Introduction
WHEN BLACK AND WHITE LIVED TOGETHER
We were as twyned Lambs that did frisk i’th’ Sun
And bleat the one at th’ other
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (act 1, scene 2, lines 81–82)
In November 1966 in a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine, the veteran radical journalist Harvey Swados wrote of “the vast confrontation between black and white now taking place not only across the United States but throughout the world.” South Africa had apartheid; the United States had its own version. If the explicit legal proscriptions of Jim Crow were beginning to vanish, the unwritten rules of neighborhood separation and segregation were proving more sturdy, with white and black enclaves “separated by a Gaza Strip or a 17th Parallel,” enforced by the heavy weight of custom, political complicity, and, if necessary, knuckles, baseball bats, or worse.1
This was not just a Southern problem, and Swados thought (and in late 1966 he was hardly alone in this) that it was getting worse. Integration, the favored remedy of the decade of civil rights, was, he argued, proving to be far more difficult to implement than first imagined, if it was not an outright delusion. Minuscule doses of “integration,” such as one black family moving into a white neighborhood, were still enough to rouse usually placid homeowners into a fury against the disturbers of their racial status quo. And those who had a vested interest in painting a rosy picture of race relations touted laughably meager results as evidence of some profound breakthrough. Does belief in racial progress, Swados wondered, always require a willing suspension of incredulity?
Figure 1. Aerial view of Rochdale Village, with John F. Kennedy International Airport in the background, ca. 1964/65. Note the Quonset huts of PS 30 between sections 1 and 5. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.
The only thing we can all agree on is that someone else is to blame for our growing problems. The catchphrase of the day was becoming less “We shall overcome” and more “What do they want? What do they want?”
But Swados’s purpose in this article was not a wringing of hands. Accompanying the rather fearsome images of racial war invoked in the article’s opening was an illustration of a curved plastic sliding pond in a playground, with a young black girl at the bottom of the slide, and a white and a black boy waiting their turn at the top, as a white parent calmly observed the scene, a tall, red-brick terraced apartment building in the background. This was a photograph of Rochdale Village, a huge housing cooperative in South Jamaica, Queens, the subject of Swados’s article. He was writing about Rochdale because it seemed to be a possible exception to the baleful trends he gathered in the opening of his article; Rochdale Village then was a place where the rest of the country could see what happens, as the title of Swados’s article indicated, “When Black and White Live Together.”
Swados described Rochdale as “the largest interracial cooperative of its kind anywhere.” The “interracial” modifier was not necessary. When it opened in 1963, with its 5,860 apartments, it was the largest housing cooperative in the world, period. Rochdale was the most ambitious effort to date of its developer, the United Housing Foundation (UHF), to create affordable and attractive cooperative housing for the working people of New York City. As a conscious and deliberate effort at creating an integrated community, in housing of any sort, nothing on the scale of Rochdale was attempted anywhere else in New York City in the 1960s, and very likely, nowhere else in the United States.
Map 1. Rochdale Village in metropolitan New York, ca. 1968
Rochdale Village represented the marriage of two social ideals; the culmination of a half-century struggle for inexpensive cooperative housing for New York City’s workers, and a more recent fight for integrated housing and education in the large urban centers of the North. It seemed to embody, in the words of the historian Joshua Freeman, “everything the civil rights movement, then at its height, called for, an interracial community that promoted mutualism and mutual understanding through joint endeavors.” Although Rochdale was built at the apogee of the great exodus from the city’s racially changing neighborhoods to the vast suburban plains on its circumference, Rochdale was able to attract thousands of white families to South Jamaica, which by the 1960s was the third largest African American neighborhood in the city, after Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The racial percentages when the cooperative opened are a matter of some dispute—hard figures are not available—but it probably was about 80 percent white and 20 percent black. Stable, integrated housing developments on the scale of Rochdale simply did not exist elsewhere. Writing in 1964, Abraham Kazan, the president of the UHF, claimed that the “significance of Rochdale Village” was that “white and non-white people will be living next to each other as neighbors. Never before in private or public or cooperative housing has there been such an opportunity to demonstrate that people can live together. The public will be focusing its attention on Rochdale. Every step will be judged with a critical eye.”2
But despite Kazan’s expectations, and despite the potential significance of the social experiment at Rochdale noted by Freeman, the complex was and has remained surprisingly obscure. It was relatively little noticed by contemporaries—Swados’s article was by far its most prominent press coverage in the first decade of its existence—and has received scant attention from historians since.3 Perhaps this inattention is a function of Rochdale’s nondescript appearance; apart from its size, it’s more or less indistinguishable from any number of other housing developments that sprang up in New York City after World War II. And its location, so close to the flight paths of Kennedy Airport, so far from the haunts of Manhattan’s opinion makers, added to its virtual invisibility during the contentious racial debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Just about the only people who paid attention to what was happening in Rochdale, Freeman noted, were the people who actually lived there.4
And the people who lived in Rochdale were typical representatives of the city they lived in, with no particular aspiration to become the ingredients of a noble experiment. Whatever else Rochdale Village was in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not a racial utopia, and it was never granted a sociological dispensation from racial tensions or problems prevalent elsewhere. Its residents, black and white, were amply supplied with the full range of common prejudices and biases. This only makes the integrated community they created in Rochdale’s early years all the more remarkable. It did not last. By the early 1970s whites were moving out in vast numbers, and by the late 1970s there were few white families left. Rochdale Village has undergone many twists and turns since then, but it remains today a vibrant, self-governing limited equity cooperative, and the largest predominantly African American cooperative anywhere. It is the story of a potential exception to the iron law of racial separation and bifurcation that has long dominated American urban life. That in the end the experiment failed is perhaps to be expected; exceptions do not prove rules, and inevitably succumb to them. What is remarkable about the story of integration in Rochdale Village was that it was tried in the first place.
It was on February 16, 1960, that New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, announced that the largest housing cooperative in the nation would be built on the grounds of the former Jamaica Racetrack. The negotiations for building housing on the spot had been going on for a number of years, and had increased in intensity after the final race at the old track the previous August. At the center of the negotiations had been Robert Moses, who had been the greatest champion of using the site for low-cost cooperative housing. Moses was nearing the end of his long career, but he was a still a figure of legendary ubiquity and formidability in city and state politics. The negotiations had been long, complex, and arduous, and had called on all his strengths: his trademark bluster was engaged, to be sure, but to get the deal done, Moses also had occasion to wheedle, to horse trade, to concede, and, when necessary, he wasn’t too proud to beg. In the end, as generally happened with Moses, he got what he wanted, primarily by securing the support of Nelson Rockefeller. All but $10 million of the $86 million needed to build Rochdale would come from state agencies and state-controlled pension funds.5
But if Moses provided the political muscle, the inspiration came from Abraham Kazan, the president of the United Housing Foundation. Kazan, with his roots in the Jewish labor movement of the turn of the twentieth century, had been, by the time Rochdale was built, a single-minded exponent of the cooperative ideal in housing (and in just about everything else) for half a century. Although Kazan had been building and managing housing cooperatives since the late 1920s, the UHF was only created in 1951, relying on a consortium of labor unions for its backing. Generally in partnership with Moses, the UHF built more than 33,000 units of cooperative housing in New York City from the early 1950s through the early 1970s.
Rochdale Village, like all the UHF’s projects, was a limited-equity cooperative, which meant that while in some sense every resident owned a proportionate share of the cooperative, and could vote for the management of the project (in elections conducted on the basis of “one apartment, one vote”), the apartments were not individually owned, and could not be privately resold for a profit. The cooperative was governed by a board of directors chosen directly by the tenants, or to use the UHF’s favored term, its cooperators.
If by the 1960s Kazan and the UHF’s ideological pronouncements were more muted than in decades past, Kazan’s core beliefs remained much as they had been since the beginning; housing cooperatives were more than just nice, inexpensive places to live; they were a harbinger of a new social order and form of economic organization, one in which the profit motive had been eliminated, a world without either avaricious landlords or downtrodden tenants, and one that provided a more rational and more efficient form of economic organization than conventional capitalism. If these utopian tidings were not widely shared by the residents of Rochdale, most of whom knew little and cared less about the cooperative movement before moving in, many residents (aided by the incessant educational efforts of the UHF) liked the fact that they were now living in a cooperative, and appreciated its many distinctive features (which included the ability to vote UHF representatives out of office, a prerogative Rochdale residents would frequently exercise). And the UHF supplied a sort of trickle-down utopianism. A sense of specialness, of being a model for the future, one that the world was watching (or at least, that the world should be watching), suffused the political culture of early Rochdale. Utopias seek to bring about social change by setting a good example, by inspiring imitation, and the role this played in the cooperative’s experiment in race relations was subtle, but was surely present.
When announced by Rockefeller in January 1960, the new Jamaica cooperative still lacked a name. Robert Moses, who by late 1959 was already annoyed by having to call it the Jamaica Racetrack site (referring to a new housing project by its former function, he thought, was to summon the wrong associations, to look backward, and not forward), suggested Jamaica Town.6 The UHF did not want a name so bereft of ideological connotations. There was some thought, when it became available, of reusing “Robert Owen Houses,” the name of a recently canceled UHF project in the East Village, honoring the pioneering British utopian socialist. This name was rejected—perhaps it was thought to be bad luck—but the UHF stuck with the theme, the heroic years of early nineteenth century British communitarianism. By March they had decided to name the cooperative in honor of the Rochdale Pioneers, the twenty-eight weavers and other artisans whose cooperative store, opened on Toad Lane in the gritty English Midlands industrial town of Rochdale in 1844, inaugurated the modern cooperative movement. By 1900, under the aegis of the Cooperative Wholesale Society, there were over 1,400 cooperative societies in England alone, to say nothing of the movement’s expansion throughout Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. The cooperative movement pursued their aims largely outside of the political realm, concentrating on building a nonrevolutionary alternative to capitalism, through concentrating and maximizing workers’ purchasing power.7 The lives of the Rochdale Pioneers were honored, the Rochdale cooperative principles they promulgated revered, and their former store on Toad Lane became a place of pilgrimage for persons from distant continents. The namesake “Rochdale” had been bestowed on many cooperatives, but none grander or more ambitious than Rochdale Village.
If the UHF had to debate to come up with a name for the cooperative, there were no prolonged deliberations over the choice of architect. Herman Jessor, like Kazan a man whose roots in the cooperative housing movement dated back half a century, who had been the architect for all the UHF’s cooperative developments, would design Rochdale. And he would do so in his familiar style; functional redbrick apartment complexes on a large superblock, well-designed, practical, sturdy, but a bit homely, puritanical in their lack of adornment or frills. Places where people could live well and inexpensively. (His critics would say he was plodding and unimaginative; he would retort that architectural imagination generally did not provide much value for the dollar for working-class families desperate for decent housing.) After some negotiation, the plans were reduced from the originally announced 6,300 units to 5,860 apartments, to be divided among twenty, fourteen-story apartment buildings.8 Each building had three separate and identical sections (sections A, B, and C), laid out along a long internal corridor. Each section had its own mailboxes and own elevator bank (with one elevator for the even floors and one for the odd floors, a cost-saving measure). We lived in apartment 11A7G, in section A (that is, the section closest to the main doors) of building 11, on the seventh floor, in apartment G. Our apartment had the largest available design in Rochdale, six and a half rooms, with three bedrooms and a pretty, pink balcony. (One of Jessor’s few concessions to external aesthetics was to vary the color of the plastic that enclosed the terraces from building to building.)
The twenty apartment buildings of Rochdale were clustered into five groups or sections of four buildings each, each section connected to the outside world of vehicular traffic by a cul-de-sac. Within the Rochdale superblock, pedestrian paths replaced city streets. The paths cut through neatly manicured lawns, fenced off and bristling with “Keep off the grass” signs. The paths were rectilinear, in part reflecting a penchant for symmetry over convenience, and they sometimes obliged rule-obeying residents to take fairly circuitous routes from point A to point B. (The design of the paths also reflected the insistence of the NYC fire department that if necessary, fire equipment could make its way to the center of the huge superblock.)9 There were ample playgrounds, basketball courts, park benches, playing fields, fountains, and, in the early years, a giant sandlot, which until it was properly landscaped was the favored venue for adolescent sporting contests. Rochdale’s 170 acres would contain two malls, the larger mall enclosed and designed by the nation’s leading mall designer, the onetime Austrian socialist Victor Gruen. There would be three schools built within the cooperative on land donated to the city, and a few other buildings, of which the most impressive was the community center, which contained rooms for meetings and a large auditorium that seated almost 2,000 persons. And across Bedell Street, outside the superblock but still part of Rochdale, was Abraham Kazan’s pride and joy, a large power plant that supplied Rochdale with all its heat and electricity, and Kazan’s answer to the arrogance and monopolistic practices of Con Edison. The UHF was typically focused and aggressive in keeping to a tight and unrelenting construction schedule, and less than four years after Rockefeller announced the plans, the first families moved in to Rochdale’s building 1 in December 1963. By March 1965, when the last families filled out building 20, all of Rochdale’s 5,860 apartments were occupied.
A few stories of those who came to Rochdale. Olga Lewis was a practical nurse, a single mother with a young daughter, living in East New York, in Brooklyn. She had grown up in the area when it was predominantly white, and had often been the only black person in her school classes. But by the early 1960s the racial mix in East New York was rapidly changing, and Olga did not like some of the trends she saw there. She had learned about cooperatives in school, and had a brother-in-law living in South Jamaica who urged her to move to his neighborhood. She knew she couldn’t afford a private house, and even Rochdale was a considerable stretch. She worked two jobs to pay for the down payment for the apartment. She moved to Rochdale because, she said, “I thought I needed to elevate myself and elevate my child. I knew I was going into a nice neighborhood, Rochdale’s houses were good, and [the people in] the surrounding area were homeowners, and East New York was beginning to go down. I was raised in East New York and it was a wonderful place, [but now] I wanted out, I wanted better for Evlynne.” Her daughter, Evlynne Braithwaithe, vivacious and outgoing, was my classmate in fifth and sixth grades.10
The first friend I made in Rochdale was Joe Raskin. This was hardly an accident. We were the same age, our families moved in within a few days of each other, and we lived in the same building, in the same section, on the same floor. Joe’s parents, Jack and Sue Raskin, had lived in Brooklyn on the borders of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, an area that had been largely Jewish, but was now also becoming largely African American (and where garden-variety American Jews were becoming rapidly outnumbered by Lubavitcher Hasidim). Jack Raskin worked for an office furniture firm, and was a shop steward for the Retail Workers Union, and Sue was a worker at the union headquarters. Their income was less than $100 a week. The Raskins didn’t object to the racial changes to their old neighborhood. But what they did mind was their apartment, which was small and crowded. Joe and his sister shared a bedroom, Jack and Sue slept in the living room. While they had a long history as labor activists and had long been interested in the cooperative movement, the affordability of Rochdale was its most compelling feature: three bedrooms, a big kitchen, and a rent of $126 a month.11
Cal Jones grew up in Harlem in the 1930s and ’40s (he remembers selling newspapers in front of the Cotton Club during its heyday, and having the famed Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen as his English teacher in junior high school). But by the early 1960s, Harlem was changing, and in Jones’s opinion not for the better, with growing problems of crime and poverty. He heard about Rochdale and decided to move there. He was worried about the long commute to Manhattan, but he and his wife concluded that a stable, integrated housing cooperative would likely have better schools and present a more suitable environment than was available in Harlem.12 Jones, who worked as an accountant for the city, was typical of many of the middle class blacks who moved to Rochdale, because they, as Swados suggested “hoped that their children would benefit educationally from leaving a ghetto neighborhood for a community with a stable white majority.”13
Some families moved to Rochdale as part of migratory chains. “My grandmother originally moved to Rochdale because she thought the idea of cooperative housing was innovative and ‘modern,’” one man related. Then when his parents separated, he said, “My mother, sister, and I moved in my grandmother’s apartment, and then into a larger apartment in a different building.”14 Indeed, for many, one of the attractions of Rochdale was that it afforded an opportunity for family members to once again live in close proximity, with a mother or adult sister or cousin living nearby in an adjacent building.
Some had deeper reasons for wanting to move to the new cooperative. Francesca Spero’s Italian American mother had married a black man in the late 1940s, but she couldn’t stand the disapproval of her relatives and community, and in a very wrenching and painful decision, had the marriage annulled, and eventually married an Italian American man. When she heard about this new community in Jamaica that was supposed to be integrated, she knew she had to move her family to Rochdale Village.15
The reasons my family moved to Rochdale were quite typical. I spent my earliest years in the Bronx. My first home was an apartment building on Crotona Park East, across the street from the field where, as local legend had it, Hank Greenberg learned to play baseball. In Greenberg’s day the neighborhood was overwhelmingly Jewish. By the time I came on the scene, in 1954, it was becoming less so. (Our apartment building remained largely Jewish because our landlady refused to rent to non-Jews, that is, to the blacks and Puerto Ricans who were moving into the neighborhood in large numbers.)16 The local elementary school, three blocks from where I lived, was located on Charlotte Street, which by the 1970s would become the most notorious block in all New York City, if not all the United States, where the Bronx burnt, and where Jimmy Carter came to muse among the ruins.17 Back in 1959 the school already had the reputation of being a “tough” school, with a student body in 1959 that was 62 percent Puerto Rican and 15 percent black.18 I never went there.
Instead, we moved just before I was to start kindergarten (I was the oldest of three brothers) only a few miles away, to the East Tremont section of the Bronx, to a new cooperative development that was about one-twentieth the size of Rochdale, about 250 apartments in two buildings. This was one of the first cooperatives built in the Bronx under the provisions of the state Mitchell-Lama housing law of 1955, which encouraged the building of middle-income cooperatives. (Rochdale too was a Mitchell-Lama cooperative, and when I was growing up Mitchell and Lama were as familiar a duo in our house as Abbott and Costello or Mantle and Maris.) East Tremont was a predominantly Italian rather than Jewish neighborhood, with bocce courts instead of delicatessens, but it had the same basic social dynamic as Crotona Park East; the neighborhood was changing, whites were leaving, and many had doubts about its future, as these East Bronx neighborhoods were conceptually moved during the 1960s into the new geographic catchall description for the borough’s woes, the South Bronx.
My dad was a commercial artist who designed advertisements for placement in magazines; my mom was a housewife until, after completing her college degree in the late 1960s, she became a high school social studies teacher. They were persons of the left, and both had been members of the Communist Party; they had left the party by the time I was aware of things, but without moving that far ideologically or culturally. For all that, I’m not sure that my parents’ politics had much impact on their attitudes about where they wanted to live. They wanted out of the East Bronx, and before moving to Rochdale, they certainly had checked out several suburban locations. I think that when they decided to move to Rochdale, they were disappointed in some way, but they soon reconciled themselves to their decision. I, on the other hand, was utterly delighted by Rochdale from the first time I set eyes on it, with its newness, its incompletion and its attendant messiness, and its overwhelming size; all these people were my neighbors, and all these buildings were my home.
There are many more Rochdale stories to tell. But most have a common cast and common themes, with people from the same economic stratum, the ambiguous region between the lower middle class and the upper working class. Most families had similar reasons for wanting to move: dissatisfaction with where they were living, and an attraction to Rochdale’s promise, with its modern, spacious, inexpensive, and well laid out apartments, all part of what they hoped would be an exciting and vibrant place to live. And in this, there was very little difference if the family moving to Rochdale was white or black.
They were the applicants for Rochdale Village…retired couples, youngsters just married, or those with engagement rings and sparking eyes who would be married soon. There were those with a toddler in one hand and a baby in the arm. There were single people, as well as couples with sophisticated teenagers carrying indispensable pocket transistor radios. These were the people who make up the city; white, brown, yellow, and black. Catholics, Jews, Protestants, from Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Richmond, as well as from Hicksville [Nassau County] and Mount Vernon [Westchester County]…. There were those who sought facts, and those who believed rumors. There were those who loved their fellow man, and a few who said, “I hate to ask this question, but how many Negroes will live in this cooperative?” There were those who thought $21 a room housing beyond their means, and those who thought it “the greatest bargain in the city.”
Figure 2. Informational meeting for Rochdale, Grand Street headquarters of the United Housing Foundation, January 1963. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Photograph by Emjay Photographers.
This is a description in a UHF publication of the first informational meeting held for Rochdale, in May 1960.19 The informational meeting was a show-and-tell put on by the UHF, with lectures and slideshows, and was one of the basic tools it used to interest prospective residents in new cooperative projects. For previous cooperatives, the informational meeting had been the most important element of the UHF’s public outreach. One thing that the UHF had not needed to do—before Rochdale—was to advertise extensively for their cooperatives. The UHF had gotten by on a fairly rudimentary “if you build it, they will come” marketing strategy for a product they were convinced was self-recommending. All they needed was word of mouth. On the first day that applications for a new cooperative were accepted, often a line several blocks long would snake around the UHF’s Grand Street headquarters on the Lower East Side, full of people waiting to put in their applications. For those wanting a bit more convincing, the UHF would hold informational seminars. For its previous cooperatives, before the first families moved in, there was already a substantial waiting list of those wanting apartments. The UHF might place an announcement in friendly newspapers and union journals, and perhaps print a few brochures. A widespread advertising campaign in the main newspaper outlets was deemed an unnecessary expense.20
But there were important consequences and limitations with the word-of-mouth approach. It tended to round up the usual suspects. There were not many minority families in UHF cooperatives, as critics such as Charles Abrams noted.21 In 1963 the New York Amsterdam News complained about the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx (the first cooperative built by Kazan) being “lily-white.” This might not have been technically true, but with the meager presence of minorities it might as well have been.22 Although the UHF was proud of its open housing policy, with no racial, ethnic, political, or ideological preferences for those seeking apartments, in practice, as they acknowledged in 1960, a word-of-mouth policy meant that most of those who lived in UHF cooperatives were either Jewish, involved in the labor movement, or liberal/social democratic in their politics, and often were a combination of all three.23
Kazan was aware of the gap between UHF rhetoric about integration and the rather paltry results in their cooperatives. At a 1960 conference on cooperatives, Don Elbertson, a UHF official, said, “We have had great difficulties in securing Negro applicants for our projects. Most of them are located in predominantly white areas.”24 Rochdale was the chance to prove that UHF cooperatives could indeed be an important part of the solution to the nation’s racial crisis. Kazan told the UHF board in April 1960 that Rochdale “could attract a more integrated population, [with] more non-white families than have been participating in our previous activities.”25 The UHF welcomed this prospect. Indeed some in the UHF management assumed that Rochdale would be predominantly black. The question they pondered was whether Rochdale would attract more than a handful of whites.26
In any event, the outreach for Rochdale would have to be different from any previous UHF cooperative. For one thing, it was more than twice the size of any predecessor; for another, it was located far from the comfort zone of familiar Jewish neighborhoods. Although the UHF had contacted its usual allies, the labor unions, to encourage their members to submit applications, they also contacted a more general audience.27 The UHF’s first advertisements for Rochdale Village appeared in the New York Times and the New York Post (at the time, the Post was the favorite newspaper of the city’s Jewish liberals) in January 1961.28 Rochdale Village did not sell its apartments quickly. As of August 1960, only about 1,200 applications had been submitted.29 The early advertisements were clearly intended to attract families pining after greener pastures. “Enjoy country living in Rochdale Village!” they proclaimed. “Now you can have practically all the advantages of owning your own suburban home without the usual upkeep and maintenance headaches,” the advertisements helpfully suggested.30
Nonetheless, sales of apartments remained sluggish, though they evidently picked up in October 1961 when the advertisements first mentioned that all the apartments in Rochdale would be equipped with central air-conditioning. Kazan was proud that Rochdale Village would provide this service and eliminate “the protruding square air conditioner” as a signifier of luxury and privilege and “make it accessible to every household.” Indeed air-conditioning in every room, a rarity in middle-income developments in the 1960s (and made possible only because Kazan had insisted that Rochdale build its own power plant) was a considerable inducement for families to decide to move to Rochdale.31 Rochdale Village was fully subscribed when the first cooperators moved there in December 1963.32 As Bernard Seeman wrote in Inside Rochdale, a weekly, privately published newspaper, in September 1967, “We have weathered the initial prediction of failure made by many because of our location by filling Rochdale to capacity prior to the opening of the first building.”33
Figure 3. Advertisement for Rochdale Village, New York Times, January 8, 1961. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.
The success Rochdale had in attracting white families surprised the UHF itself, prepared as they were for Rochdale to have few white families. Harold Ostroff, the executive vice president of the UHF, said in 1968 that the most important lesson of Rochdale was that integration worked when “you offer such an attractive economic buy that people will not be able to afford their natural prejudices.”34 A similar sentiment was expressed by another UHF official: “People can put up with a lot of integration when they can get good housing at an attractive price.”35
One good way to get into an argument with a Rochdale resident was to imply that their reasons for moving there had been a reflection of their inner idealism, their deep commitment to racial harmony. Although there were exceptions, Harvey Swados reported that it would be a grave mistake to assume that white families moved to Rochdale “from conviction, eager to put their liberal, all-men-are-brothers beliefs to the test.” Instead, he wrote, “It is nearly unanimously agreed that the whites are there, not from conviction or commitment to the cause of cooperative living, but rather because the apartments represented such an unusual bargain that the pressing need for economical housing overcame fear and uneasiness.”36
Still, many white families who considered Rochdale had second thoughts after attending informational meetings with more African Americans than they felt comfortable with, or after walking or riding through South Jamaica.37 According to Harvey Swados, “thousands” of families had second thoughts after making their initial inquiries.38 Those who moved to Rochdale did so knowing they were moving to the third largest African American neighborhood in the city.
On the other hand, the UHF was surprised by how difficult it proved to attract black families to Rochdale. Some would blame the UHF for this, and there is some debate on how assiduous was the effort to reach out to blacks. A UHF official told the New York Herald Tribune in 1965 that they made “no conscious effort to ‘integrate’ Rochdale,” though “all Negro applicants who met the income limitations were treated equally with whites.”39 Harvey Swados argued in his New York Times Magazine article that there was considerable foot-dragging by the UHF in their approach to black potential residents.40 Perhaps the UHF underestimated the difficulty of attracting blacks to Rochdale, but they did place advertisements for Rochdale in the black press. At the same time that the first advertisements appeared in the Times and the Post, in January 1961, a notice in a column on local Queens and Nassau County affairs running in the nationally circulated Pittsburgh Courier declared, “It’s Official: Rochdale Village with its 5,860 apartments has been fully approved and construction is due to get underway as soon as weather permits.”41 The black press continued to run positive blurbs and vignettes on Rochdale while it was under construction, as in this rhapsody from the Amsterdam News in March 1963:
Alice and “Jap” Steward are among many Queensites awaiting the opening of Rochdale Village following the trend towards “modern living”; when the brood is raised mom and pop decide to stop fighting the weeds and leaky pipes and “live a little.” So when the Stewards move, just park your “copter” outside and step onto the balcony of their penthouse, they’ll be on the upper floor. (The first section of this fabulous city within a city is scheduled to open in late spring or early summer.)
The same adjective, “fabulous,” would appear in the Amsterdam News again when, in 1965, an advertisement touted a house as being “adjacent to the fabulous Rochdale Village.”42 Over the several-year application process, the UHF became more successful in attracting blacks. The number of black faces in informational meetings increased over time,43 and the four buildings that made up section 5, the last section to be built and the last section to fill with people, had notably more blacks than the four buildings in section 1.44
Harold Ostroff, Abraham Kazan’s protégé and by the mid-1960s (with Kazan’s declining health), the dominant figure in the UHF, speculated that one reason that blacks were at first reluctant to move to Rochdale was a basic “unfamiliarity” with housing cooperatives. While this to some extent ignores the quite lengthy history of African American cooperatives from the 1920s on, it is certainly true that there were not a lot of African Americans living in limited-equity cooperatives before Rochdale.45 At first glance Rochdale looked like a lot of the ubiquitous “projects” built by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the sort of housing that many upwardly mobile middle-class black families were eager to escape, and the difference between Rochdale and a typical NYCHA project had to be explained again and again, both to prospective residents and to neighbors in South Jamaica.46
The unfamiliarity with middle-income cooperatives would lead to some suspicion and hostility on the part of some local black residents. Initially black homeowners in Springfield Gardens worried, Harvey Swados reported, that Rochdale would bring down property values. Juanita Watkins, a prominent local politician, remembered that when Rochdale was announced blacks had “bought this little house for a semisuburban lifestyle, and for many of these middle-class blacks in South Jamaica and Springfield Gardens Rochdale looked like ‘projects’ at first. They felt these huge buildings were like an invasion…. Swados in his article was wrong when he thought it was about race or religion; it was about lifestyle and the fear of the homeowners that they would be taken over by a huge influx of apartment dwellers. They were concerned because it changed the nature of the community. Co-ops and co-op living were new, and unfamiliar, and they didn’t want this new and different thing in their midst.”47
However, this was by no means the universal reaction to Rochdale among local blacks. Many thought the cooperative would help revive southeastern Queens, and quite a few moved to Rochdale. Some, like Alice and Jap Steward, did what a later and more avaricious age would deem unthinkable and gave up their private houses (and the pleasure of accumulating equity) to live in a not-for-profit cooperative. Hugh Williams, who was living in South Jamaica, told me that he moved to Rochdale because he was “an apartment type of person, not so much a private house type of person. I didn’t like the idea of shoveling snow, and I like the idea of apartments.” Swados wrote of black middle-class families in Rochdale who “had owned their own homes, giving them up because the burden had grown wearisome with the years.” (The Jews who moved to Rochdale overwhelmingly had been apartment dwellers.)48
The converse of the local fears that Rochdale would be a low-income housing project that would lower property values was that Rochdale would be a comfortable middle-class cooperative for whites that would not really welcome black residents, and that the application process would be accompanied by the subtle hints and nervousness indicating that they were not really wanted.49 Hugh Williams would regularly walk past the construction site and was very impressed when he saw that the UHF had opened an on-site office taking applications, a sure sign that they were truly interested in having blacks move in. Rochdale seemed too good to be true, one of the premier middle-income developments of its time, and many blacks were looking to see if any strings were attached. Omar Barbour, who grew up in South Jamaica at this time, remembers, “We weren’t sure what Rochdale Village was except that everyone wanted to try to get an apartment there…. Everyone was impressed by the design of Rochdale. Everybody thought that Rochdale was the place we wanted to be.” For Lee Reynolds what made Rochdale Village special was simply that it was a housing development that “we had a choice of moving into and not someplace that was left open to Negroes.”50 Rochdale wasn’t just available to blacks because whites weren’t interested in moving there. But it was harder than the UHF initially realized to convince blacks of this.
One way to create a racially mixed housing development, and one that was fairly common in the 1950s and early 1960s, was to establish a quota for the maximum percentage of blacks, to assuage skittish whites.51 This was not the approach followed by the UHF, but there were reports, strenuously denied by the UHF at the time, that Rochdale was employing a formal or informal quota. The Long Island Press reported in 1961 that UHF was filling apartments on the basis of a 60 percent white/40 percent black quota.52 A 40 percent quota would have been very large, far past what then was considered the conventional “tipping point” for the maximum black participation in integrated housing—usually pegged at 20 percent to 25 percent—past which whites would flee.53
When asked about quotas and racial percentages, UHF officials denied they had one. I have no reason to doubt them. However, their pious pronouncements that they did not know how many blacks had applied for apartments in their cooperatives—“We do not count, and there is no way of telling. Applications are not marked to give a man’s race, color, or religion”—stretched credulity.54 Given the preponderance of Jews among the whites of Rochdale, and the ease with which most Jewish and black names can be distinguished (a task made even easier by a question that asked applicants to list clubs, organizations, and religious institutions they were active in) the UHF would have had no problem keeping an informal racial tally. If the rumor of a 40 percent black quota in 1961 illustrates nothing else, it is that the early estimates for the percentage of black residents in Rochdale were considerably higher than they turned out to be when the cooperative actually opened.55
For the most basic demographic questions about early Rochdale—how many blacks, whites, Jews, and gentiles?—there are no hard answers. A UHF advertisement in April 1964 claimed that there were 4,700 white families in Rochdale, or just about 80 percent, and Kazan gives the same figure in his oral history.56 Many contemporary observers offer somewhat lower figures. Harvey Swados in 1966 put Rochdale’s minority percentage at 15 percent. Myron Becker, writing in the Long Island Press the previous year, hazarded a figure of 8 percent. William Mowat, the author of a study of religious affiliation in Rochdale, was quoted in 1965 as claiming that the African American population was “far fewer” than 20 percent, but he didn’t offer his own figures. In subsequent interviews, many of those who grew up in Rochdale found the 20 percent figure a bit high. Perhaps the contrast between the predominantly white cooperative and the overwhelmingly black surrounding neighborhood has retrospectively sharpened the racial contrast in some memories. If it is an upper limit—certainly no more than one-fifth of the original residents of Rochdale were of minority background—in the absence of conclusive evidence for an alternative percentage, the UHF figures should be taken as authoritative.57 In any event, Rochdale’s success or failure in attracting blacks needs to be seen in context. By means of comparison, consider LeFrak City, a private rental housing development seeking the same middle income residents, which opened in Queens at about the same time as Rochdale and where less than 5 percent of the residents were African American.58
The record of religious background for the original residents of Rochdale, if less controversial, is equally imprecise, but no one doubts that among the whites, the population was overwhelmingly Jewish, and certainly one of the defining characteristics of early Rochdale was the pervasive Jewishness of its population and its institutional life. One man remembers that he had been one of a handful of Jewish families living in an Irish Catholic enclave and moved because his mother “wanted us to grow up knowing other Jews.”59 In the end, many moved to Rochdale, despite its location in South Jamaica, because of its perceived Jewish atmosphere.
The one extant study of religion in Rochdale, from 1965, concluded there were about 4,000 Jewish households in Rochdale, 800 Protestant, and 400 Roman Catholic, with the remainder either lacking or with an indeterminate affiliation. (The methodology used to determine these statistics was not specified in the study.) This would make the population of Rochdale as a whole at least two-thirds Jewish, and if one accepts UHF’s figures of 4,700 white families in the cooperative, about 85 percent of them would have been Jewish.60 This seems about right; if white gentiles in Rochdale were not quite curiosities, they were certainly exceptions.
We are on somewhat firmer ground on some other demographic data for early Rochdale, thanks to a 1967 study produced by the UHF.61 Overwhelmingly the families that came to Rochdale moved from elsewhere in New York City. It was primarily a migration within the outer boroughs. There were 2,033 families from Brooklyn (34.6 percent), 1,906 from Queens (32.5 percent), and 1,272 (21.7 percent) from the Bronx, along with 484 (8.2 percent) from Manhattan, with many of the latter from upper Manhattan and Harlem. Less information is available on their original neighborhoods, though the Jewish families came extensively from neighborhoods that were undergoing rapid ethnic change. The 1966 High Holy Day services in Rochdale, a local paper reported, had “a hometown flavor of the East Bronx, Eastern Parkway, and Washington Heights as people promenaded around Rochdale meeting old and new friends.”62 African Americans hailed in large numbers from Harlem and the immediate environs of Rochdale in Jamaica and South Jamaica.
The people who moved to Rochdale were not wealthy. One of the great attractions of Rochdale was the average carrying charge—the monthly fee paid to management, the term the UHF preferred to “rent”—of $21 per room, which would make the highest annual carrying charge for a six-and-a-half-room apartment about $1,600 a year. (This was in addition to the one-time $400 per room down payment, for which assistance was available for those unable to afford it.) If the families moving to Rochdale were middle class, they were middle class as much by aspiration as by income level. By the early 1960s the notion of the working class was sounding out-of-date. The gatekeepers of America’s sociological distinctions generously welcomed large numbers of former proletarians into the middle class, and this led to an array of confused self-perceptions. For many, the move from a tenement to an inexpensive suburb like Levittown was enough, without any increase in family income, to make it into the middle class. As Sylvie Murray has noted, many families who moved to Queens in the postwar period, “continued to see themselves as members of the working class with reference to the relations of the workplace, but also came to see themselves as middle class with reference to consumption and their lives away from work.”63
But even though the “middle class” had become bloated from terminological expansion and inexactitude, there still were qualifications for membership. In the early 1960s, most observers pegged the lower level of the middle class as being families with an income of $7,000.64 Yet this was beyond the means of the majority of families at Rochdale, many of whom had a weekly income of around $100 a week. About two-thirds of the households in Rochdale earned less than $7,000 per year. More than half the families earned less than $6,000 a year. (My dad, the sole breadwinner in our family, earned about $6,500 the year we moved to Rochdale.) Families earning $5,999 or less constituted 53.5 percent of Rochdale, with 18 percent under $4,000. The Mitchell-Lama program mandated a maximum income for its developments at six times the annual carrying charges for a family of three, and seven times for a family of four or more, above which level a surcharge on rent or carrying charges was applied. For Rochdale this meant that the maximum income for a family moving to the cooperative without surcharges would have been $8,000 in 1964.65 Indeed, the average family income of Rochdale Village was lower than that of the immediately adjacent areas of South Jamaica, which largely consisted of modest private homes. In the 1970 census (the first to include Rochdale Village) the mean income of Rochdale Village was $10,873 (there had been considerable inflation since the early 1960s), while the average of the overwhelmingly African American census tracts that surrounded Rochdale was $11,688.66
Rochdale Village was a middle-income cooperative for the working class. A survey of the vocational occupations of its first residents provides a useful guide to typical types of employment. The survey has its limitations, notably the gendered decision to include only one vocation per household, thereby severely undercounting female participation in the workforce, but it is worth keeping in mind that in the mid-1960s as many as half the mothers in Rochdale were housewives. Only about 8 percent of Rochdale’s families were professionals (such as doctors or lawyers). About one family in seven had a civil service position; teachers and transit workers were among the most common occupations. Many women worked as teachers; many African Americans had obtained jobs as transit or postal workers. Only about 4 percent worked as independent proprietors such as store owners or cabdrivers.67 This no doubt pleased Abraham Kazan, since the UHF traditionally frowned on the self-employed as petit bourgeois enemies of the working class. And while he still fulminated against small shopkeepers, seeing them as a major cause of slums and tenements, and had barred them from his earliest cooperatives such as the Amalgamated, this restriction at UHF cooperatives had been eased by the 1960s.68 About 14 percent of the families in Rochdale were retired (occupying the bulk of the cooperative’s one-bedroom apartments).69
Most Rochdale families worked for wages, many in union jobs. Relatively few heads of household were college graduates, and in many families, like mine, where my mom returned to school to get teacher’s certification, eventually earning a master’s degree, the woman had more formal education than the man. A survey I conducted with about twenty-five participants in a chatroom for former Rochdale residents, almost all of whom were Jewish, produced the following occupations: Among the participants’ fathers were three cabdrivers, a garment industry cutter, a court officer, a shopkeeper, a postal worker, a lighting technician, a truck mechanic foreman, a supermarket manager, a small factory owner, an accountant, a stationery company supervisor, a housepainter, an insurance broker, a diamond setter, a college professor, and a commercial artist. The distribution of jobs for mothers was narrower, reflecting the more limited options for women. Among the respondents there were eight housewives, four teachers, four secretaries, a U.S. immigration inspector, a school aide, an insurance broker, and a practical nurse. There is some evidence that among African Americans there was a greater tendency to two-income families, and to civil service work.70 By 1970, 40 percent of the female heads or coheads of household in Rochdale were in the workforce.71
The families who came to Rochdale were, for the most part, young and had grown up in postwar New York City. The largest group of families were married couples between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five. (My father and mother, 43 and 38 respectively in 1964, just missed the cut.) With the exception of retirees, most of those moving to Rochdale had burgeoning families, and needed additional bedrooms to divide among additional children. This was reflected in the applications; over 75 percent were for apartments with two or three bedrooms.72 Rochdale Village offered working people on the cusp of the middle class, white and black, an affordable step up, and the chance of a better life.
What in the end Harvey Swados, in his 1966 article in the New York Times Magazine, found most fascinating about Rochdale was that from its basis in the thousands of prudential and utilitarian calculations by practical people on what was best for themselves and their families, from an accumulated mass of private self-interest, came a unique experiment in the common good. Swados wrote of a “highly intelligent Negro policeman” who related to him a conversation he had with a conservative colleague. “This man was saying that if all Negroes were like me there’d be no problem but because of the kind that were moving in, he’d bought a house out on the Island.” His colleague complained of his long, boring commute, the house always needing repairs, and how the mortgage was a strain on his budget. “When I told him what my carrying charges are at Rochdale, how big the rooms are, how close it is, and what the community affords us and our children, he was flabbergasted. And envious.” He told his colleague that he was paying both an economic and social penalty for segregating himself in the suburbs. “You don’t even give yourself the chance to find out that there are other Negroes like me.”
Swados concluded his article by stating that the American who doesn’t give himself and his children a chance to find the answer to this question will not be able to flee indefinitely. At some point, in some place, we must take a stand for the possibility of a genuine integrated society. Or not. “The great question,” wrote Swados, is whether the average American “will learn in time to promote the emergence of the multiracial society or whether he will insist upon dooming this nation to stupid and brutalizing racial warfare.” Rochdale, Swados was convinced, was one of the few places in America where it would be possible to try to give a positive answer the question.73