7. Creating Community
The “social fabric” so dear to the hearts of Jane Jacobs and her ilk does not exist
Herman Jessor
A housing cooperative like Rochdale Village was necessarily many things at once: a business, a participatory democracy, and a place to hang your hat, but above all, it had to be a functioning community. Abraham Kazan, for whom Rochdale Village was the culmination of a life’s dream, had no interest in the well-intentioned but short-lived communal efforts that fill the pages of the history of American utopian experiments, prized apart by internal tension and external hostility. His monument was to be cooperatives and utopias that could endure. His faith in the power of cooperatives as a positive social good was boundless. In an early article, Kazan wrote in 1937 that housing could “mold the social fabric,” but that “only cooperative housing can supply this great physical need and, through it, greatly revise the relation of man to man in the big city. The social outlook and the very ethic and morale of our people can be transformed more effectively through such housing than through any other social agency, for no other institution touches so many facets of life as one’s home and community.” He never lost the conviction that, above all, housing cooperatives were experiments in the creation of community.1
When it came to creating a sense of genuine community in Rochdale and other cooperatives, the UHF relied on a series of time-tested formulae. Probably no single factor, in the opinion of Kazan and the UHF, was as important as size. As mentioned, if cooperatives were too small, they would be unable to sustain themselves economically, politically, or culturally. Former UHF executive vice president Harold Ostroff said the whole point of cooperatives was to change the character of neighborhoods and this couldn’t done in tiny increments. “I don’t think you can do it with a 100 units there, or a 200 units here; you have to establish the affinity of a cooperative environment.”2
Figure 9. Building 14 and the circular driveway for section 4, in front of the Bedell Street power plant, ca. 1965. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Photograph by Gene Heil.
The UHF saw urban planning as a Darwinian struggle for dominance, in which only the fittest communities survive and get to reproduce themselves; either a cooperative can transform a slum area, or the slum area transforms the cooperative. The latter happened, in Kazan’s opinion, in his first Lower East Side cooperative, Amalgamated Dwellings. But if it is of sufficient size and internal confidence, a cooperative will ward off the baleful influence of its immediate environs, and become a model, both for the surrounding area, and for all who are interested in good, affordable housing.
On the other hand, cooperatives that were too large created their own problems, and could get too far away from the original ideal of a small community of neighbors forging the future together. The anarchist ideals that had long nurtured Kazan anticipated not one big cooperative (that was socialism, or fascism) but many small and midsize cooperatives, all independent, all functioning together. The UHF was worried that as the size of the cooperative increased, as in Rochdale, everything else being equal, the sense of involvement in the affairs of the cooperative would decrease, and cooperators would increasingly feel like ordinary tenants, dictated to by management. This was why Kazan was more or less opposed to public housing. It undermined the spirit of self-help and mutual aid, and subjected residents to the government, the most distant, most intimidating, and most capricious landlord of them all. What was needed was sufficient governmental help to permit even people below the level of “middle income” to form their own housing cooperatives.3
Debates arose about whether to divide Rochdale into five separate cooperatives, one for each section. Some UHF officials worried, as articulated in an article contemplating the size of Rochdale, that it would be “impossible for any single person to know more than a relatively small number of his fellow cooperators” and that it would therefore be hardly possible “for them to vote intelligently to select responsible people for directors and the members of important committees.”4 When I asked Harold Ostroff what, in retrospect, he would have done differently in Co-op City, where internal dissent became so pronounced that it essentially destroyed the UHF, he said he would have divided it into five separate cooperatives.5 In any event, the idea of smaller internal co-ops was rejected for Rochdale.
The UHF deeply believed the communities created in cooperatives were models for a noncapitalist future, and continued to believe so into the 1960s, when the notion of a cooperative commonwealth was becoming a bit shopworn. As late as 1966 Harold Ostroff (who in the late 1960s took over the reins of the UHF from an aging and increasingly incapacitated Kazan) said the goal of the UHF was not “to merely provide a balance wheel for capitalism in order to prevent or correct the worst excesses of the profit system…a cooperative is [rather] a social instrument which stands for a better world.”6 (The same year, Norman Thomas, the longtime Socialist Party leader and sometime contributor to the UHF’s house organ, visited Rochdale, where he “was affectionately greeted by many old Rochdalers as an old friend, and he expressed pleasure at being invited to a place where so many of his ideas about progress through cooperation are being applied.”)7
But one of the ironies of the success of the UHF was that it was able to pursue this vision, and on the scale of cooperatives like Rochdale and Co-op City, only because it was rigorously nonideological, and offered inexpensive, high-quality housing, first come, first served, with no preconditions or litmus tests. This was a delicate balancing act. On one hand the UHF was very proud of the fact that its cooperatives were not, like most communal experiments, peopled through the self-selection of like-minded individuals dedicated to realizing a shared vision, but through a collection of individuals and families gathered together without a common ideological purpose or goal. For the UHF this proved their social utility. After all, a cooperative whose residents were all like-minded leftists might prove only that like-minded leftists could live together, while a cooperative composed of a more or less random cross-section of New Yorkers offered prima facie evidence that cooperatives were a potential solution for the housing needs of everyone.8
Map 3. Rochdale Village plan, ca. 1968
On the other hand, selecting families without regard to their prior commitment to the cooperative ideal more or less ensured that UHF projects would suffer, from Kazan’s point of view, from a certain lack of ideological fervor. Kazan complained of the Seward Park cooperative that “its residents were not people imbued with the cooperative idea, or with the idea of helping to bring about a cooperative commonwealth.” It was purely a desire to “better their living conditions for themselves” and that therefore “it was a success and a failure.” Kazan would, ultimately, have much the same reaction to Rochdale; it was great, but he imagined what it might have been, and still might become, if everyone really believed in the cooperative ideal.9 Unsuccessful utopias disappoint through their failure: successful utopias disappoint by ceasing to be sufficiently utopian.
But if Rochdale was not a utopia, at least by Kazan’s exacting standards, it was the closest that most residents ever experienced, and it was common to share in a sense of optimism about Rochdale in its early years, an enthusiasm that reflected, obliquely and indirectly, some of the utopian excitement of its progenitors. Eddie Abramson, who became the editor of Inside Rochdale and was a mainstream to conservative Democrat, had been living in Flatbush and moved to Rochdale from a small one-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife and two children. By his own account the fact that Rochdale was a cooperative “didn’t matter at all.” But neither did the fact that Rochdale was in a black neighborhood. According to Abramson, “We were glad we moved to a large apartment, but we never gave any thought to anything other than knowing we would have a nice time over here.” When they moved in, he said, “Psychologically, we thought, we were going to live there, we were going to die there, and our children were going to get married there.”10
This was a common reaction. Anita Starr, with a very different political background from Abramson, with a long history of involvement in civil rights and progressive causes—her career as a teacher in the city’s schools was delayed for a number of years because she refused to sign a loyalty oath—expressed herself very similarly: “I thought I was going to live and die in Rochdale.” Larry Lapka’s parents, who had moved from Kew Gardens Hills, a neighborhood on a perceived downward trajectory, “truly thought that Rochdale was their Nirvana, their Garden of Eden. I know my parents said many times that they truly (probably naively) believed that they would stay there the rest of their lives. I really think they thought that this was where they would raise their families and grow old.”11 If Rochdale’s first residents were not all committed cooperative ideologues, they were deeply committed to Rochdale as their present and future home.
Kazan and the UHF did their job well as educators or propagandists, tirelessly teaching cooperators about the possibilities, advantages, and responsibilities of cooperative life. Harold Ostroff wrote in 1966 that “more than anything else, I think, we must teach people that even in the center of the city they can be individuals. That they can have an important voice in their own affairs, that they can help themselves and others by working together…. Education is a slow and costly process, but it is an essential ingredient for developing an understanding of the meaning of cooperatives. In the UHF we spend a great deal of time, effort, and money on education. We publish a monthly newspaper and quarterly magazine. And we conduct endless meetings.”12
Rochdale operated in its early years as a planned community, with a firm paternalistic hand on the helm. The UHF, in its publications and representatives, were at great pains to explain to new residents how much cooperatives differed from any other type of housing, and how the rewards of cooperative life entailed special obligations and responsibilities. In particular, Kazan wanted residents to overcome what he called the “passivity” of renters, a lazy mentality of complaint and critique that relied on the landlord to take care of problems. But in places like Rochdale, “The members of the cooperative are their own landlords.” What this meant, for Kazan, was that, for the most part, cooperators shouldn’t complain to management about something they could take care of by themselves.13
How this worked in practice became clear a few months after the first families moved into Rochdale. About one hundred of the eight hundred families then living in Rochdale banded together in laundry room meetings to fight the “deplorable conditions” in the cooperative, which included plaster cracks, broken pipes, leaks, poor elevator service, insufficient lighting in the streets and parking lots, and extended periods without water or electricity. Perhaps the biggest complaint was the lack of common meeting places—one reason the meetings had to be held in laundry rooms—and the lack of recreational facilities for teenagers. (The Community Center, a surprisingly late addition to the plans for Rochdale, would not open for the better part of a year.)14
The response of the UHF to these sorts of complaints was to try to place things in perspective and to urge cooperators not to let small annoyances and imperfections obscure the possibility for a better and brighter future, in the manner of John Bunyan’s man with a muckrake, his eyes forever cast downward, unable to see the Celestial City ahead. There were many among Rochdale’s first residents who shared the UHF’s perspective. In February 1964 a large general meeting was held at a neighboring high school, at which the critics were supposedly “howled down” by their neighbors, in an event that was headlined in the Long Island Press as “Rochdale Protests Protested by Protestors’ Neighbors.” The naysayers were accused of having adopted a “premature attitude of hostility toward the management.” One of the indications of a mentality of “passivity,” as Kazan understood it, was an overeagerness to actively protest about conditions.15
As usual, Kazan raised the issue to the level of cooperative philosophy and principles. “Minor problems, blown out of proportion, might lead to disparagement of the cooperative, [and the] integrated life in the development”; Rochdale’s residents had “a moral responsibility” to keep their complaints in perspective.”16 You are paying for any additional expense management incurs by management, he explained, because in effect, you are management. If you can tolerate a minor inconvenience until we get around to addressing it, that is less money you will be spending to repair it. Rather than complaining about litter around the cooperative, pick it up yourself, and save the cooperative the expense of hiring additional maintenance staff to do the litter-picking up. The money you save will be your own. Kazan frequently invoked this principle to explain his actions, in which the cheapest solution was invariably also the most socially responsible. There was no “I” in cooperator. For many, this made perfect sense; in building for a common good, there are inevitable sacrifices, and there was confidence that in the end things would turn out for the best. For others this was parsimonious paternalism masquerading as social democracy.
The UHF certainly did want to run things in Rochdale in its opening years to set a good example, show how things should be done, and to impart lessons on cooperation to Rochdale’s new cooperators. In Rochdale, as in other UHF cooperatives, there were no direct elections for most members of the board of directors in its early years of operation; the board consisted of persons handpicked by the UHF. The board picked the manager, who was in the case of Rochdale’s first manager, Arnold Merritt, an old UHF hand. There were some plausible reasons for this. The UHF, properly speaking, was just a foundation promoting cooperative housing. A separate corporation, Rochdale Village Inc. (with Kazan as its first president), was created in 1960 to acquire the land from the Jamaica Racetrack, and had to make decisions about the land and its development in the four years before the first families moved to Rochdale, a process that obviously had to be directed by the UHF. Harold Ostroff would write that while cooperatives are “owned and controlled by their members…this does not mean that large-scale cooperatives can be built by the ‘democratic process.’ They cannot. The future owners do not design the site or plan of the apartments.”17 A cooperative whose members were moving in daily and whose numbers were constantly changing was not stable enough to hold elections. But the UHF also wanted to ensure that the right decisions were made in the critical early years of the life of a cooperative, and to try to sufficiently impart to Rochdale’s residents the ideology of cooperation so that by the time the inevitable handoff was made to full cooperator control, there would no change in the underlying premises or basis of cooperation at Rochdale.
The UHF created a model of democracy that did not imitate the Athenian model of the demos directly marking their potsherds in the agora, but a filtered process, where eligible voters elect a board of governors who then make important decisions for the generality. As a 1959 study of the Amalgamated Houses indicated, “the management of the Amalgamated has consistently discouraged direct shareholder participation in corporate affairs. Instead it maintains that stockholder meetings should be limited to the discussion and voting upon of the activities of the popularly elected board of governors.” Out of a caution born in part from fights with Communists in the 1930s and 1940s, Kazan largely limited direct voting at the Amalgamated and UHF cooperatives to the occasional plebiscite and to the elections for the board of directors, which then made most of the decisions for the cooperative. And elections to the fifteen-person board were staggered, with three year terms, so that a majority of its members would remain in place, to ensure continuity.18
But like the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1787, the UHF’s notion of democracy through pyramidical filtration required a more directly representative body at its base, the House Congress, with its fingers on the pulse of the cooperative, to complement the deliberations of the board of directors. With 120 members, this was a body far more broadly based than the board of directors. (Rochdale’s twenty buildings were each divided into three sections, each with separate elevator systems and stairwells, and each of these sixty sections elected two members to the House Congress.) Rather than the cooperative-wide elections for the board of directors, the House Congress races involved canvassing by many candidates floor by floor and door to door. The analogies to the U.S. Constitution break down at this point, since the role of the House Congress was strictly advisory, making recommendations to the board of directors, who were free to accept or reject their suggestions. Still, many felt that the House Congress was a necessary first step toward the complete assumption of control of Rochdale’s internal politics by its residents.
At first, there was great enthusiasm about the House Congress, which had its initial elections in April 1965, shortly after all of Rochdale’s apartments were occupied, and began operations several months later. It established several standing committees, including ones for finance, security, education, and public relations, and elected as its first president Irving Washington, an African American.19 Candidates canvassed their buildings, and attended meetings to listen to and dispute with the candidates. Many Rochdale residents put all their talents and accumulated political experiences and passions into the House Congress. For Cal Jones, who was elected as one of the House Congress’s vice presidents in its initial year, the Congress was an education: “You would think people were really congressmen and senators the way they brought their organizational skills to the House Congress. There were those who could quote paragraphs of Robert’s Rules of Order because of all of their skill and experience in organizations…. It was very intense. At Candidates’ Night at the House Congress, you’d think the president was in the auditorium.”
In the cauldron of the House Congress and Rochdale’s overheated politics, many close political friendships were forged, often across racial lines. This was the experience of Hugh Williams, who became a leader of the Tenants Council, an important political faction in Rochdale politics: “I was delighted to live in Rochdale because I learned so much, man. In just attending meetings, and learning how meetings are organized, and to have caucuses beforehand so that when you have the meeting, the meeting doesn’t go astray…and these people didn’t mind sharing their knowledge. You don’t go out looking for a Jewish friend, but you do things together, and you have a meaningful relationship, and you form a close friendship.”20
Harvey Swados, an impressed outside observer writing in 1966, saw the House Congress as a striking example of democracy in action and an example of how democracy can trump racial divisions and barriers:
One thing it [the House Congress] can mean is ready and constructive gratification of the human urge to be, in the broadest sense, political (an urge far more widespread than one would credit in a society that for all its periodic noise about the democratic process places a premium on passivity and withdrawal). Hundreds of men (and not a few women) turn out for the meetings of the Rochdale Congress, even though in the present conduct of affairs of the village it has only an advisory relationship to management. Caucasians and blacks compete spiritedly for office, for committee chairmanships, for positions of influence. They solicit support through fliers, doorbell ringing, buttonholing; they caucus; they vote—all with little or no external evidence of appealing to racial or ethnic solidarity.21
Figure 10. Electioneering for the Rochdale House Congress in the large mall, 1965. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Photograph by Sam Reiss.
However, the enthusiasm in some quarters for the House Congress soon diminished. Many members of the House Congress saw its role as providing transition to full governance by Rochdale residents, by “setting up rules and suggestions” that the board of directors would honor; instead, they often felt, according to Herb Plever, who was one of the original vice presidents of the House Congress, that “the UHF just went along and did whatever they wanted to do.” As a result, “when we discovered that we would only be wallpaper and window dressing for them, and that we weren’t going to do anything, we said keep your House Congress because we have better things to do.” Cal Jones had similar sentiments. “So now you had someone dictating from on high on how your home should be and you left the Bronx or Brooklyn which was quite a trip to start a new experiment, and now you see that it’s not coming into focus into the way you wanted and someone else says hey you can’t.” For Hugh Williams, “the idea of not being able to elect the members of the community that are governing the community seemed un-American.”22 Maurice Cerrier, a close observer of internal Rochdale politics, writing in Inside Rochdale in 1966, describing the UHF as endlessly reliving the Great Depression and in thrall to faded collectivist pieties, called for “a strong dynamic House Congress to help pull it away from the paternalistic attitude of the Management.” He was skeptical of the promise the UHF had repeatedly made to stay on the board only as long as the people in Rochdale wanted them to. “Do you think we will ever get a chance to test these lofty words?”23
In response to this and similar criticisms, in October 1966 the Rochdale Village board of directors voted two Rochdale residents, the president and vice president of the House Congress (Irving Washington and Sidney Weinberger, respectively) onto the board, a pledge and token of good faith against “such time as they [Rochdale residents] can directly elect representatives.” For Harold Ostroff this was part of a natural process and transition to a fully self-governing cooperative. “There was a plan to replace the [UHF appointed] board by local people, and as Rochdale grew there was a push to get local people on the board…. I think it began to be evident that they wanted more responsibility than they currently had, and I think that expedited it a little, not with resistance on our part.”24 Others saw it differently, another instance of ersatz empowerment without real power.25 The factions that had already emerged in Rochdale politics—by 1966 there were complaints of “splinter groups [being] busy and active” in the House Congress—emerged as something akin to political parties and slates in early 1967.26
The political tension only increased when, in early 1967, the Rochdale Village board of directors realized that a 15 percent increase in monthly carrying charges was unavoidable, due to exigencies in the Mitchell-Lama law, inflation, and an increase in the cooperative’s tax assessment. This news, according to one report, “swept through Rochdale Village like a hurricane, leaving in its path confusion, disorganization, and panic. Everyone was caught by surprise by the amount of the increase, and no one knew what to do about it.”27 One response, on January 17, 1967, was the formation of a new organization that pointedly called itself the Tenants Council, in its very name rejecting the UHF talk of Rochdale residents as cooperators, joined with management in a common cause to build cooperative housing, instead invoking the classic dispute between landlord and tenants, in which the two sides had diametrically opposing interests. The Tenants Council saw the House Congress as essentially in cahoots with the UHF, politically inefficient and irrelevant, and prey to the vagaries of false consciousness. What was needed was more forceful and direct protest, up to and including the possibility of a rent strike, an act that would directly display the parties’ respective class interests.28
But if the rent increase had few supporters, the nascent Tenants Council faced much opposition within Rochdale. Some felt that the House Congress needed to be given a chance to show its utility. One moderate (and UHF supporter), Eddie Abramson, argued in Inside Rochdale, “How unfortunate it is that all this energy could not be harnessed into one organization…. Though there are mixed feelings about the House Congress, I feel, as a cooperator, that my energy should be concentrated with our elected House Congressmen.” Others, from a social democratic viewpoint, felt that the threat of a rent strike made no sense in a cooperative, and that it was “a strike against yourself.” After all, one resident said, “Where is the money going to come from? There was a lack of understanding of what a co-op really meant.” The co-op, they argued, would eventually have to make up any shortfall out of the pockets of its residents.29 The House Congress and the UHF successfully organized what they called Operation Uproar and after rallies, lobbying, and negotiating in Albany, in February 1967 the New York State housing commissioner announced a cut in Rochdale’s tax assessment by $6.4 million, enough to avoid the monthly carrying charge increase.30 For the supporters of the House Congress, this was an indication that the UHF system was working and that rather than indulging in the “luxury of ‘protesting,’” Rochdale residents should proceed with “constructive and productive thinking.”31 But the turning back of the rent increase marked only a brief interlude of unity in Rochdale’s internal politics, and the Tenants Council continued to organize and offer its criticisms.
The division between the Tenants Council and their opponents had a distinct ideological tinge. Many leaders in the Tenants Council had been associated with the Old Left, and were at varying degrees of distance from their roots in the Communist Party. Some in Rochdale had not traveled that far. One Rochdale resident who visited the Soviet Union in 1966 reported that “Russians gave proof of their increased freedom” and that “those I met with were impressed with pictures I had taken of Rochdale Village.” Given that Rochdale’s architect, Herman Jessor, was himself close to the party, and had used Soviet workers’ housing as a model, Rochdale indeed must have seemed familiar to many Soviet viewers.32 For veterans of the Old Left, few forms of community action were more basic than the rent strike, and a deep-seated hostility to landlords underlay much of the progressive and left activism in twentieth-century New York City.33 Herb Plever was of the opinion that the “UHF was very suspicious of people who sounded like the Old Left, in terms of making sure that if we controlled the House Congress we weren’t going to have any power.”34 On the other hand, some felt the basis of the animus of the Tenants Council toward the UHF was that it was seen by some “as a social democratic and not a true left venture.”35
If the divisions between the Old Left and social democrats was fuzzier than it had been a decade or two earlier, it was still sharp enough to send sparks flying between what one observer called “the left and the left-left” (with mainstream Democrats as Rochdale’s version of the far right36). Anticommunist social democrats and veterans of the Old Left had been sparring for decades, their disagreements originating within the deeply fractious world of the Jewish labor movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, and many residents were taken aback by the ferocity of the internal fighting, which seemed to many out of proportion to the problem at hand. This somewhat confused and nonplussed outsiders. Cal Jones remembers one of his initial reactions to Rochdale’s politics: “I couldn’t understand it. These guys just met each other and they already can’t stand each other.” Hugh Williams had a similar observation. “There weren’t a lot of black folks involved in the Tenants Council or the Concerned Cooperators [which emerged as their main rival] at first; we were more standing back, looking at these two groups at war, trying to figure out what was going on—what we didn’t know is that a lot of these wars had nothing to do with Rochdale. These people came with their wars from the East Side and from Brooklyn and the Bronx; these fights had been going on for years. Lots of black folks said, ‘What’s going on, why can’t they get together?’”37
But if Rochdale’s political debates in the late 1960s had roots in internecine Jewish debates at Union Square and the City College luncheon alcoves, they could not be reduced to these earlier events. Many Rochdale residents in the late 1960s, Jew and gentile alike, were, as Hugh Williams suggests, indifferent to the nuances of Jewish left sectarianism, and there were real issues in Rochdale in the late 1960s that compelled political participation. Hugh Williams himself is the perfect illustration of this. He saw his entrance into Rochdale politics coming about from his frustration with the UHF’s management. Williams was among the first of Rochdale’s second generation, a nonoriginal resident who moved into Rochdale in 1966 from South Jamaica. He felt that the family that had occupied the apartment before him had not taken good care of their parquet floors (the pride and joy of many a Rochdale resident) and wanted them redone. But management gave him what he considered to be “a hard time” and this helped catalyze his emergence as a political activist. He complained that Rochdale’s management “didn’t deal too well with the cooperators, they didn’t solve problems—you went to them with a problem, and you felt that you had bought into this place, you were living in a cooperative and not just a rental apartment, and you thought it should have been able to get your problems solved especially when you weren’t asking for things that were crazy. But all you got was a lot of excuses, and the feeling that people who were well connected and belonged to the right organizations had their problems taken care of.” Williams would in time become a leader of the Tenants Council, and was elected to the board of directors.38
Williams’s anger at the UHF was part of the lively democracy the UHF had created at Rochdale, and those who lived in Rochdale soon discovered what the UHF had known for many years, just how vibrant and potentially chaotic cooperative democracy could be. This was of course one reason why the UHF wanted to create forms that would channel the exuberance, knowing that one of the problems of creating new democratic institutions is the inevitable tendency for members to rebel against founders. Kazan, commenting in 1964 on the pro- and anti-management factions that had developed in Penn South, a sister cooperative in Midtown Manhattan, a few years after its opening, attributed this to transferential projection: “Most people are used being tenants in someone else’s house. When they move into a co-op, they put their old feelings about the terrible landlord on the management. After a while, though, they’ll settle down.” Sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn’t.39
Even before Rochdale moved to complete self-governance, it had developed a rough-and-tumble democracy, with a political debate that could be intense, rancorous, and sometimes vicious, with character assassination and red-baiting. Many exhibited a bare-knuckled love of factional infighting that would have made Andrew Jackson (or to pick a more apt tutelary figure, Leon Trotsky) proud. Rochdale’s politics highlight an essential problem with democracy: participation in politics is invariably seen as a societal good and intense partisanship is seen as negative, yet you rarely have vigorous governance without both, and it is often rivalry and contention that makes democracy vibrant. Whether one looks at Rochdale’s politics in the 1960s as a model of participatory democracy, or as a nightmare of interminable meetings and endless squabbles, there can be little doubt that Rochdale’s residents cared deeply about their homes, and were trying, to the best of their abilities, to realize the cooperative ideal of a self-governing and self-determining community. The story of Rochdale after 1969, when the UHF ended its direct control of the cooperative and internal politics became even more frenzied and bitter, will be taken up in a subsequent chapter.
Despite (or because) of the political infighting that characterized Rochdale from the beginning, most residents were excited by their new community. Eddie Abramson, the publisher of Inside Rochdale, wrote in an early issue that the publication was “dedicated to living and growing in Rochdale. It is here that many of us are planting our roots, such that we never experienced.” The paper promised that it would feature the kind of “thinking” and “dreaming” that was only possible in Rochdale.40 The excitement of people working together for a common goal was infectious, and could be transferred to almost any aspect of cooperative life. A leader of the B’nai B’rith chapter at Rochdale, in a Passover reflection in 1965, compared Rochdale to the Promised Land (though Rochdale had a different Moses). “Just as the past year has been like the beginning of a new life for all of Rochdale, so it was thousands of years ago the beginning of a new life for people of the Jewish faith.” At about the same time, a eulogy for a woman who died after a prolonged illness proclaimed that “her fondest dreams were realized when she moved to Rochdale Village.”41 Cal Jones remarked that when he moved to Rochdale, he was determined to get involved in as many different sorts of activities as he could, and there was much to become involved in. “Rochdale was a real good attempt to build a diverse community, with people trying their best. You get something of everything in a community, but if you were fighting with someone, there was always someone else you could align with. That was one of the best and most vibrant communities I have ever lived in.”42
Even in as politically active place as Rochdale, not everyone was involved in local politics, and this was only one of the ways to get involved in the swirl of community, and in many ways it was not the most important one. The culture of a cooperative community was created not only through its politics but through its various organizations, clubs, and associations. Their formation was encouraged by the UHF, and this had long been central to Kazan’s and the UHF’s philosophy of housing. Kazan had written in 1951 that the two main benefits of cooperative housing were “material” and “social,” and that, in the end, as important as the material benefits were, the social benefits “outweigh…the purely material gains.” Herman Liebman, who had been a social director at the Amalgamated Houses for many decades, wrote in 1956 in the UHF house organ that it is the beehive of social activity and cultural recreations that distinguishes cooperative housing from commercial housing” and transforms it “into a superior way of life.”43 To help grow the social beehive in Rochdale, the UHF made the names and potential interests of prospective cooperators available to interested parties before the cooperative opened, and many organizations—such as several of Rochdale’s synagogues—were organized prior to the first family moving in. By the fall of 1964, before the peopling of Rochdale was complete, 141 organizations had already been founded with the UHF’s encouragement, and more were in the offing. Inside Rochdale boasted in March 1965 that Rochdale Village “has an organization for just about everyone and everything.”44
Rochdale’s newly formed organizations covered the whole gamut of associational life. There were the political clubs (Democrat, Reform Democrat, Liberal, and even a beleaguered Republican club), in addition to organizations representing every shade of progressive opinion from moderate socialist on leftward.45 There were fraternal organizations like the Knights of Pythias, the Oddfellows, the Masons, and the American Legion, service organizations dedicated to heart disease, cancer, tuberculosis, and other ailments, as well as a police auxiliary and groups concerned with drug use, crime, and other problems. Hobbyist clubs offered forums for bird-watching, sculpture, painting, and woodworking. For children there were the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, organized leagues for baseball, football, and basketball, and numerous after-school activities clubs.46 There was even a swingers club, whose members came together discreetly for the swapping of wives and husbands and other sexual adventures.47 (This group did not meet in the Community Center, though.) As Harvey Swados described Rochdale’s associational life, “while the local chapter of Cancer Care is having its rummage sale and the Leukemia Chapter its lingerie fashion show, members of Planned Parenthood listen to a lecture on the history of contraceptives, while the young wives of the modern dance group wriggle on the floor in their black leotards, the men of the Chess Club ponder the pieces on their boards.”48
And there were groups that reflected the religious and ethnic backgrounds of Rochdale residents, especially Jewish organizations of every variety, reflecting both Rochdale’s demographics and perhaps a Jewish propensity for joining and belonging to things. There were three synagogues (along with a secular Jewish organization that held God-free High Holiday services), numerous Jewish fraternal organizations, chapters of Hadassah, B’nai B’rith, Workman’s Circle, Jewish War Veterans, American Jewish Congress, Zionists, non-Zionists, forums for progressive Jews, for reactionary Jews; in short, the teeming organizational panoply, the whole megillah of American Jewish life.
This whirl of activity by Rochdale residents in forming and joining clubs and associations was contagious and mutually reinforcing, as participation in one organization often led to participation in another, and for many there was an excitement in knowing that so many of their fellow cooperators were spending their evenings not in front of their televisions, but in meeting with common purpose with their neighbors. Cal Jones, a founder of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, was not alone when he said this spirit of involvement helped inspire him to be “active in anything that moved; I was going to make sure that I was going to get the most out of living in a cooperative.”49
There were many opportunities for culture in Rochdale, high and not so high. Concerts in the auditorium in Rochdale’s early years covered the cultural gamut from the great bluesman Muddy Waters to the Russian American violinist Mischa Elman, in what proved to be the latter’s last New York City concert in his celebrated sixty-year career.50 And when Muddy and Mischa weren’t available, and no visiting theatrical or ballet troupe called, Rochdale residents were perfectly willing and capable of putting on their own musical, dramatic, or dance performances, and many organizations were devoted to nurturing the creative abilities of Rochdale’s residents.
Many activities stressed the interracial nature of Rochdale Village, and went out of their way to form integrated chapters, including the Knights of Pythias and the American Legion. An integrated bridge tournament in Rochdale was the subject of a laudatory column in the New York Times.51 The Rochdale Community Singers put on memorable annual concerts (my mom was a participant), with guests such as folksinger Pete Seeger, who sang in the world premiere of a cantata based on the songs of Woody Guthrie. The proceeds of their first annual concert, to a sold-out auditorium in the Community Center in February 1966, were donated to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to purchase a bus for organizing work in Mississippi. Accepting the donation was Nathan Schwerner, the father of the slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner.52
The commitment of the UHF to nurturing Rochdale’s organizational life reflected, at a remove, the anarchist conviction that with the proliferation of voluntary societies would come a withering away of hierarchy, and that in the future, everybody would get to be in charge of something, and in that way, the very notion of power would be diffused and redefined. As one Rochdale resident said in 1966, even “the most miserable misanthrope, black or white, has the chance to be somebody here, to get himself elected in short order to a position where he can take charge of several hundred people.”53
The same year Harold Ostroff speculated, somewhat fancifully, that “in the future, man will not have to work—at least as we know it today—in order to consume. Computers and machines will free man from the drudgeries of work as we know it.” Rather than education for “making money,” children will be educated for the purpose of being creative, to utilize leisure profitably, to enjoy life in a society based on abundance and cooperation rather than a system based on scarcity and competition.54 The ultimate goal of cooperation, Ostroff continued, was “to give people the opportunity to appreciate Grand Opera and Shakespeare.” But he also said, “before they can appreciate these things, they must have decent homes, enough food, security, and so forth.” For the UHF, and no doubt for many Rochdale residents, the creation of a vital, vibrant sense of community in Rochdale was important in itself and also as a foretoken of a new type of society, “the cornerstones of which are cooperation, democracy, brotherhood, abundance, and peace.”55
It was not only adults who enjoyed the fruits of community at Rochdale. Those of us who were children in Rochdale’s early years were living rebuttals of Jane Jacobs’s popular thesis that large, tower-in-the-park developments were sterile environments that bred a similar cultural sterility, and deprived children of the life-enhancing heterogeneity of city life.56 When Rochdale was new, it was a single playing field, 170 acres with no through streets and no automobiles, with thousands of kids my age, and all of whom, like me, had just moved in to the development and were looking to make new friends. One man remembered “running out on that first warm spring day and seeing people in every direction…so many kids you didn’t know where to go first…and so much space you could run and never stop…. Then being a teenager and smelling the grass on a summer night…and seeing crowds in every direction…and not believing that this place was really mine.”57 Much of Rochdale in its early years was a giant sandlot, with grass only slowly laid over the hard dirt on which, not too many years previously, the hooves of Thoroughbreds had trod, and this was part of the fun. (An occasional horseshoe, or nail, or, to gross out the girls, a calcified bit of manure could still be found in the weeds in Rochdale’s earliest years.) One man remembered that, “no matter what patch of grass existed, there was always some form of athletic activity going on either at the sandlot (softball or tackle football) on the grass (usually touch football) or the parks (either basketball, punchball, or roller hockey). Rochdale was a breeding ground for sports.”58 And the playing fields of Rochdale, as more than one person has attested, were remarkably free of racial tension; anyone who wanted to play was invariably welcome. The sandlot could have other uses—one girl remembered digging a pit on the last day of school in June with a large group of friends and ritually burning her schoolbooks.59 (It should be noted that for adolescents, free-form improvisational play was more difficult, and there were complaints and organizations formed to try to improve the recreational facilities for teenagers, such as night-illuminated basketball courts, to steer them away from juvenile delinquency.)60
The human density of childhood in Rochdale fostered both friendship by serendipity—you left your house and just ran into whomever you ran into—and the formation of cliques and gangs of friends who hung out at regular and appointed times, at the playgrounds, along the culs-de-sac, in building lobbies, or in front of the Community Center. Girls were not as avid sports players as boys as a rule, though there were some games that were co-ed, such as skully, the famous New York City version of street croquet that consisted of flicking a bottle cap through a series of chalked-in squares on playground cement (though one woman and avid skully player remembers burning a skully court into her girlfriend’s parquet floors).61
Another woman remembers the exhilaration of “going out to play after supper on the first day of daylight savings time,” knowing that the long hard winter of four-thirty sunsets was a thing of the past. Another woman recalls the moments of relative intimacy “sitting inside one of the cement barrels in the playground with a friend and sharing secrets” or shopping at Rochdale’s mall (there were two malls on the cooperative grounds, the “big mall,” which was enclosed, and the “little mall,” which was an open-air strip mall, and you didn’t drive, you walked there): “spending a rainy day at the big mall with a buck or two in your pocket and having the greatest time.”62 The urban concentration of Rochdale had many rewards; consider Halloween, with six to eight apartments on each floor, thirteen floors in each section, three sections in each building, and twenty buildings. As one man recalled: “What a setup! I personally worked two or three doors at once, and would ‘trick or treat’ till my hands were almost bleeding from the shopping bag’s handles cutting through them under the weight of all that candy in it.”63 One girl remembered that, growing up, she thought that Rochdale was so cosmopolitan, and it was easy to think of her home, in this corner of Queens, as the center of the universe.64 For another man, Rochdale “was paradise for me and my parents, having moved from Brownsville, where I was already used to fighting for my lunch money. I had grass! Open spaces! So many kids! And brand-new schools. My school in Brooklyn was already a hundred years old when I was there. I can still smell it. Rochdale was paradise, fleeting as it was, but paradise nonetheless.”65 Evlynne Braithwaithe spoke for many when she told me, “I don’t think I could have asked for anything better than growing up in Rochdale.”66
There was a feeling of security in being part of a community of identical apartments and buildings; once you knew one apartment and one building, you in effect knew them all. This global sense of belonging was perhaps felt more acutely by teens and preteens, than by adults who had fully accepted the inviolability of bedroom and other apartment walls. For those of us who grew up in Rochdale, apartment walls were artificial barriers to be overcome and breached. The closeness and the sameness of the apartments opened connections between them. Some friends communicated in code by knocking on steam pipes. Others, also using a version of Morse code, communicated to friends in adjacent buildings by flashing the venetian blinds up and down.67 Some tried more dangerous expedients, such as leaning out a twelfth-floor window to drop something on the sill of a friend’s window four floors below.68
When you visited a friend’s apartment you often had an eerie sense of familiarity; your home sweet home had exactly the same layout as your friend’s, and for that matter the same layout as hundreds of others besides. This could lead to a feeling that in some ways all of Rochdale Village was yours. “I remember, as a nine- or ten-year-old, walking through the lobby to someone else’s house wearing slippers. It was like the whole building was your private house. Something that people who grew up in private homes couldn’t possibly understand.”69 Rather than make you feel insignificant, the layout, the similarity of the apartments, buildings, and sections, and the fact that as an inhabitant of one of Rochdale’s 5,860 apartments, in some sense it all was yours could make you feel not puny or insignificant, but empowered.
Rochdale Village opened, blessedly, before the era of the playdate and officious parental intrusion into the prerogatives of childhood: “being ten years old and leaving your house to play at noon and not coming home until six…and our parents had no idea where we were.”70 However, this is perhaps an exaggeration, and if parents did not call attention to themselves, they remained quietly observant shepherds (actually, shepherdesses, primarily) watching their flocks. One of the central theses of Jane Jacobs’s work is that in true urban settings, people watch and watch out for one another, from the street, from apartment windows; and this sense of collective, communal observation was necessarily greatly attenuated in large apartment complexes, with tall towers and large distances between buildings. But in practice, Rochdale was in a constant state of vigilance. One woman, a single mother, who worked evenings and nights, remembered that her neighbors would watch from their windows as she walked from her building and waited for the bus.71 If parents were not always around when their kids were playing—and of course, this was equally so in Jacobean neighborhoods under the tightest parental surveillance—there was, one woman remembers, a grapevine; parents watched from windows, and misbehavior had a way of getting back to your mom. “When I cut across the grass to jump the fence to cut through the playground, and Mr. or Mrs. Pemberton in Section C happened to see that, they were going to let my mother know. People were always about looking out for your kids, and in Rochdale I never knew who I was going to run into, so I always had to mind my p’s and q’s.”72 Children yelled up from the street to the moms (usually asking for money) or to friends, and the ability of the more leather-lunged to call loudly to the upper floors became an envied Rochdale talent. A UHF publication once offered a generic complaint against “children shouting from the gardens to their mother” and “mothers shouting to her children in the playground” from the high floors of buildings.73 It was a losing battle. Rochdale residents remember calling up to friends on the upper stories of buildings, asking them to come out and play, pairs of keys and carefully wrapped baggies being thrown from windows, and, at the tinkling of bells, kids importuning their moms to throw down money for the ice cream truck.74 Those who grew up in Rochdale’s playgrounds, curved pathways, and culs-de-sac, did not envy those coming of age on Jane Jacobs’s perpendicular and rectilinear Manhattan streetscapes one whit.
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) has already made several appearances in this book. She was, without question, the most significant North American writer on urban planning (however much she detested being labeled a “planner”) in the second half of the twentieth century. Her acolytes are innumerable; her influence on the subsequent course of thinking about cities is of Copernican dimensions. As much as any intellectual and political movement can be credited to one person (and no movement can), the rejection of large-scale urban renewal can be credited to the insights of one person, Jane Jacobs.75 The low murmurs in the 1950s against urban renewal and the wisdom of building large superblock apartment complexes like Rochdale grew into a loud trumpet blast with the appearance of her landmark 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The case against urban renewal included the human cost of tenant relocation, the great expense of such projects, and what was seen as the unfairness of the tax breaks always necessary for large-scale urban projects. Jacobs provided the clincher: not only did these projects have a lot of unnecessary side effects, but far from contributing to a solution to the city’s woes, they were the major cause of its problems. New York City, for Jacobs and her followers, was renewing itself into ruin and decay.
After her success with Death and Life, Jacobs’s role as a political figure blocking Robert Moses’s ill-considered plans for cross-Manhattan expressways added to her legend, which had the dimensions of a fairy tale; the obscure and unprepossessing housewife and writer on architectural topics who discovered her true destiny, which was to challenge the curmudgeonly dragon whose fiery breath for decades reduced neighborhoods to rubble. She was acclaimed as “Queen Jane” as early as 1962.76 From the time Jacobs’s book appeared, Rochdale Village and all other UHF projects were dated.
Moses and Kazan lost politically and intellectually in the 1960s and 1970s, and have lost ever since at the hands of historians, urbanists, and in the court of public opinion. Jacobs has carried the day. Her powerfully observed and argued versions of street life have persuaded several generations of urban thinkers that instead of the slash-and-burn bulldozer architecture of much urban renewal, we needed to carefully rehabilitate and improve our old neighborhoods. Instead of planning communities we needed to nurture the messy unplanned diversity and vitality of the streets of urban neighborhoods, the entwining of dense networks of human interaction.77 Huge superblock developments had their failure inherent in their very design, with a soul-numbing and spirit-killing architecture, a layout and design that stifled regular human contact while encouraging muggers, vandals, drug users, and other criminal riffraff to ply their trades. Tower-in-the-park developments such as Rochdale were condemned by Jacobs as anti-urban and on some level anti-human.
One of the spurs to Death and Life was Jacobs’s growing irritation with the presence of UHF cooperatives on the Lower East Side in the late 1950s, and she singles out two UHF cooperatives for critique in the book’s pages. The Amalgamated Dwellings is scored for closing off their central promenade with a padlock and barbed wire (which does seem pretty indefensible). The cooperative supermarket at the ILGWU Houses on the Lower East Side, which replaced a number of smaller stores, is described by Jacobs as “a mill. Its clerks are so busy making change and screaming ineffectual imprecations at rowdies that they never hear anything except ‘I want that.’…A store like this would fail economically if it had competition.” (This description must have cut Kazan to the quick.)78 For Jacobs, large projects like UHF cooperatives were urban black holes, their huge gravitational pull distorting all around them into disorder.
One of the keys to understanding Jacobs is her profoundly anti-utopian sensibility. The entire tradition of utopian communities setting themselves off, their residents trying to live their lives according to principles promulgated from on high from their founders, seemed to her a betrayal of everything that was vital in cities, and indeed, in free people choosing the own destinies. Utopias were confining and procrustean; overplanned, rigid, and lifeless boxes built by Platonic guardians. She wrote with withering condescension of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century British Garden City movement, an inspiration for the UHF and other planners of urban communities. Its aim, she said, “was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice small towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in the Utopias, the right to have plans of significance belonged only to the planners in charge.”79 City life provided the relative anonymity and the possibility of chance encounters that fostered both creativity and spontaneity. Planned communities were the reverse; you had no real public spaces, and no real place to go, and nothing to do except go to endless meetings with your nosy and intrusive neighbors, until all real individuality was eroded away into a passionless, clubbable, suburban amiability.80
Although Jacobs does not mention Rochdale in Death and Life (not surprisingly, since it was still under construction in 1961), she does have one passage which seems to speak to it and other model developments that tried to create integrated communities. She thinks they are a waste of time and money. While segregation is “our country’s most serious social problem” and proper design of streets and street life will not solve all the problems, she thought it would go a long way to do so. She damns efforts at integration in places like Rochdale with faint praise: “To be sure, token model housing integration schemes here and there can be achieved in city areas handicapped by danger and by lack of public life—achieved by great effort and settling for abnormal (abnormal for cities) choosiness among its new neighbors. This is an evasion of the size of the task and its urgency…. [T]he tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors…. are foreign to the suburbs and pseudosuburbs.”81 In other words, even if integration worked in an artificial hothouse like Rochdale, it proved nothing about its applicability to the city at large.
Kazan and the UHF saw Jacobs for what she was; a direct threat to their way of doing business, and they tried to counter her as best they could. There was much mutual incomprehension between Jacobs and supporters of urban renewal. Kazan and the UHF returned the condescension (and the lack of nuance) in spades. By 1962 for Kazan, Jacobs, whom he did not name, was the leader of the “pseudo-intellectuals” who maintained that “slum clearance has ruined the city”; he further complained that “the publication of a controversial book has received more attention than the number of children bitten by rats in vermin-infested households…yet to some fuzzy thinking intellectuals, such conditions are preferable to destroying neighborhoods and replacing them with modern buildings.”82 The review of Death and Life in Co-op Contact accused Jacobs of having an unrealistic view of city life, and dismissed the volume as an urban pastoral with its roots in comic operetta, with the Manhattan equivalent of happy peasants: “The blocks are short and full of circuses…. In the streets people are friendly without trying to presume too much; truck drivers spend their idle hours guarding kids against danger,” while the favorite pastime of children is “exploring dark alleys, who therefore have no need for parks or playgrounds.”83
Rehabilitation as an alternative to urban renewal was seen as little more than an insidious plot to keep the slums intact. In 1963 Kazan complained that “‘historic architectural heritage’ is apparently a new phrase to be added to the lexicon of those who would preserve what are in reality only ugly, unsafe tenements.” The Co-op Contact added crankily, “It seems to us that history has always been made by people, not by buildings, and there is certainly is not much point in saving old relics”; it offered as a reductio ad absurdum that if the city could consider designating the “cast-iron district” (the area just south of Houston Street) as a historic district, the Lower East Side and Harlem couldn’t be far behind, and one day to other teeming slums “the Landmark Commission can come along and put up plaques on the buildings which will guarantee their preservation for posterity.”84 (How Kazan would have loathed the very idea of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum!)
One of the reasons Kazan and the UHF were so suspicious of historic preservation is that on some level they saw it as a sleight of hand by shopkeepers and speculators to raise real estate values. One of the main differences between Kazan and Jacobs is Kazan’s lifelong distrust of the petite bourgeois, whereas Jacobs saw shopkeepers anchoring neighborhoods by their very presence. “Many of them are interested in what they can take out of the neighborhood, not in what they can do towards improving it,” Kazan wrote. “We cannot delay rebuilding and keep people in miserable tenements on account of small shopkeepers.”85 As Rochdale’s architect Herman Jessor wrote in 1968, “housing for the masses…. is too vital for the needs of the people to be subject to the profit motive.”86 On the other hand, Jacobs felt the basic problem with housing utopians like Kazan and Jessor was that their disdain for the profit motive was so profound, they were willing to embrace totalitarian planning designs as an alternative.
The extent to which the tide had turned against superblock-style urban renewal became clear in 1965, when the UHF announced plans to build Co-op City. Part of the negative reaction toward Co-op City was due to its unprecedented size: thirty-five buildings, each twenty-four to thirty-three stories high, with more than 15,000 apartments, all spread out over three hundred acres of marshy land in the East Bronx, relatively isolated from mass transit. Herman Jessor, the architect of Co-op City and all previous UHF cooperatives, designed Co-op City in his distinctive nondescript style, an almost aggressive blandness. But the main difference between the reception of Rochdale and Co-op City was that in the five years between the announcement of the two projects, the scholarly consensus now echoed the planning concerns of Jane Jacobs.
A few days after the project was first announced, in February 1965, a group of architects calling themselves the Committee for Excellence in Urban Architecture denounced the design as reusing “outdated design formulas which have already been proven inadequate in a variety of housing projects.” The height of the towers would create a “feeling of alienation.” A few months later the American Institute of Architects opined that the “spirits” of Co-op City’s residents “would be dampened and deadened by the paucity of their environment.” The noted architect and urban theorist Percival Goodman dismissed Jessor’s design as “a disgrace to humanity” and sneered that “just because it keeps the rain off doesn’t make it worthy to live in.” Previous criticisms of UHF cooperatives had focused on their uninspired architecture or tenant relocations (which, as with Rochdale, was not relevant for Co-op City). But Jane Jacobs’s critique had raised the stakes. Now UHF cooperatives were not merely excoriated as drearily utilitarian, but were seen as positively illiberal and reactionary, or, as the Committee for Excellence in Architecture complained in February 1965, a “negation of the ideals of the Great Society.”87 At the heart of the unease that many progressives felt about the new cooperative was the feeling that Co-op City was, on a deep level, ersatz urbanism, a bastard neighborhood, somehow not a real place to live. In 1968 the Times’s distinguished architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable offered the conventional critique of Kazan and all his works, claiming that the UHF was guilty of “sterile site-planning and uninspired architectural design,” and of building communities “that are not communities in the urban expert’s sense.”88 Co-op City became a symbol for progressive reformers of all kinds of everything that was backward and retrograde in urban planning.
Kazan, needless to say, was having none of it, and dismissed the critics’ “worthless talk,” and “abstractions” which “did nothing to produce housing working people can afford,” and he wondered how many units of moderate income housing his detractors had built.89 The UHF was almost aggressively contemptuous of those who raised the issue of architectural beauty. Talk of aesthetics made them reach for their slide rules. A UHF official was quoted as saying that he was “the first to admit that aesthetic problems do not keep him from sleeping at night” and that the goal of the UHF was “to give people the most housing we can for the money. And I don’t mean cheap housing.”90 Jessor argued that “the cheapest wall is still a brick wall. We are willing to pay for something practical, but we are unwilling to pay for art.”91
The UHF and its defenders also argued, perhaps more to the point, that the people who were actually living in Co-op City (and in Rochdale Village and other UHF cooperatives) were by all accounts generally delighted with their new homes and their spacious and affordable apartments, happy to be living in a place where it was safe to walk at night, satisfied with their new neighbors.92 (Ada Louise Huxtable would return to Co-op City in 1971 and, in a partial recantation, acknowledge that it had “15,372 well-planned apartments that are no mean achievement.” She had nice things to say about the landscaping as well.)93 The UHF further argued that in Co-op City (much as in Rochdale) there was a vibrant and vital community life, with its residents deeply involved in the future of their new home, and active in the widest possible array of cultural and social activities.94
The UHF rejected the strain of architectural determinism that runs deep in Jacobs and many of her admirers. To Harold Ostroff, speaking in 1969, evaluating a city through its structures was skin deep and superficial, like judging a book by its cover, or a person’s worth by their external appearance:95
We do not subscribe to the theory that people become frustrated, alienated, or dehumanized by the size and shapes of buildings. What is important is for people to have the opportunity to live in dignity and self-respect with their neighbors; to create an atmosphere for brotherhood and a happy relationship among people; to provide an opportunity for people to grow and enrich their lives socially and culturally. This is the real meaning and purpose of Co-op City and other cooperative communities.
But perhaps the biggest difference between Kazan and Jacobs was in their respective understandings of community. For Jacobs, a community was, above all, a physical thing, fragilely rooted and defined by the specific geography and topography of place. Human life inevitably reflects the spaces in which it lives, and the best human spaces cannot be summoned by a design; they come into existence without a specific creator (or from multiple creators), rising from a primordial urban chaos. Communities can, at times, when threatened by an external foe (like a Robert Moses highway) come together to face a political challenge, but for the most part community exists best only indirectly and implicitly, within the interstices of human intention.
For Kazan, on the other hand, all communities worthy of the name had to be planned communities, deliberately conceived, carefully birthed, and lovingly nurtured. Kazan thought his cooperatives were physically well designed, but in the end, architecture was only the outer shell that gave people a place to live; what was important was not where they lived, but how they lived, and how they took control over their lives. Community for Kazan primarily was a social and political space, existing to permit people to come together as equals for self-governance. The ultimate purpose of any community was a joining of people in diverse ways to advance their spiritual, intellectual, and political interests. And this sort of community for Kazan was exemplified in limited-equity cooperatives.
In many ways the urban visions of Jane Jacobs and Abraham Kazan stand at opposite urban poles, resisting merging or amalgamation. But they can both be appreciated on their own terms, and enough time has passed to see both Kazan and Jacobs as historical figures, each with their own biases, unexamined assumptions, and trailing a host of unanticipated consequences in their wakes. Contrary to Jane Jacobs’s view, not all superblock developments were alike, and many, like Rochdale and Co-op City, report a rich internal life.96 And Jacobs woefully underestimated the extent to which preservation of streetscapes could open cities to rampant gentrification, making the sort of rich urban life she so memorably described as progressively unaffordable for persons of modest incomes, and sending many of the participants in her “intricate sidewalk ballet” scurrying to the nearest superblock apartment complex for affordable housing. And contrary to Kazan, there indeed were effective ways of reviving inner city neighborhoods besides razing all the existing structures. He greatly underestimated the extent to which Sharon Zukin has called the quest for “urban authenticity,” the creation of distinctive communities of older rehabilitated structures and new buildings, with a mix of racial, ethnic, and income levels, could be a valuable engine of urban growth.97
But Jacobs and Kazan both reflect aspects of what one can call a quasi-anarchist vision of society: that people, left to their own devices and enterprise, are basically good and can manage their affairs without external interference. Conventional politics are eschewed in favor of what historian John H. Summers has called the encouragement of “voluntary associations vitalized by spontaneous effusions and organized around the latent potentialities of cooperation.”98 Kazan placed more emphasis on the cooperation, Jacobs on the spontaneity, but both are key elements in any decentralized conception of urban order, in which a city is built and organized around its granular particularities. If they differed profoundly, they both were, in their own ways, advocates of the beauty of smallness, even if they refused to acknowledge this underlying similarity. Jacobs’s ugly superblock was Kazan’s miniature self-governing polity; and Kazan’s pestiferous, teeming slum was Jacobs’s epitome of the virtues of local, uncoerced cooperation.
In the end, there is no one way to live in cities, to improve cities, or to save cities. Cities are both carefully planned and celebrate randomness and serendipity. Both Jacobs and Kazan believed that the great glory of cities was their ability to inspire cooperation between people to work for their common goals, and that this was a stronger force than any that might be imposed by a central authority or dictated by a political ideology. And perhaps now, in the early twenty-first century, we can create a new urban vision, broad, generous, and encompassing enough to have room for both Jane Jacobs’s street life and Abraham Kazan’s superblocks.