives followed that route, including Grand Street Houses on the Lower East Side. Although there were discussions about privatizing Rochdale around 2002, it never came to a vote, because it was clear it would not have passed. (A vote of two-thirds of all households would have been necessary for taking Rochdale private.) William Greenspan, who was in favor of privatization, thought this was a big mistake, and that Rochdale really needed the money that privatization would have brought. He predicted, correctly, that without it Rochdale’s fifteen years of relative financial stability (and political stability) would come to an end. Indeed, recent years have been stormy years, with fights over carrying-charge increases, delays in needed repairs, including to the old and balky power plant, which shuts down at odd hours, and the return of general political instability. However, the main reason people were opposed to privatizing Rochdale was that people more or less liked their homes the way they were, and what they had accomplished as a limited-equity cooperative. They were proud that Rochdale was the largest predominantly black housing cooperative in the city, and they were afraid of the inevitable loss of control that would be the consequence of privatization.26 For all that has changed, Rochdale today is still very much what Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses imagined, a limited-equity cooperative, home to thousands of families of modest income, on the cusp of the middle class.

No doubt the most obvious change to Rochdale Village from the years when I lived there is the absence of whites and the lack of integration. On one level this clearly does not matter. Rochdale belongs, physically, economically, and spiritually, to the people who live there. Indeed, if the history of Rochdale since the 1970s shows anything, it is that a form of housing and cooperative enterprise created by the Jewish labor movement in the early twentieth century did not need either Jews or the labor movement to continue to thrive. Harold Ostroff told me in 2004, “A few years ago somebody who had worked many years in housing called me on the phone and asked me, ‘Well how do you like Rochdale now?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Well, it’s almost all black.’ So what? It’s perfectly decent housing, it’s still a functioning cooperative, and if whites don’t want to live in Rochdale it’s their problem.”27

For Herman Ferguson, the black radical who started his political career when he became a leader of the demonstrations at the Rochdale construction site in 1963, the original predominantly Jewish residents “outgrew the place, and the blacks moved in.” After his flight to Guyana to avoid imprisonment in the early 1970s, he returned to the United States in 1990, cleared up his legal problems, and in what he acknowledges is a considerable irony, moved to Rochdale Village and in due time was elected to Rochdale’s Board of Directors. “I think Rochdale has enormous potential. Here we have a cooperative that we sort of inherited from the first tenants, but today Rochdale is 98 percent black, something so wealthy and rich in resources, and we need to work to bettering their condition by owning and controlling 170 acres of prime real estate. I like the cooperative ideal, there is evidence that it works…. But Rochdale Village is not living up to its potential.”28

Ferguson’s uncompromising radicalism and black nationalism is by no means typical of Rochdale residents, but even he pays tribute to the cooperative vision that created Rochdale from the heart of the city’s Jewish labor movement, and shares with Abraham Kazan the belief that building large-scale cooperatives was an essential step in building democratic institutions. He calls himself a believer “in the cooperative ideal, there is evidence that it works” and argues that Rochdale, “98 percent black, [and] something so wealthy and rich in resources,” can become a place where Malcolm X’s vision of black self-government in America is finally realized. In his own way, Ferguson is an unlikely successor to the legacy of Abraham Kazan, and a tribute to the flexibility of Kazan’s cooperative vision.29

But New York City in the twenty-first century is a very different city from the one in which, fifty years earlier, Rochdale had been built. The institutions and personalities that helped created Rochdale are no more. Rochdale Village was a dream of old men. Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses were both in their seventies during the years of Rochdale’s construction. Kazan died in 1971; Moses, after a retirement that was typically cantankerous, died in 1980. (Rochdale’s architect, Herman Jessor, lived to be ninety-five, marrying for the first time a few months before his death in 1990.)30 The Mitchell-Lama program, incubator of so many cooperative housing ventures since its birth in 1955, was a victim of the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. No new Mitchell-Lama housing has been built since the 1970s, and the program became oriented toward the past, minding already constructed projects rather than seeking new ventures. The social democratic city, the last best hope of so many socialists, anarchists, union activists, and New Deal liberals, slowly faded away. Political movements rarely last longer than a single generation, about forty years or so, and the constellation of ideas and institutions that gave rise to the cooperative housing movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s died a natural political death in the early 1970s. Rochdale (and Co-op City) were among its final acts of parturition.

After the mid-1970s Rochdale no longer had the United Housing Foundation either to kick around or to look to for support. The UHF had been an organization with extravagant ambitions, chief among them to convert the world to the cause of cooperative housing. Its triumphs were real enough, but its cooperatives, even behemoths on the scale of Rochdale and Co-op City, were trifling in comparison with what it imagined itself accomplishing. In 1967, Harold Ostroff, seeking new worlds to conquer, spoke before the City Council and suggested that the largest area of conveniently located, underutilized land in the city was the huge expanse of cemeteries between Brooklyn and Queens, which he thought should be used for cooperative housing. “Can we afford this $157 million tax exempt luxury for the dead when the problems of the living are so pressing?” Calling for razing and raising the dead, he also suggested that no one would miss the northernmost ten blocks of Central Park, which could be turned into cooperative housing for people living on 110th to 120th streets, after which all the housing on 110th to 120th would be torn down, making Harlem one great big cooperative. (After hearing this, Robert Moses summoned Ostroff to a meeting and told him that while he liked him and admired his ambition, he never wanted to hear him talking about building housing in Central Park again. Ostroff obeyed.)31

Within a few years the UHF had largely ceased to be an active builder. The rising costs and expectations of the fiscal crisis and, in particular, the rent strike in Co-op City in the mid-1970s, followed by a suit by the rent strikers that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, brought the UHF to its knees and into bankruptcy. The effect of the tumult and controversy at Co-op City on the UHF board was devastating. It made them cautious and gun-shy, afraid to engage in the herculean task of planning and building new cooperatives. Some new projects like Starrett City in Brooklyn, were developed by others and not as cooperatives. Other plans, like those for giant new cooperatives in Jersey City or Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula, of a size that would have dwarfed even Co-op City, died on the drawing board.32 Although the UHF faced real financial and political difficulties, the real problem, as one close to the UHF in its final years explained, lay deeper. The leadership had been profoundly hurt by the fallout from the Co-op City rent strike and did not want to go through the process again, only to be sued, besmirched, and dragged through the mud by one of their creations. A lack of will and a healthy draft of self-doubt, of the sort that Abraham Kazan would never have entertained, now blocked the way to new projects. Harold Ostroff left the UHF in 1975, and he was never really replaced.33 The UHF built no new cooperatives after Co-op City, and without new cooperatives to build, the UHF lacked a purpose, and it dwindled away into insignificance. Although its actions were always couched in the language of rational business decision-making, in many ways the UHF died of a broken heart.34

Since the 1970s large-scale limited-equity cooperatives have generally been seen as urban dinosaurs, ungainly monsters that long since should have waddled to their deserved extinction. For many contemporary urbanists, Rochdale and its siblings are simply products of an idea whose time has passed; living on borrowed money and borrowed time. Those who regret their privatization, wrote Louis Winnick in the Times in 2000, were just “lamenting the passage of a bygone era with dim prospects of return.” They cost too much to build and require too much political and financial capital to maintain. Winnick suggested that liberals and progressives turn their attention to other, more achievable political causes, such as “crime and schools, the environment and health care,” and stop dreaming of a cooperative revival, since most of New York City’s politicians and residents “seem reluctantly reconciled to the vertiginous drop in the volume of affordable housing.”35

If this was accurate and good advice, or at least practical counsel in 2000, it seems much less apt a decade later. It is true; building new limited equity cooperatives is a very expensive proposition. But so too has been bailing out the private real estate market and its speculative engines since their collapse in 2007. Those who would criticize Rochdale as a limited equity fossil need only look around to its immediate environs. From 2007 to 2010 South Jamaica has had some of the highest rates of default and foreclosure on subprime mortgage loans in the nation.36 Certainly South Jamaica and many other low and moderate income areas across the United States would have been far better served, as Robert Moses long ago suggested, by building more Rochdales, than by listening to the sirens of the “ownership society” that lured hapless millions to the illusion that the true path to self-advancement and a better life lay through purchasing an expensive private home that all too often came complete with a lawn, a garage, and an exploding mortgage.

We again need to ask, with Abraham Kazan, whether a necessity as basic as housing should or in the end can rest on the shaky foundations of a ferociously speculative real estate market. And the question is not whether we can afford to build more limited equity cooperatives but whether we can afford not to. There has never been a better time than now to once again start building Abraham Kazan’s cooperative commonwealth. His original vision, social democratic and anarchist in its inspiration, practical in its orientation, is badly missed in the hyper-capitalist city and housing market of the early twenty-first century.

And if limited equity cooperatives seem like a relic of the social ideals of a bygone age, so too does the fate of the quest for an integrated America. Since the 1970s, the most common attitude toward racial integration has been in many ways analogous to that toward limited equity cooperatives; a nice idea, perhaps, but one that is perilously easy to sentimentalize. And many, looking at the history of Rochdale, have concluded that the failure of integration in Rochdale was predestined, and that lamenting the inevitable is a useless self-indulgence.

That an integrated Rochdale was doomed from the outset is a very common view of its history. Many have allocated blame to the usual racial suspects. One former resident, in a chatroom of ex-Rochdalers opined, “Rochdale could hardly have been considered an integrated community by any stretch of the imagination,” and that the whites in Rochdale probably “wished that someone like Ariel Sharon would have constructed a huge wall around Rochdale, keeping the outsiders from the insiders.” To which another participant in the chatroom replied, “I think it takes two to tango, and the outside community made absolutely no effort to welcome Rochdale residents at all. Please let’s stop this version of history. We [white residents] clearly weren’t wanted from the beginning, and I don’t care if we were yellow with pink polka dots, we were branded the outsiders and that was the end of the story.”37

Many wouldn’t apportion the primary blame to either side of the racial divide but maintain that all the goodwill in the world would not have been enough to overcome the differences between predominantly white Rochdale and overwhelmingly black South Jamaica. Although it did not prevent him from becoming a leader in Rochdale’s politics, Arthur Greene argued that Rochdale “was a white enclave within a black community, and I felt it was doomed from the start because you cannot establish a white enclave in a black community without having the interactions and connections affect the situation; in the beginning it was 85 percent white, and in a very short time white families began to move out. As the numbers began to change, and the schools’ makeup changed, the phenomenon increased, and the tipping point was reached, and there was no turning back…. Looking back, the underlying assumptions were faulty, as was the belief that you could establish a white community in a black neighborhood.”38

There is much to reckon with in these objections. The problem of race and racial equality in America and in New York City was deeper and more intractable than the creators or most the original residents of Rochdale realized, or perhaps could have imagined. There were flaws inherent in the UHF’s conception of Rochdale itself as an integrated community, in internal race relations within the cooperative, and between Rochdale and surrounding South Jamaica, that were never transcended. As both Kenneth Tewel and Sue Raskin suggested to me, Rochdale Village was cursed to open in the 1960s, that decade of both racial possibility and rage, which cruelly revealed all the flaws in its racial thinking. Urban liberalism took a great fall in the late 1960s and early 1970s and its pieces have never been reassembled. Perhaps, if the owners of Jamaica Racetrack had made an earlier decision to take their horses and stables elsewhere, and Rochdale had opened in the early 1950s, an additional decade spent building the institutions of an integrated community might have enabled Rochdale to better weather the storms and tempests of the 1960s.

Perhaps. And perhaps an integrated Rochdale was doomed to failure, and the reasons for this have only become clearer over the years. But I hope the history of integration in Rochdale is not seen simply as a failure. Certainly those who moved to Rochdale in the mid-1960s did not know how the story was to turn out. And if the 1960s proved a curse for Rochdale, it was in many ways a blessing as well. Certainly at no time in New York City’s history, before or since, had there been such public concern (and willingness to fund) affordable middle-income housing, on the scale of a Rochdale Village. The era of Robert Moses was one of urban plasticity, of the belief that the cityscape and built environment could be reshaped in broad, bold strokes for the public good. And neither before nor since has the idea of building a mammoth integrated cooperative in the midst of one of the largest black neighborhoods in New York City gotten off the drawing board. Before the 1960s, it would have likely been defeated by racism, pure and simple, as Rochdale almost was in any event. After the 1960s, all sides would have been too committed to the nurturance of racial grievances to contemplate anything like it. In Rochdale a serious attempt was made to merge, or at least bridge the gap between what Jerald Podair calls the two separate cities, white New York and black New York, that were the dominant social reality in the 1960s, and if Rochdale was a tale of those two cities, its early years were no doubt the best of times and the worst of times.39

In the four and a half decades since Rochdale opened, the prospects for genuine racial balance in housing and education have receded ever further, and the whole topic seems to have vanished from national concern, even when racial matters are discussed. Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires write of “integration exhaustion,” the contagious intellectual yawning that is the usual consequence of its introduction into policy discussions by persons of all races and political persuasions.40 Depending on one’s political perspective or racial vantage, there are numerous explanations for the failure of integration (which invariably include pointing fingers and assigning blame to someone else), and many, scholars and average citizens alike, have concluded that integration is either a good idea that was just simply unworkable, or was just a bad idea from the outset.41

As a result, we have tried to solve America’s racial problem in every way but the most obvious way: trying to get people of different races, especially whites and blacks, to live together and go to school together. And New York City remains one of the most segregated cities in the United States, and South Jamaica, despite some highly touted progress in this regard elsewhere in Queens, remains solidly and uniformly black, with African Americans now mixing with a large Caribbean and African population. Integration remains the great exception in American housing patterns. Fewer than 4 percent of Americans live in stable integrated communities.42

In his classic 1955 work The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward wrote of the “forgotten alternatives” of America’s racial history.43 Woodward was writing about the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods, and his work scraped away layer after layer of conventional wisdom that held that blacks and whites living together and sharing power as equals was a preordained failure. A similar veneer now obscures 1960s efforts to create genuinely integrated communities, when we learned, the hard way, of the chasm that existed between the end of racial barriers and the creation of a genuinely interracial society. History of course cannot be rewritten, and like Reconstruction, the effort to create an integrated Rochdale in the 1960s was ultimately a failure. Its failure may confirm the worst in our racial attitudes. Success is imitated, failure is shunned, and Rochdale’s attempt to create an integrated island in the middle of South Jamaica has largely been ignored.44

Rochdale Village represented the best of New York City in the 1960s in the hopes of its founders and first residents. They believed that they were creating and living out a solution to the city’s and the nation’s racial and housing crises. Let us honor their intention and ambition, and learn from their naivety and mistakes. The complexities of our social ills defy easy answers, in the early twenty-first century as half a century earlier. But as Abraham Kazan long ago argued, utopianism is often just another name for the most thoughtful and most practical way to try to find a solution to a difficult problem.

Two closing comments. First, Cal Jones, who was a founder of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, and who, as much as anyone else, reflected the social idealism that Rochdale generated in its early years:45

Rochdale was a tough community for anyone to try to manage. I don’t mean it was a rough community; it was vibrant, it was energized, there were a million ideas, and some ego. You had people who moved to Rochdale from all over the city saying, “This is it, this is going to be my home.” You could feel the energy. You could find someone to support any cause. You said anything, there were two contrary opinions. We had an early-morning discussion group, people liked to talk so much. My children are better for their experience in Rochdale. I had to deal with certain truths that you wouldn’t have to deal with if you lived in a community of one race.

Let me give the last word to original and still current (as of 2009, when this is being written) Rochdale resident, Herb Plever:46

There’s nothing like living side by side. It’s a learning experience on both sides. All of your conceptions of what the other people are like, sometimes negative ones get reinforced, sure, but they fall away if you live side by side. You can’t have a society unless you have that living and learning experience. If integration in Rochdale failed it has to be tried again.