[ad_1]
“The ultimate solution to the mass housing problem is for it to become a function of government – streets, highways, sewers, water, subways, post offices, Ozarks, etc. The needs of the people are too important to be beholden to government functions.” Profit motive. “
——Herman Jessall
There are 7,197 cooperative buildings in New York City with a total of 364,720 housing units. Architect Herman Jessor designed 40,245 limited equity units during his 60-year career, accounting for 11% of the city’s total cooperative housing supply. In a recent profile celebrating Jessor, critic Owen Hatherley described him as “the most important radical architect you’ve never heard of.”
Herman Jessor’s works include the Sholem Aleichem Houses (1926) and the United Workers’ Association Houses (1926-29) in the Bronx; the Lower East Side Incorporated Houses (1930), the Hillman House (1951), the East River House ( 1956) and Seward Park Houses (1961); Penn South in Chelsea (1963); Amergamated Warbasse Houses in Coney Island (1965); and Rochdale, Queens Village (1966). Jessore’s buildings were often built hand-in-hand with socialists and militant unionists who fought to create a fairer metropolis in the throes of industrialization and McCarthyism. As a result of his efforts, Rochdale Village became “the largest majority black housing co-operative in the world” despite numerous privatization attempts.
In 2023, Herman Jessor’s most daring feat: the Co-op City celebrates its 50th birthday. On 320 acres in the North Bronx, 15,732 residences are spread across 35 high-rise towers and 7 low-rise townhouses. The complex of buildings inspired by Ville Radieuse surrounds shared green spaces, cycle paths, cooperative grocery stores, shopping centers, schools and sports grounds. The estate was built on top of the former amusement park grounds and had the support of Governors Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Moses. As planned, Co-op City’s towers are shaped like a cross: this allows each unit to have an entrance foyer, cross breezes, a balcony, a bay window, and an eat-in kitchen—features common to the millions of people living in New York’s dank apartments. own. Historically denied.
Countless legendary New Yorkers have passed through Jessor’s apartment over the years: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor lived in Co-op City as a teenager. Legendary labor leaders WEB Dubois, Emma Goldman, Audley “Queen” Moore, Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger (Pete Seeger) is famous for his work in and out of the Bronx’s Union Cooperatives, an environment also known as “communist co-ops.” “
Penn South in Chelsea was the childhood home of the late Marxist David Graeber, who longed to describe the place as his “only permanent home” before his death. Graeber also often attributes his radical politics to where he grew up and the union members who lived there. Even Marc Chagall lived in the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses after escaping the Nazi invasion of Paris.this Bubby Joan Micklin Silver’s 1988 romantic comedy Traveling through Delancey Stay at Seward Park Villas. All of these buildings form the structure of the film and serve as the backdrop for the story of immigration and class struggle in New York City. If only the walls could talk!
As Zara Pfeifer’s photo essay shows, the cooperative city’s architecture is vertical, but its ownership system is horizontal. The model was designed by Abraham Kazan, head of the United Garment Workers (ACW) credit union, who later founded the United Housing Foundation (UHF).Tony Schumann noted in his 1997 article that Kazan’s ideal of cooperation New York City Labor and HousingInspired by the Rochdale Weavers, a profit-sharing movement launched in England in 1844, from which the village of Rochdale in Jessor, Queens, is named.
Under Kazan’s leadership, ACW established cooperative grocery stores, milk distribution, pharmacies, optician services, furniture distribution cooperatives, insurance plans, and even energy distribution centers for its shareholders throughout New York City. (Inhabitants of Kazan buildings called themselves “shareholders” rather than “tenants” because they had property rights in their homes.) In short, Kazan brought with it the high ideals that defined Karl E. Famous modernist projects such as Karl Marxhof (1927-30) provided inspiration. ) from Vienna or Bruno Taut’s Horseshoe Estate in Berlin (1925-33) to New York. In Kazan’s architecture, working mothers were included in the design and planning: housework was redistributed between shared kindergartens and kitchens, as in Moisei Ginzberg’s Narkomfin (1930) in Moscow.
The greatest achievement of Abraham Kazan and Herman Jessor, the “City of Cooperation” can be understood as a city within a city. The complex has its own government, its own postal code, and even its own newspaper: co-op city times, printing 27,000 copies per week. Riverbay Corporation is the name of the 15-member board of directors that governs the 44,509 shareholders who call Co-op City home. This body is made up of elected shareholders; it sets community policy and communicates with New York City and state officials. Industrial power plants provide electricity, heat, hot water and air conditioning to each unit.
Subletting is prohibited in Co-op City. The shareholders of these units do not pay market rates like many of us do, they hand over large paychecks to private landlords. By comparison, apartments in Jessor sell for “Lower price per room but no profit realized on resale,” Tony Schumann wrote. “These units are affordable thanks to real estate tax abatements, low-interest mortgage loans and Jessor’s cost-conscious design,” Schumann elaborates. In short, Jesser’s units were decommodified, allowing working-class New York families to live close to work and schools. In the most expensive city on earth, these apartments can be a lifeline.
Fifty years after Co-op City reached its peak, it still sparks debate.exist Land of the Free: Collaborative Cities and the Story of New YorkIn Annemarie Sammartino, Annemarie Sammartino tells an extraordinary story set in her childhood in Co-op. She provides a first-hand account of Abraham Kazan’s early optimism that drove plans for Co-op City. She even recounts the epic rent strike led by Bronx Maoist-slash-Co-op City resident Charlie Rosen. The massive event lasted 13 months, made headlines throughout New York City, and marked the largest rent strike in New York history.
exist land of freedomNamed after the Co-op City amusement park, Sammartino’s contribution to Ulrich Franzen and Ada Louis Huxtable ) and others scoffed at the fact that they focused too much on the estate’s aesthetics and neglected its impressive economic and racial egalitarianism that remains relevant today.critic Sybil Moholy-Nagy said Co-op City “deadly anti-urbanism“——What does this mean?exist New York TimesHuxtable lambasts Co-op City “Uninspired architectural design“, and”Sterile site planning”.exist progressive architectureUlrich Franzen Accuses Herman Jessor of Designing Buildings for the “Silent Majority,” Suggesting Co-op City Shareholders Are a Group of White Fugitives Trying to Leave the Bronx Nickerson voter. Sammartino writes: “From the co-op’s inception, residents of Co-op City were accused of being horrific white racists who abandoned the Grand Plaza and ultimately became dissatisfied with the Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s. Responsible for the collapse in some areas.”
In his 2022 book, Sammartino said the popular narrative espoused by Franzen was simplistic and inaccurate. Sammartino points out that if Franzen had done his homework, he would have noticed a very different demographic: The families who moved into Co-op City were 75 percent white to begin with, but they were mostly left-wing Jews from unions, and First-generation black and Latino families, including young Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor spoke fondly of her childhood in Co-op City in her memoir: “A wider world is opening up to me“There. The difference,” she said [in this multicultural development] It was obvious, but I found them to be nothing compared to what we had in common. ”
Franzen, Huxtable and Moholy-Nagy Yet they are far from alone in lamenting the cooperative city: New urbanists hate the place, and neo-traditionalists hate it even more. A group of opinionated Yale students said in 1968 that co-op cities were “an example of a desolate, inhumane, uninhabitable pile of stones, the product of a society with values so distorted that it brings nothing but nothing to its unfortunate members.” There is nothing but ugliness.” Jane Jacobs came out against the co-operative supermarket in Jessore building saying “if there was competition such a store would fail economically” because of Jacobs’ liberal ideas The workers in the cooperative “lacked friendliness”. No love for the Rochdale Weavers!
This is indeed a difficult group of people to deal with. In response to the haters, Jessore shook off the petty-bourgeois pedantic criticism of Co-op City. “We are willing to pay for practical things, but we are not willing to pay for art,” he said. After the project was completed, Denise Scott Brown became one of the first celebrities to come to the rescue of Co-op City. In the article “Learning from the Cooperative City” she co-wrote with Robert Venturi, the pair defended the estate saying: “Co-op cities are not great, but almost okay,” And meTheir 1970 article progressive architecture, Scott Brown, and Venturi praised Jesse for having the courage to “take ordinary things on their own terms and do them well” and to give “people what they want.” This iconoclastic view makes sense given Scott Brown’s training at London AA after the Second World War. In the post-war years, architects went to work in the planning department of the Greater London Council, a socialist governing body charged with rebuilding London as cost-effectively as possible. Scott Brown is also well-versed in the teachings of Team X’s Peter Smithson and Alison Smithson, which espouse the virtues of large-scale, brutalist planning.
Are cooperative cities perfect? of course not. Every utopia has its cracks. Co-op City is notoriously difficult to get to – the nearest tube station is a 20-minute walk away (but a new Metro-North line station will be built nearby in the next few years). When the Co-op City rent strike ended in 1976, the New York State Housing Finance Agency nearly went bankrupt, and UHF collapsed soon after. Washington, D.C. also had a new president (Gerald Ford) who preferred smaller government and initiated an austerity program to divest from government-supported housing projects. Much of the cost of building Co-op City went to shareholders, prompting many of the original families to up and leave. Crime and racial tensions plagued Co-op City for much of the 1980s, until deals were struck in 1986, 1991 and 1993 to receive much-needed support from the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR). The department came under the then new government. York Governor Mario Cuomo.
Today, Herman Jessall’s buildings are not the prettiest or most luxurious, but thousands of working-class New Yorkers call them home. They were reminded of the old adage: “Small is good, but you must be tall.” In the midst of a devastating housing crisis, this generation of urban planners can learn a lot from Jessor and Co-op City. The North Bronx towers hovering above Interstate 95 remind us of the utopian optimism embraced by radicals not so long ago; calling on contemporary architects to do the same.
Zara Pfeifer is a photographer based in Vienna and Berlin who often focuses her lens on iconic buildings in everyday life. Her work explores high-rise housing in her native Vienna, Berlin and other cities. The photos posted here are the result of the 2023 New York Artist Residency. These sections focus on Jessor’s architecture, but Pfeifer also documented the lives and apartments of the co-op residents. Pfeifer plans to photograph more of Herman Jessor’s buildings in the summer of 2024 for an upcoming book project.
[ad_2]
Source link