Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housing 9780801459979

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Rochdale Village

A VO LU M E I N T HE S ERIES

American Institutions and Society ED I T ED B Y

Brian Balogh and Jonathan Zimmerman

Rochdale Village ROBERT MOSES, 6,000 FAMILIES, AND NEW YORK CITY’S GREAT EXPERIMENT IN INTEGRATED HOUSING

Peter Eisenstadt

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2010 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eisenstadt, Peter R., 1954– Rochdale Village : Robert Moses, 6,000 families, and New York City’s great experiment in integrated housing / Peter Eisenstadt. p. cm. — (American institutions and society) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4878-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Rochdale Village (Queens, N.Y.)—History. 2. Housing, Cooperative—New York (State)—New York—History. 3. Discrimination in housing—New York (State)—New York— History. 4. Moses, Robert, 1888–1981. I. Title. II. Series: American institutions and society. HD7287.72.U62N634 334'.10974724 — dc22

2010 2010018406

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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To the light of my life, Jane DeLuca And to two who have left us, my beloved brother Freddy and my darling mother, Betty

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction: When Black and White Lived Together

1

1. The Utopian: Abraham Kazan

21

2. The Anti-Utopian: Robert Moses

33

3. The Birth of a Suburb, the Growth of a Ghetto

44

4. From Horses to Housing

52

5. Robert Moses and His Path to Integration

68

6. The Fight at the Construction Site

83

7. Creating Community

106

8. Integrated Living

130

9. Going to School

154

10. The Great Fear and the High-Crime Era

173

11. The 1968 Teachers’ Strike and the Implosion of Integration

191

12. As Integration Ebbed

215

13. The Trouble with the Teamsters

229

Epilogue: Looking Backward

239

Notes

253

Selected Bibliography

301

Acknowledgments

307

Index

311

Preface

This book had its genesis in 2002, when I received an e-mail entitled “Nahamies Babies,” from Barbara Brandes Roth, who wanted to know if I was the same Peter Eisenstadt who had been her classmate in Mrs. Nahamies’s sixth grade class at P.S. 30 in Rochdale Village. I was. I soon discovered that Barbara had created a chat room for old Rochdale residents. After I’d spent a few months catching up with old friends and making new ones, it occurred to me that the history of Rochdale was a fascinating, untold tale, and one that I very much wanted to tell. When Rochdale Village opened, in 1963, it was the largest housing cooperative in the world, with almost 6,000 families. It was also the largest integrated housing development in New York City in the 1960s, and perhaps the largest such development in the United States. Located in South Jamaica, Queens, the third largest African American neighborhood in New York City, it nonetheless opened with a majority (about 80 percent) of the apartments occupied by whites. Rochdale became a vibrant integrated community, with its residents proud of what they had accomplished, but it did not last. Whites started to move out in large numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in time the complex would become almost entirely African American. The story that I have tried to tell in this book

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is of the initial promise of integrated housing and education in Rochdale, and its subsequent failure. One of the families that moved to Rochdale Village soon after it opened was my own. We arrived in 1964, when I was ten years old, and left in 1973. It was in Rochdale Village that I completed elementary school and attended junior high and high school, was bar mitzvahed in a local synagogue, and weathered the storms of adolescence. I moved to Rochdale Village a boy and left a man. This book is in part my story, but it is also the story of the 5,859 other families who lived in Rochdale; Rochdale Village’s neighbors in the surrounding communities; its creators, especially Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses; and more generally all those in New York City and elsewhere who tried to make sense of the tangled imperatives of race in the America of the 1960s. Given my personal connection to many of the events covered in this book, it was probably inevitable that from time to time personal reminiscences enter into the narrative, yet this is not a memoir but a history of Rochdale Village and its broader significance. Heretofore, with only a few meritorious exceptions, Rochdale Village has largely escaped the notice of historians, and this book rises on the solid foundations of primary research. I have made use of a number of archival collections. The extensive discussion of Robert Moses and his connection to Rochdale is garnered almost exclusively from his papers, to be found in several archives in New York City. Rochdale’s developer was the United Housing Foundation (UHF), and their records, located at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, have been an invaluable resource. In addition to plowing through the relevant archives, I have also made extensive use of newspapers and other contemporary notices from and about Rochdale. However, pride of place in my research goes to the fifty or so people who consented to be interviewed by me. They include my former classmates, teachers, and neighbors; some who achieved a modicum of renown or notoriety, and many who did not; Jews and gentiles, whites and blacks; those who are still bitter about their years in Rochdale, and those who look back in fondness. In all, I hope my book reflects the diverse spectrum of backgrounds and opinions that made Rochdale such an exciting and sometimes such an infuriating place to live. Writing this book has been a reminder of a lesson that historians like to preach to others but often fail to apply to their own lives: that the extraordinary historical forces that shape the destinies of nations are composed of ordinary people, just trying to get by. I am one of those ex-Rochdalers who look back at their years there with a tincture of nostalgia, though I hope I am alert to the pitfalls of this and have kept the narrative from getting too cloying. Rochdale was where I grew up, and it was a great place to grow up. It was also one of the few places in the 1960s where New Yorkers collectively tried to grow up and to deal with, as practically as possible, the dominant political question of the day: whether it was possible for whites and racial minorities to ever drop their mutual suspicions long enough share the city peacefully, and perhaps even learn to live together.

Preface

xi

Though this book focuses on Rochdale’s early years, when integration was first tried and then abandoned, this is not intended to slight the subsequent decades of its history, when it has continued to flourish as the largest predominantly African American cooperative in New York City. And if the fate of integration in Rochdale is the dominant story in this book, it cannot be separated from the broader effort of the United Housing Foundation in the 1950s and 1960s to make attractive, affordable, low-cost, limited-equity cooperative housing available for all New Yorkers. But by the early 1970s, New York City was undergoing a sea change in its politics, its economy, and its racial attitudes. The United Housing Foundation, beset by multiple problems, ceased operations, and its vision of limited-equity cooperatives was widely ridiculed as an idea whose time had passed. Integration slowly dropped out of our working racial vocabulary and was dismissed by all sides as little more than a sentimental folly that had been dissolved in the acids of the era’s racial tensions. And for the most part, that is where we have remained, in a city whose housing stock has become increasingly unaffordable, with its neighborhoods and schools still largely divided into a welter of racial and ethnic turfs. It is my hope that in some small measure my book on Rochdale will take readers back to an era in the history of New York City and the nation when both affordable housing and genuine integration seemed within our grasp, and people will ask themselves why we might not live in such a time again?

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

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Introduction

Figure 1. Aerial view of Rochdale Village, with John F. Kennedy International Airport in the back-

ground, ca. 1964/65. Note the Quonset huts of PS 30 between sections 1 and 5. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

breakthrough. Does belief in racial progress, Swados wondered, always require a willing suspension of incredulity? 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,

Map 1. Rochdale Village in metropolitan New York, ca. 1968

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Introduction

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. 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

When Black and White Lived Together

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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

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Introduction

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

When Black and White Lived Together

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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, fourteenstory 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

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Introduction

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

When Black and White Lived Together

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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

10

Introduction

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?”

When Black and White Lived Together

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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.

There were those who thought $21 a room housing beyond their means, and those who thought it “the greatest bargain in the city.” 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

12

Introduction

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

When Black and White Lived Together

13

Figure 3. Advertisement for Rochdale Village, New York Times, January 8, 1961. United Housing Foun-

dation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

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 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,

14

Introduction

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

When Black and White Lived Together

15

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

16

Introduction

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

When Black and White Lived Together

17

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.

18

Introduction

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

When Black and White Lived Together

19

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

20

Introduction

“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

1. The Utopian ABRAHAM KAZAN

The year is 2044 of the Christian Era. The date is August 15th, the bicentennial of the foundation of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in Rochdale, England. For half a century now this day has been a worldwide holiday, celebrated by all the races and faiths of mankind. . . . Over the International House at Rochdale flies the rainbow flag of the Cooperative Union of the World. . . . Let us bow our heads in silence, remembering the twenty-eight weavers of Rochdale, their burden, their vision, their hopes, and their labors. Horace M. Kallen, The Decline and Rise of the Consumer

When Abraham Kazan was nearing the end of his career in the mid-1960s he was in regular contact with many of the most powerful people in New York City and State, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller. After one meeting, Rockefeller was very impressed with Kazan’s business acumen, and his ability to construct and negotiate complex deals. He gave him the highest praise a Rockefeller could bestow. He told Kazan that he “could have gone into private business, and made himself a fortune.” If Kazan was flattered by Rockefeller’s remark, he remained true to his principles. “I am a co-operator,” he replied, “interested only in building the cooperative commonwealth.”1 Though Kazan never expressed his belief in cooperatives quite as fancifully as the distinguished American philosopher Horace M. Kallen (Kazan’s good friend, and a longtime supporter of UHF) did in 1936, he evidently felt the same way: the Rochdale principles of consumer cooperation, mutual aid, openness to all, democratic procedures, and cooperative autonomy were a fulcrum for not merely changing the economy, but transforming the entire world. Two qualities dominate most accounts of Kazan; his efficient business sense, hard-nosed to the point of ruthlessness; and an undisguised and unrequited utopianism. Kazan had been trying to build the cooperative commonwealth, the legendary land somewhere to the left of the borders of conventional capitalism, for

22

Chapter 1

Figure 4. Abraham E. Kazan (right), president of the United Housing Foundation, with Frank Basil of

the New York Racing Association, with the check for acquiring the land for Rochdale Village, July 14, 1960. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

his entire adult life. He achieved fame as a builder of nonprofit housing cooperatives in the 1920s, and from the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1960s he was an ardent proselytizer for all forms of cooperatives. In 1951, after several decades of working in association with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), he formed his own organization, the United Housing Foundation (UHF), which for most of its history would be little more than an extension of his very forceful personality. From the early 1950s through the early 1970s, UHF was the largest builder of cooperative housing in New York City, building more than 33,000 apartments in increasingly gargantuan housing complexes (East River, Seward Park, and Penn South in Manhattan and the Amalgamated Warbasse Houses in Brooklyn, before turning its attention to Rochdale and Co-op City. Former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. would write in 1977 that Kazan was “chiefly responsible for constructing more decent middle-income cooperative housing for New York than anyone, anywhere, at any time,” and was “the father of cooperative housing in this country.”2 By the time the last of Co-op City’s buildings were open for occupancy, in 1971, Abraham Kazan had passed away, and soon, for

The Utopian

23

all intents and purposes, so would the UHF. Kazan’s career spanned the birth, the growth, and finally the decay of the idea that nonprofit cooperative housing, attractive and relatively inexpensive, could be an alternative to the cupidity and vagaries of the private real estate market. • • • Abraham Eli Kazan’s life story was part of the great arc of Jewish migration from the Russian Empire to the United States in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. He was born in 1891, in what is now Ukraine, and what was then the southern portion of the Pale of Settlement. Kazan’s family lived on an estate that his father managed for a tsarist general, which he remembered in his oral history as being some sixty versts (about thirty miles) from Kiev. The political currents and rebellion coursing through Jewish communities in cities and market towns in the late nineteenth century left Kazan’s peasant backwater largely untouched. In about 1904, when Kazan was 15, he left Russia, largely because he couldn’t get into a good Russian school because of quotas restricting Jewish students. Though he took some night classes, he had little formal education in the United States, and in many ways would remain a classic autodidact.3 Kazan spent his first year in the United States on the Lower East Side, and like so many others at the time, he found work in the garment industry. However, about a year after arrival, his parents and siblings also crossed the ocean to America. His father, used to life on the manor, wanted to live in a rural setting. Forsaking Manhattan, the family relocated to the Jewish agricultural settlement in Carmel, New Jersey. This was one of almost one hundred Jewish agricultural settlements formed in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the largest cluster, some twenty in all, like Carmel, located in southern New Jersey, organized by recent immigrants from Russia.4 Many of these settlements were sponsored by Jewish philanthropists like the Baron de Hirsch, in a largely unsuccessful effort to keep the new Jewish immigrants from concentrating in large eastern cities. However the colonists had their own reasons for wanting to live in agricultural settlements; many were associated with the Am Olam (Eternal Life) movement, which held that landlessness was the bane of Jewish existence in Russia. Because of legal restrictions on Jewish landownership, and cultural reluctance to engage directly in agriculture, Jews were largely relegated to the status of middlemen and merchants; hated by the peasantry, despised by the nobility. Am Olam offered, as an alternative, a potent ideological brew composed in equal parts of the rejection of normative patterns of Jewish life in Russia, revulsion at that country’s ever more virulent anti-Semitism, admiration for local social revolutionaries and socialists, and an idealization of the Russian peasant farm collective (the mir), all suffused by a general spirit of anticapitalism. Some took the direct approach to eliminating the problem of the Diaspora and immigrated to Palestine in what would be the first wave of modern Jewish settlement there, establishing the forerunners of

24

Chapter 1

the kibbutzim and moshavim of modern Israel. But they came in far greater numbers to the United States, creating agricultural colonies that were, as one historian wrote, tributes to the “spirit of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Tolstoy.”5 Carmel was one of the largest of the Jewish agricultural settlements, with 1,250 residents in 1909. It was also one of the most radical, and developed a reputation for the significant numbers of socialists, anarchists, and atheists in its ranks, and for some of the best developed communal and cooperative institutions of any of the settlements.6 Some of the residents at Carmel established in 1889 a cooperative for the purchase of essential items for consumption. In addition to farming, many at Carmel found work in nonagricultural pursuits, especially as tailors, some of whom created a short-lived producer’s cooperative making shirts and dresses. Around 1910 some residents in Carmel experimented with communal living arrangements. Kazan had moved to one of the few places in the United States where Jewish immigrants were living their lives cooperatively.7 The extent of Kazan’s involvement with the cooperative activity at Carmel is not clear. Of the time he spent at Carmel, he remembered that he, like sullen teenagers everywhere, “actually did not do anything during the year I stayed in the country.” This is something of an exaggeration. He met a somewhat older immigrant whose name is transcribed with the somewhat unlikely (or at least not very Jewish sounding) spelling of “Rassass” in his oral history. Rassass helped Kazan learn English and introduced him to radical socialist politics. Kazan’s work as a labor organizer commenced when a Philadelphia garment manufacturer, subcontracting some of its work to one of Carmel’s garment factories, was the subject of a labor action. Despite the pro-labor sentiments in Carmel, there evidently was some debate on whether the local garment factory should engage in a sympathy boycott, and by his own recollection, Kazan and Rassass, working with an International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) organizer, held an open-air rally on the propitious day of May 1. The protest led to Kazan’s arrest, and to his father’s worries that his son would be sent to an American equivalent of Siberia.8 Kazan did other organizing for the ILGWU while in Carmel, but it is not too surprising that it was hard to keep the teenaged Kazan down on the farm and away from the attractions and possibilities of life in the city. After about a year in southern New Jersey, Kazan returned to Manhattan. He never made any great claims about the impact of Carmel on his subsequent career, but it would seem that the example of workers living, working, and educating themselves together, on land they owned, in a community that contained both factories and forests, made an impression on him. Throughout his career Kazan’s cooperative ideal was an urban pastoral, and perhaps the “tower in the park” style of Kazan’s developments, such as Rochdale, had a distant reflection in the Russian peasant commune in New Jersey where he lived as a teenager. By his own account, Kazan’s real introduction to cooperatives took place in New York City sometime around 1909. He worked for a year in a garment factory and joined ILGWU Local 35, but soon got a job as an “office boy” in ILGWU

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headquarters and began his lifelong career as a labor movement official. He took some adult education courses, and in a private library in Yorkville he met Tom Bell, described by Kazan (rather narrowly) as an asthmatic Scottish liquor salesman, who converted him to the cause of cooperation. This was almost certainly Thomas Hastie Bell, a Scottish anarchist admired by Emma Goldman for his “propagandistic zeal and daring.”9 Among Bell’s exploits was managing, during the state visit of Tsar Nicholas II to Leith, Scotland, in 1896, to dash beneath the heavy security surrounding the tsar, jump up to his carriage, and shout in his face, “Down with the Russian tyrant! To hell with empires!” an act that must have endeared him to every Jew he met in New York City.10 Bell was an anarchist with a literary bent. While in Britain he had been an associate of William Morris and of the exiled Russian prince and anarchist Peter Kropotkin—who described Bell as a “thoroughly honest, fully reliable man.”11 Bell published short volumes on two of his friends: one on Edward Carpenter, the anarchist sympathizer and pioneering defender of male homosexuality, and another on Oscar Wilde, whom he met a few months before Wilde died in Paris in 1900. They discussed Wilde’s essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” and Bell came away convinced that Wilde’s political opinions, like his own, “were akin to Kropotkin’s.”12 As much as Oscar Wilde or Bell, and originating from the same anarchist inspirations, Kazan hoped that the transformation of the material condition of the working classes would bring about revolutionary changes to the “soul of man,” freeing it to realize its full creative potential. But as Kazan relates it, the influence of Bell was in other ways very practical. Bell convinced Kazan “that there was no sense in trying to build a socialist society for improving conditions in the country, when we are not prepared, we haven’t got the men to manage. . . . You have to be practical and take over businesses. If you haven’t got the men to take it over how are you going to do it?” Without practical managerial experience, Bell argued, the coming of socialism wouldn’t really change much—the newly empowered workers, would “have to fall back on the same people that are mismanaging it now.” Kazan had been a committed socialist, but he now concluded that socialism was no longer sufficient—anarchism and the creation of cooperatives was now the focus of his energies.13 Bell’s message can easily be read as a call to abandon radical agitation for work in practical businesses. But this is to misunderstand the anarchist critique of socialism that lay behind Bell’s argument: gaining control of the means of production through politics is merely to change ownership, leaving the means of production themselves unchanged and the new owners hostage to the expertise of the old managerial class. The most important thing for workers to do is to create their own forms of enterprise, learn how to manage them, and to start doing this in the here and now. For Bell, political agitation for some future revolution was merely postponing the day of reckoning. Unless workers are ready, any future revolution will be at best cosmetic. It is not politics, but workers creating their own forms of economic organization, that will usher in comprehensive social transformation.

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Kazan followed Bell into several cooperative enterprises until, in 1910, Bell’s asthma led him to depart for Arizona. These ventures included a short-lived cooperative hat store on Delancey Street; and then a Second Avenue restaurant, which had a reputation for good talk and poor food. The restaurant supposedly employed a young member of Local 10 of the ILGWU, David Dubinsky, as a waiter, and, during his few months in New York City in 1916 and 1917, had Leon Trotsky as a patron. Kazan soon moved on to larger cooperative ventures.14 At the time Kazan started working for the ILGWU, it was a leader in what was known as the New Unionism, the effort by workers to go beyond collective bargaining and become full partners of both capital and the state in planning for the industrial future of the United States. One goal of the New Unionism was to improve the lives of workers away from the shop floor by developing better facilities for leisure, housing, and shopping, including a renewed interest in consumer cooperatives.15 World War I and the accompanying rise in the cost of living gave an impetus to cooperatives within the labor movement. Kazan got his start in large-scale cooperatives around 1916, with the assistance of ILGWU president Benjamin Schlesinger. (Kazan later returned the favor and persuaded the city to name the intermediate school they erected in Rochdale Village in Schlesinger’s honor, to the endless befuddlement of students, parents, and teachers, who wondered about the identity of this by then quite obscure figure.) Kazan, who always had a rather jaundiced view of small shopkeepers as petit bourgeois reactionaries, was angered that some grocers were charging extremely high prices for sugar. With Schlesinger’s assistance, Kazan set up a sugar cooperative with 7,000 members. This expanded into a cooperative grocery store at Second Avenue and 14th Street, and one Passover, the store distributed over 100,000 pounds of matzoh. But at the end of 1918 the grocery store was closed, and Kazan took a job with the ILGWU’s rival among the city’s garment unions, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA).16 The Amalgamated, under its longtime president Sidney Hillman, was, if anything, even more committed to the New Unionism than the ILGWU.17 In the ACWA Kazan worked primarily on a variety of union-sponsored welfare and quality of life programs, and his success in turning around a failing credit union (at the time an innovation only recently introduced into the United States) enabled him to get more directly involved in cooperatives.18 His single-minded support for cooperatives would lead to frequent differences with his superiors. On one level this reflected an ideological chicken-and-egg debate—what came first, building workers’ institutions or the political support that would enable their survival? For Kazan, the creation of cooperatives was an end in itself; for most other union officials, cooperatives were part of a broader political program of workers’ advancement, and not necessarily the most important part. Kazan’s anarchist tendency to dismiss electoral politics as irrelevant did not fit in well with the ACWU’s agenda, and this contributed, eventually, to his leaving their employ. Even those who approved of

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cooperatives wondered if they could survive without political support. In his oral history Kazan said of the ACWU leadership:19 They were dreaming of bringing about socialism in this country, and they were active during electoral campaigns, trying to elect a congressman or assemblyman or other officials. In their opinion, no matter how much success could be achieved via cooperative work, some legislators would put legislation on the books that would wipe out all possibilities of conducting cooperative business. Kazan felt that this was backward. Create successful cooperatives first, he argued, and the political support would come. Politicians will always want to be associated with success. As in the ILGWU, the Amalgamated supported Kazan’s passion for cooperatives up to a point, and as part of a greater goal. In 1919 Hillman argued that while consumer cooperatives would not “free the worker from his present status,” they “will bring a large measure of democracy and human happiness into industry.”20 Hillman, like Kazan, had an interest in cooperatives as a means of providing workers with managerial experience.21 However, cooperatives were at best a temporary substitute for a comprehensive social democracy. As Hillman’s biographer Steven Fraser has written, cooperatives “notwithstanding some overblown rhetoric,” were for Hillman never “more than second-best solutions.”22 Kazan felt this acutely, and later claimed that while Hillman was ready to bask in the reflected publicity from cooperative endeavors, he never took them sufficiently seriously.23 In his memoirs, Kazan went out of his way to diminish the role Hillman and Amalgamated played in the creation of his cooperative housing developments.24 The actual sequence of events and apportioning of credit between the two men is difficult to untangle from extant records, but whatever the truth, and despite their differences, Kazan and Hillman certainly worked together closely to create Kazan’s first great effort in the area of cooperative housing, the Amalgamated Houses. The year 1927 was a remarkable year in the Bronx, which in addition to the heroic feats of Babe Ruth and the 1927 Yankees saw the opening of no less than four cooperative housing projects in the borough, all built by different factions of the Jewish left, among them the Amalgamated Houses. Although there were precedents for cooperative housing in the United States and Europe, there was nothing to rival the Bronx efflorescence of 1927. The United Workers Cooperative on Allerton Avenue, known as the Coops, were closely aligned ideologically to the Communist Party. The Shalom Alechem Houses, constructed by the socialist fraternal organization Workmen’s Circle, built a cooperative overlooking the Jerome Park Reservoir that opened in 1927. The Farband Cooperative, with its roots in the Socialist-Zionist movement, opened a cooperative on Williamsbridge Road. The largest and most ambitious of the four cooperatives was the Amalgamated Houses.25

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On November 1, 1927, the first cooperators moved in to Amalgamated Houses, less than a year after the groundbreaking, on Thanksgiving Day 1926. As would be his pattern, Kazan was in a rush to move in families, who started occupying apartments even before the electricity had been turned on. The decision to expand was made almost immediately, and by 1931 there were 620 units in the Amalgamated. The Amalgamated Houses were an immediate success and were hailed by the housing expert Edith Elmer Wood in 1931 as “the best and most successful cooperative housing thus far seen in the United States.”26 The Amalgamated and all the Bronx cooperatives shared a common ethic and aesthetic. They were conceived as anti-slums, urban housing that tried to reverse, condition by condition, the problems slums caused. If slums were crowded and teeming, Kazan and the other cooperative builders would build housing that was airy and spacious. If tenement greenery consisted of grass in sidewalk cracks, he would build his housing around parks. If tenement apartments were small and unsalubrious, they would build roomy, well-lit, and well-ventilated apartments. If tenements were thrown up haphazardly, without a thought other than profit maximization, they would not only build housing, they would build communities. And if tenement dwellers were subject to the arbitrary whims of landlords, they would create buildings whose residents would be owners who could vote democratically on their future. The planning and the architecture for these cooperatives came from many sources: the “philanthropic tenements” that rich benefactors (such as John D. Rockefeller Jr.) had been building in New York City since the late nineteenth century, as well as the socialist and especially anarchist ideas about small-scale communities and regional development promulgated by the nineteenth-century anarchist Élisée Reclus and especially Peter Kropotkin, in his Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1898). This anarchist tradition, in turn, had a considerable impact on the first generation of urban planners, such as Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, the theorist of the “garden city,” who led the leftist and liberal push to eliminate tenement housing.27 Cooperative ventures of all sorts flourished at the Amalgamated. There was a bus service to take children to school and adults to the subway for the work day, a credit union, and a grocery that purchased eggs directly from a cooperatively run farm in the Hudson Valley. There was a full-time educational director and extensive cultural offerings, which included plays in English and Yiddish, a day camp and nursery, a library with several thousand volumes, a music room and string orchestra, an auditorium seating five hundred, and a lecture and concert series. After an argument with the utility Con Edison (whose monopolistic practices and prices made it one of Kazan’s bêtes noires) the Amalgamated Houses operated its own power plant from 1937 to 1944, when the war brought this experiment to an end. Kazan wrote in 1929 that the members of the Amalgamated “had been given the privilege to show [that] where all personal gain and benefit is eliminated, greater good can be accomplished for the benefit of all.”28 Kazan wrote the following year that the Amalgamated would be “the nucleus of the metropolis of the future.”29 The

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Amalgamated Houses would be the blueprint for all his future success, and for the rest of his career Kazan would try to duplicate the success he enjoyed there. • • • Kazan’s later career in cooperatives continued to exemplify the anarchistcooperative principles he learned from Thomas Hastie Bell. The extent to which the later Kazan can be called an anarchist is a vexing question. On the one hand, as far as I know, he never publicly spoke or wrote about anarchism, and the subject does not come up in his oral history. Against this, there is the testimony of Kazan’s protégé Harold Ostroff who when I interviewed him in 2004 told me that “Kazan defined himself as an anarchist.”30 There is no reason to doubt Ostroff ’s assertion, to which one can add much circumstantial evidence—the prevalence of anarchists among Kazan’s friends and colleagues (including Ostroff himself ), and his continuing adherence to certain anarchist principles, most importantly the rejection of politics as a means of advancing the interest of workers, in favor of the formation of communities and cooperatives dedicated to mutual self-help and advancement. The impact of anarchism on the Jewish labor movement is often overlooked, largely because of anarchism’s relative fading after 1920, but when Kazan became active in the Jewish labor movement, few issues were more important than the constant ideological sparring between anarchists and socialists. The rejection of politics led to two main anarchist tactics for advancing their aims: terror and assassination, and self-help and mutual aid. After 1920, the first tactic was repressed by the government and rejected by almost all who remained true to the anarchist calling, while cooperation was gently co-opted by socialists and progressive liberals. In addition, after the rise of Communism, a left polarized between Communists and non-Communists tended to bring the socialists and anarchists together, both in their tactics, and increasingly, in their ideologies. In his early ascent, Kazan was surrounded by anarchists. When Kazan joined the ILGWU, a sizable anarchist faction had been active in the union for some time, including the organizer Rose Pesotta, author of the well-known memoir Bread upon the Waters.31 The Amalgamated Houses became a haven for anarchists, many of whom would be very active in its management and in other cooperatives built by the UHF. Harold Ostroff was the son of a lifelong anarchist (and a longtime Amalgamated Houses resident), as was Abe Bluestein, who served as a manager at Amalgamated Houses and later business manager at Co-op City, and who saw in his work with cooperatives a natural extension of his anarchist beliefs.32 Another anarchist who lived in the Amalgamated, albeit briefly, was the German émigré Rudolf Rocker, who was probably the most influential anarchist of the interwar years. In the fall of 2004, when I was finishing my interview with Harold Ostroff, he went to a bookshelf and pulled down a dog-eared copy of Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture (1937). This was, he said, the most important book he had ever read, and that both he and Kazan had been longtime admirers of Rocker.33

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One of Kazan’s mentors in cooperation was James Peter Warbasse, the founder of the Cooperative League of America in 1916 and a tireless advocate for all things cooperative for half a century. (The importance of the link was demonstrated after Warbasse’s death in 1957, when Kazan memorialized him in a sister project to Rochdale Village, the 4,000 unit Amalgamated Warbasse Houses in Brooklyn, opened in 1961. It was the only UHF cooperative named after an individual.) If Warbasse was not an anarchist de jure, he certainly was an antistatist, who hoped, as he expressed it in 1937, that the state would eventually wither away. “But as the people in their cooperative societies supply their needs, the need for state service declines. . . . Government is a product of injustices which cooperation would heal. The cooperative society is the antithesis of the state. Cooperation prophesies the fading of the state.”34 To be sure, Kazan did recognize that the cooperative movement had to work with the state and the relevant government agencies on occasion, particularly in the building of housing cooperatives, which required a massive initial investment far in excess of what the prospective residents could provide themselves. And from the Amalgamated Houses on, he understood the importance of obtaining tax reductions or abatements to make cooperative housing ventures viable. But the role of the government was that of a catalyst, providing an initial boost, and then letting the self-owned and self-governing cooperative to manage its own affairs. If cooperatives and the cooperative economy were a success, there would be no need for workers to take over the state; the state would recognize their manifest advantages and superiority over other forms of economic organization, come to them, and beg their assistance. And this (at least for middle-income housing in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s) is more or less what happened, when Robert Moses sought the assistance of Kazan in his plans for middle-income housing. In any event, Kazan never lost his anarchist conviction that politics was a futile diversion, and that extraneous political obligations tended to muck up the transition to a postcapitalist society. The tenacity with which he held to this was responsible for his reputation in some quarters for ruthlessness. He felt abundantly confirmed in his beliefs by the events of the 1930s, when all the Bronx cooperatives save the Amalgamated were forced to abandon their cooperative form of organization. The immediate cause of the reversals was the Depression, and the Amalgamated too found itself in dire financial straits, but managed to weather the storm. For Kazan the reason for his success where others failed was evident. Reviewing this matter in 1947, Kazan concluded that “the most important single factor that is responsible for the success of our Cooperative is the uncompromising policy set by sponsors of the organization to confine its activities to such as would serve the general welfare of all its members.” For Kazan, other “so-called cooperatives” allowed themselves to become “the tail-end of some other ideology,” with disastrous results.35 The other cooperatives, Kazan thought, had been wrong to tie their operations so closely to ideologies or to union membership. Vocational or ideological tests and other preconditions for membership divided the cooperative between favored and

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less-favored groups. An official ideology such as Communism or Socialist-Zionism needlessly divides a cooperative into insiders and outsiders, creating endless political debates, and perhaps most importantly, fosters the dangerous notion that an individual owes a primary allegiance to like-minded ideologues residing elsewhere, rather than to one’s fellow cooperators. Supporting good causes such as refugees from Hitler or striking workers, Kazan felt, was all well and good, but not with the funds or imprimatur of the cooperative. There was nothing more crucial, or from Kazan’s perspective more radical, than ensuring the health of cooperatives in an often hostile capitalist environment. Cooperation was an end in itself. When cooperatives were fruitful, they tended to multiply. The more cooperatives there were, the more the cooperative movement could accomplish. It was no accident that Kazan dedicated his largest and most ambitious project to date to the spirit of Rochdale. As a UHF publication described it in 1962, Rochdale Village would not be a housing development but “a city within a city—with its own traffic-free thoroughfares, park, library, schools, shopping centers, and office buildings.” For Kazan, the scale meant that of all his cooperatives, Rochdale would have the greatest chance of realizing the cooperative ideal, the size making all sorts of ancillary cooperative ventures possible. In addition to the cooperative supermarkets and pharmacies, there were plans for a cooperative furniture store, gas station, beauty parlor, and bowling alley.36 And with enough large cooperatives, there was no industry or service that could not be provided with greater efficiency and less expense. Kazan wrote as early as 1929, shortly after the opening of the Amalgamated Houses, that “once the element of profit is eliminated there is no reason why everything possible in commercial enterprise should not be within the reach of the man of moderate means in cooperative undertakings” and he never moved from this belief.37 Kazan’s ultimate goal was to establish an entire cooperative sector of the economy. The UHF journal Co-op Contact in 1960 laid out an expansive, abecedarian vision of a society in which consumers had fully organized for cooperation:38 We need consumers with vision to see the advantages of using their own savings and purchasing power to own and operate their own automobile agencies and repair shops, bakeries, barber shops, beauty parlors, baby-sitting services, book and record stores, credit unions, colleges, clothing stores, clinics—including medical, dental, and optical—drug stores, electric generating plants, food stores, florists, funeral parlors, factories, furniture stores, farms, gas and oil service stations, homes, hospitals, hotels, hardware stores, insurance companies, jewelry stores, laundries, motion picture houses, moving van services, publishing companies, photographic supply stores, restaurants—bars, candy stores—recreation facilities—camps, bowling alleys, gymnasiums—radio stations, repair shops, shoe stores, travel agencies, transportation facilities—taxicabs, buses, airlines—television stations, tailor shops, telephone and telegraph services, etc., etc. etc.

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Of course, nothing like this was ever realized at Rochdale or anyplace else in the United States, though Rochdale did boast two cooperative stores, a pharmacy, credit union, and a cooperative health center.39 As in all utopias, it was difficult for the results to measure up to the expectations, and though Kazan was on some level satisfied with the results, he always wanted more, and in his memoirs suggested that “in some respects this development [Rochdale] was a disappointment. My dream of seeing the cooperative idea expanded in different directions did not materialize. I was hoping that more activities not only in foodstuffs but in many other fields would develop on a cooperative basis.”40 In any event, Rochdale Village was inaugurated with the highest of expectations. In the groundbreaking ceremony for Rochdale Village, a narrator called the assembled to stand and honor the Rochdale Pioneers, “these twenty-eight poor men of Rochdale who lighted an unquenchable torch,” their names recited, their spirit invoked.41 “It is to be hoped,” said the initial announcement of the plans for the new cooperative, in early 1960, by its developer, the UHF, “that the members of Rochdale Village, by their actions will make the name of their cooperative as famous as the society in Rochdale, England.”42 In his own remarks, Kazan, in unmistakably utopian language, spoke of his hopes for Rochdale Village:43 The 6,000 families that will live in Rochdale will have a wonderful opportunity—an opportunity to develop a community within the larger confines of the city that will serve their taste and needs. It will be a place where neighbors will know neighbors, where roots and traditions will be established. A community which will be motivated not by self-interest, but by mutual aid and self-help. Where each can contribute and all will benefit. There was nothing wild-eyed or what, by the late 1960s, would be called “countercultural” about the utopianism Kazan imparted to Rochdale and his other cooperatives. This was a practical, hard as nails, no frills utopianism, utilitarian and perhaps even somewhat drab. This reflected Kazan’s personality. He certainly could be pragmatic and pliable when he needed to be. Of all human endeavors, few are as complex, or require as many actors and participants to come to an agreement, as large-scale construction projects, and Kazan had no interest in promoting schemes that failed to come to fruition, or in architectural renderings that remained inert on the drawing board. Kazan’s practical utopianism required more than noble failures and moral victories. He knew when and how to compromise and when to seek allies, even unlikely allies, but this was a superficial flexibility. At his core, there was an unswerving commitment to things that really mattered to him. On these there would be no budging. His somewhat dour personality was in part the product of his clear sense of the goal he sought, and an acute awareness of the obstacles, detours, or diversions from that path that all too often had waylaid the unwary. And that path, as he told Nelson Rockefeller, as he had told countless others for a half century, was the building of the cooperative commonwealth.

2. The Anti-Utopian ROBERT MOSES

I am more and more doubtful of definitive biographies, of the conscientious, scholarly winnowing of unrelated bits of grain from vast quantities of chaff; of the lurid, imaginative historical novels revealing intimate details of daily lives and thoughts of departed great men; the caricatures of kings, statesmen, poets, actors and artists, full of “atmosphere,” fiction and subtle distortion; the candid photograph; the distorted etching. Robert Moses, A Tribute to Governor Smith

One week before Rochdale Village opened, Robert Moses published a long article about the new cooperative in the Long Island Press, the daily newspaper for southeastern Queens.1 Moses was proud of what he had wrought on the grounds of the former Jamaica Racetrack, and as usual, he was not one to hide his light under a bushel. Moses’s role in the creation of Rochdale can hardly be overestimated. If Kazan provided the blueprint and the cooperative vision, Moses did almost everything else. Without Moses’s flexing of his political muscle, his complete mastery of the bureaucratic arts, and his unflagging enthusiasm for the project, which kept the idea moving forward when most (including Kazan) had their doubts, Rochdale Village never would have been built. Abraham Kazan, never one to share credit easily, said as much—“Rochdale Village owes its existence to Robert Moses”—and all the extant evidence corroborates Kazan’s contention.2 If Kazan has been largely overlooked—and he is surely one of the most neglected creators of twentieth-century New York City—Robert Moses is, if anything, too well known, regularly credited with a greater influence than he actually possessed. But this overestimation is pardonable. By 1963, Robert Moses, at the age of seventy-five, had been in the public eye for half a century, first as an energetic reformer in the Bureau of Municipal Research, then as a young Turk on the staff of

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Governor Alfred E. Smith. He developed the New York State park system and then played a similar role for New York City’s parks. He headed the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) and dominated public and government sponsored housing construction in postwar New York City. He built power plants along the Niagara Frontier beaches on the southern shore of Long Island, and parks and parkways many places in between. He was a wearer of many hats, legendary for both the power he had accrued over the decades and the bitter controversies that invariably swirled around his exercise of it. By December 1963, Moses was very much a lion in winter, and Rochdale Village was perhaps a penultimate, if not quite a last hurrah. Shortly after the deal to build Rochdale Village was announced in January 1960, Moses began to lose his political influence over city housing, and in the spring of that year he left his positions as city construction coordinator and chairman of the Slum Clearance Committee, and was gently kicked upstairs to chair the preparations for the 1964–1965 World’s Fair. He would remain head of the TBTA until 1967, but in 1964 Nelson Rockefeller relieved him of his chairmanship of the New York State Parks Commission, a position he had occupied for forty years. Moses’s article on Rochdale is very laudatory, in his best panegyrist mode, praising Kazan, the United Housing Foundation, its union sponsors, and the state agencies that facilitated its construction. For all that, the real subject of the article is less Rochdale Village than Moses himself and his vision of the city, and this vision is surprisingly gloomy. He describes himself as isolated and beleaguered, caught in the crossfire of opposing camps, a lonely teller of truths to power, a voice crying in the wilderness. “Housing for the masses in a city like New York, if we seek the plain unvarnished truth without equivocation,” he writes, “requires almost an inhuman detachment and perspective, indifference to immediate political consequences, and a thirst for martyrdom beyond most of those who influence public opinion.” If there is a healthy amount of self-pity in this description, it honestly reflects the way he thought about himself and his work. He was a powerful man, to be sure, and he thought that the proper exercise of power was crucial for the future of New York City. At the end of 1963, as Moses looked at the future of urban development, he saw confusion. “New York has no one firm philosophy, speaks with a divided voice, and lacks leadership.” After his departure as city construction coordinator, there was no single voice of authority, just a cacophonous din. “If the whim, caprice, and ambition of every last objector and scribbler is to prevail, where will you find the men of purpose, skill and courage to take the lead?” In the article on Rochdale he provided a long defense of his policy of tenant relocation to build middle-income housing. While this was a subject of doubtful relevance to Rochdale, since only horses and not people had to be moved to build it, there was no subject Moses was more sensitive about than tenant relocations, and he needed little in the way of prompting to offer his defense. In Moses’s opinion the complaints were grossly exaggerated—“Let us have less unproven charges of sadistic tenant removal and less twaddle about ‘bulldozing’ the common man”—but

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his broader argument was the need for a suitably cosmopolitan outlook and the recognition that personal inconvenience needed to be balanced against a utilitarian calculus—petty problems versus the best outcome for the greatest number. Tenant relocations needed to be handled with “sympathy and understanding,” but no one was entitled to “block progress because he is inconvenienced or misled. His personal wishes must yield to a common good.” The common good, Moses felt, was realized in places like Rochdale. It was an example of what can happen when the government and the private sector engage in enlightened collaboration, creating something on an enormous scale, for the benefit of average New Yorkers, something to give his critics pause. Rochdale, Moses proclaimed, “is the most significant multi-family cooperative going on in the city at this time—measured by location, size, rent, low coverage, amenities, accessibility, and widespread neighborhood transformation.” It will benefit both residents, “self-respecting people” who need “only a little help to be on their own,” and the surrounding community in the form of new schools, shopping, and recreational facilities. But the elegiac tone of Moses’s article on Rochdale Village conveys a sense that unless things in the city underwent a radical change, Rochdale Village represented the end of his particular vision of the city. Things had gone in the wrong direction since his exit, he concluded. Slum clearance was increasingly discredited, and the ideas of Jane Jacobs, not mentioned by name though included in the epithet “avantgarde housers,” were a gathering specter, turning many against his views of redevelopment. Big superblock projects like Rochdale were increasingly seen as passé. There was a growing sense that New York City was too big, its problems grown too enormous to be managed by any one person or any specific direction. Confidence in the city’s future was now crowded out by a fashionable sense of worried unease. Moses would have none of this. Bigger problems just called for even bigger leaders, and he diagnosed the city’s ills in one of his classic Menckenian philippics: We shift from one extreme to another. First it is fearless surgical slum clearance, cutting out the malignancy; then it is rehabilitation and repair stimulated by nostalgia; then the modern Savanarolas come marching in, denouncing our urban civilization as essentially wasteful and wicked; and finally the sad sacks, proclaiming the city hopeless, and advocating dispersing the population to perfectly planned suburbia and exurbia, or yielding spinelessly to philosophical despair. In such an atmosphere complete frankness is rare, unpopular, and even dangerous—and yet only absolute honesty and candor will save the day. But what made Rochdale Village so special to Moses—though he seems to have been reluctant to say it here in so many words—was that Rochdale was an answer to the many critics who charged him with being indifferent to civil rights and minority aspirations. The article did contain one of Moses’s coded references to his doubts

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about civil rights legislation—“economic and social objectives no doubt ultimately valid and undeniable but hardly immediately obtainable,” but Rochdale for Moses represented civil rights in practice, and not as abstract and unrealizable theory— thousands of white families voluntarily moving to a black neighborhood, and helping to anchor and improve the surrounding community. It was for this reason that Moses ranked Rochdale Village as one of his greatest achievements, a view he would continue to hold in the years to come. Moses concluded the article by linking Rochdale with two of his most famous projects, Jones Beach and Lincoln Center, and promised bus trips to all three places from the 1964 World’s Fair, so that the fairgoers would see in Rochdale “the essence of the spirit of cooperation, the spirit that can alone unite all peoples and in the very long run produce peace.” In many ways Moses saw Rochdale Village as a culmination of his life’s work.3 • • • The relationship between Moses and Kazan is a largely untold story. For reasons that are not entirely clear, you will not learn anything about it in Robert Caro’s monumental, magisterial, indispensable, though in many places aggressively negative and one-sided biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which has cast a giant shadow on all subsequent discussions of Moses. And Kazan’s absence is all the more striking because, as the historian Joel Schwartz has noted, Kazan was probably Moses’s favorite postwar developer.4 Neither Abraham Kazan, nor the UHF, nor Rochdale Village make an appearance on any of the 1,250 pages of The Power Broker. Though the friendship between Kazan and Moses was fruitful for both parties, it was in many ways a curious tie. Throughout his career Moses had little use for the labor movement or social democracy (to say nothing of anarchism), and even vigorous liberals would often cause a serious furrowing of his brow and a spraying of choice adjectives in their direction. But in the article on Rochdale Village he dutifully praises the Rochdale Equitable Pioneer Society and their little store on Toad Lane, and the traditions of British communalism that gave rise to it. Letting his rhetoric arch skyward, Moses said of the UHF that it was “lifting up the tabernacle of cooperation in our fiercely competitive American wilderness.” If Moses was laying it on a bit thick, there’s little doubt that the underlying admiration for the cooperative movement in general and Kazan in particular was sincere, praising the latter as “tough-minded,” a “doer,” at once an “incurable optimist” and “successful realist.” Whatever Moses’s true feelings about the cooperative movement, and it is clear, even in this article, that he viewed the broader cooperative vision of a nonprofit world as hopelessly naïve, he appreciated the way it animated its adherents, and the results it produced. In 1956, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the UHF Title I Seward Park cooperative, he said, “These cooperatives are tops in my book. They are built cheaply and well by devoted, I might say almost fanatical, idealists, not for profit but for substantial, reliable people who have a real stake in the City.”5

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At the same time, there’s no disguising that in many ways the partnership of Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses was a partnership of opposites. As was sometimes remarked at the time, the two men were an odd couple. There’s no evidence that they were particularly close personally. Moses, who affected an informality and easy equality with the highest and the mightiest—Mayor Wagner was “Bob,” Governor Rockefeller was “Nelson”—used “Mr. Kazan” as his preferred salutation, and Kazan in turn opted for the formal “Commissioner Moses” in his letters. The two men didn’t travel in the same social circles. Kazan was a short man with a heavy Yiddish accent, with no formal education to speak of. Moses was a man of great physical presence, erudite and well-spoken, educated at the greatest universities on two continents. Kazan was a Russian Jew whose entire career was spent within the ambit of the Jewish left. Moses was a person of German Jewish background who kept his distance from all Jewish associations and affiliations and had spent his lifetime hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. Robert Moses was born in New Haven in 1888, grew up in New York City in a wealthy family, and attended Yale and Oxford before receiving his doctorate from Columbia. Before his dissertation was published in 1914 he had already embarked on his career as a progressive reformer in New York City. He would eventually become a leading associate of Al Smith, and worked closely with him during his four terms as governor between 1918 and 1928. He admired Smith for his combination of political smarts and reformer’s ambition, and Smith’s success would in many ways be a model for his own career. But while Smith’s public persona was that of genial, effective, and affable persuader and builder of coalitions, Moses soon developed a reputation as tough and demanding, with a difficult personality, the sort of person you didn’t want to challenge, and definitely did not want to cross. In 1924 Moses became chairman of the New York State Parks Commission. He would later work closely with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who appointed him to a number of important offices, starting with New York City Parks commissioner in 1934, and a variety of mayors and governors through John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.6 Moses began his career as a progressive cleanser of the Augean stables of Tammany and patronage politics, and while he never lost his distaste for venal backroom negotiations, in time he would direct his greatest animus against the liberal and reform-minded gnats he tried to swat away from so many of his plans and deals. For Moses, the main problem with reformers was that they were untethered critics with no allegiance or roots in a political faction; they were both powerless (and therefore did not need to be placated) and unconstrained by practical responsibilities (and therefore generally incapable of making wise decisions). In a speech in 1960 about his distinctive brand of conservatism, Moses spoke of how he accomplished things by respecting existing sources of power:7 The conservative, no matter where he started, gets around in time to recognizing political leaders as a necessary liaison between the voters and the candidates for elective office. The leaders analyze better than the pollsters.

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They interpret. They reconcile differences which might flare up into feuds. Many, if not all of them, want the best government consistent with their running it. The conservative understands their motives and trusts them a lot further than he does the self-righteous and sour reformers. The conservative is in a sense a reformed reformer. What did it mean for Moses to be a “reformed reformer”? It meant he could speak the language of reform, and advocate needed social change, but at the same time decry what he called the “fallacy of expertizing,” and the tendency to academize and overintellectualize the problems of governing.8 Reformers wanted to trespass on his turf, and they wanted to be taken seriously as political players without having done the work to establish a political base. In 1943, in a typical blast against urban planning, with people like Lewis Mumford in mind, he excoriated a catalogue aria of “long-haired critics, fanatics, and demagogues, perfectionists and daydreamers” and “ivory-tower philosophers with their abracadabra about urbanism.” Reformers who remained wedded to their a priori dreams were in for rude awakenings. Moses thought that political leaders needed to plan wisely, but he was adamantly opposed to “planning” as an abstract academic pursuit. “I devoutly hope,” said Moses in the late 1930s, without much prescience, “that no university will start a school for planning.”9 Indeed, when it came to criticizing the artificialities of urban planners, Moses had more than a little in common with his best-known detractor, the architectural critic and activist Jane Jacobs. Neither had any use for Lewis Mumford, or for architects like Le Corbusier (whom Moses met during the planning of the United Nations complex), and whom Moses dismissed as a foolish, abstract daydreamer, whose drawing-board fantasies of the city of the future were fundamentally pernicious.10 Speaking in 1959 he criticized planned cities of the future, all those “New Delhis, Canberras, and Brasílias” which might “have all of the neatness, logic, and harmony of an oriental silk rug,” but what city dweller would trade the complexity of urban life for life upon a pretty pattern? Moses went on to quote a letter of Henry James to the effect that “cities are living organisms that grow from within and by experience and piece by piece; they are not bought all hanging together, in any inspired studio anywhere whatsoever.”11 There were few things Moses enjoyed more than crumbling ivory towers and dream palaces. Moses was that rarity of his time, an intellectual in politics. Did anyone with a PhD, save Woodrow Wilson, amass more political power than Moses in America in the first half of the twentieth century? But Moses was rarer still, an intellectual in politics who hated other intellectuals in politics. He wrote no systematic treatises, founded no school of urban theory, taught no students, and never had any real protégés or disciples. Nonetheless, he was a compulsive writer of selfjustifications, with a philosophical chip on his shoulder, and he directed most of his anger at other intellectuals, whom he tried to convince that they didn’t know how the world worked, or how to run it. Robert Moses was at his core an anti-utopian,

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even a proselytizing anti-utopian, whose goal was to get others to accept the world as it is. But for a complex series of reasons, in Abraham Kazan, Moses found a utopian he could do business with. • • • Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses first met shortly after the end of World War II, over the planned expansion of Kazan’s second cooperative, the Amalgamated Dwellings. The Amalgamated Dwellings were a direct result of the praise heaped on his first cooperative, the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, which was described by Governor Al Smith in his 1929 autobiography as “a group of multiple dwellings . . . modern in every respect.” (It was also the first housing project built under the 1926 Limited Dividend Housing Companies Law, which Smith took great pains to push through a somewhat recalcitrant legislature.)12 Other housing reformers in and out of government, including Smith’s successor Franklin Roosevelt, pressed Kazan and the Amalgamated to build a cooperative on the Lower East Side that would more directly involve urban redevelopment; that is, the removal of slum tenements and the erection of replacement housing. In 1931 the 226 unit Amalgamated Dwellings opened on Grand Street, in a striking Art Deco design that drew on Austrian and Soviet designs for workers’ housing, and received the financial support of and the financial backing of the lieutenant governor (and future governor and senator) Herbert Lehman and the wealthy real estate investor Aaron Rabinowitz, and it became the Lower East Side’s first privately financed slum clearance project.13 Kazan, however, had his doubts about this project from the beginning, and wrote that various difficulties including the lack of understanding of the cooperative idea on the part of the residents created “obstacles almost too difficult to cope with.” One of the problems with the Amalagamated Dwellings was, to Kazan’s mind, that it was undersized, too small at a little more than two hundred families to develop its own internal culture. Kazan had long subscribed to the contagion theory of housing, that cooperatives had to be separate from the baneful influence of the slums; he worried that the Amalgamated Dwellings, a relatively small development covering one city block, was being “engulfed by the surrounding slum buildings,” and decided he wanted to build an adjacent cooperative.14 Kazan had felt this way since almost the opening of the Amalgamated Dwellings but was in no position to do anything about it until 1945. During the Depression Kazan could do little but try to stay solvent, and the war years precluded any expansion. But with the end of the war, Kazan was ready to remedy the situation on the Lower East Side, and in early 1945 he presented a plan for a massive expansion of the Amalgamated Dwellings, sixteen city blocks surrounding the Amalgamated, with the removal of more than sixty tenements to the City Planning Commission, one of whose members was Robert Moses.15 In 1945 Robert Moses was a relatively recent arrival on the housing scene in New York City; it was not until 1938, when La Guardia named him to a committee

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to advise him on slum clearance and housing that he added New York City housing planning to his portfolio. In 1942 he was named to the City Planning Commission, and had a major role in the passage that year of the Redevelopment Companies Law (a state act), which made it easier for the city to condemn land and sell it to a private investor. (It was a precursor of sorts to Title I of the National Housing Act of 1949.) In 1946 he was named city construction coordinator, and in 1948 chairman of the Committee on Slum Clearance, two positions which enabled him to dominate city housing policy until 1960. In 1942, under the aegis of the Redevelopment Companies Law, Moses was the prime mover in his first large-scale middle-income housing project, Stuyvesant Town, which as we have seen, he compared to Rochdale Village in 1963. Stuyvesant Town was always controversial, both because of the large-scale tenant removals involved, the question of the replacement of lower-income with middle-income housing, and most notoriously, the insistence of Metropolitan Life (Stuyvesant Town’s developer) that all African Americans be excluded. For Moses the battle over Stuyvesant Town was perhaps his primal urban struggle, the battle of sensible priorities for building middle-income housing arrayed against a host of enemies, which he would return to again and again in his career. Still, Stuyvesant Town was a model to him of what urban redevelopment could accomplish. He proclaimed its triumph in the article on Rochdale Village. “We moved over 11,000 people from the rat-infested old law tenements of the middle East Side, roosting in buildings covering eighty to ninety percent of the ground, to make way for Stuyvesant Town with 27,500 middle income people in high, attractive buildings set in gardens and covering only twenty-five percent of the land.”16 But for various reasons, Metropolitan Life built no more Stuyvesant Towns, and Moses by the late 1940s was looking for new developers to partner with. The initial encounter between Kazan and Moses was not auspicious. After Kazan in 1945 presented his plan for a huge development on the Lower East Side, the City Planning Commission gave it to Moses for review. In May of 1945 Moses nixed the project. He claimed it was a project done primarily to “provide substantial income for its promoters,” who were not a “recognized, responsible financial group.” Instead it was a “mere scheme proposed by lawyers and architects.”17 Like many of those on the receiving end of one of Moses’s mighty epistolary blasts, Kazan was at first stunned into a shell-shocked silence, and did little for several weeks. He then summoned his courage and requested a meeting with Moses. To his surprise, Kazan found Moses friendly. Moses had in the interim made inquiries, and found that Kazan was respected as honest and trustworthy, and that his two cooperatives were well run, and rather than blocking the proposal, Moses suggested scaling it back to four blocks, clearing sixty-five tenements, and insisted on adding a four-story parking garage. This complex opened in 1950 as the Hillman Houses, 807 units in three twelve-story buildings. With their height and location on large superblocks, and their design by Herman Jessor (the architect of every major UHF cooperative, including Rochdale), they pointed the way to future Kazan and Moses collaborations.18

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But it was Title I of the 1949 National Housing Act that brought the friendship of Kazan and Moses to fruition. Title I permitted the federal government to reimburse municipalities for two-thirds of land acquisition and condemnation costs for urban sites. It was intended to encourage the rebuilding of tenement areas in large contiguous plots primarily by private developers (either for profit or nonprofit) as a means of stabilizing and improving urban areas. Title I projects, as envisioned by the Act and by Moses, were intended to be a mix of housing and building types, including the expansion of institutions of higher learning (NYU and LIU), market-rate housing, and subsidized middle-income housing. Low-income housing was generally not included in Title I projects. Moses’s opposition to centralized planning did not mean, of course, that he didn’t plan his urban renewal projects carefully, and he recognized in his building plans the need for a mixture of income levels. He often rebuilt slum areas with a mixture of public housing and middle-income Title I projects, enabling him to house in the former some of those displaced by the latter. Moses developed seventeen Title I projects between 1949 and 1960; eight of those were limited-equity middle-income cooperatives.19 One of the areas that Moses was interested in developing most extensively was Corlears Hook, on the Lower East Side, and the site of the Amalgamated Dwellings and the Hillman Houses. Moses in 1944 already saw the area with new public housing as “part of the East Side reclamation. Not a pipe dream, but a reality.”20 He wished to add middle-income housing into the mix. Shortly after the passage of the 1949 Act, Moses approached Jacob Potofsky, Hillman’s successor at the Amalgamated, and Kazan about sponsoring new housing on the Lower East Side.21 Moses’s interest in cooperative housing helped Kazan decide to form his own organization, one that would be connected to but separate from the Amalgamated and other unions.22 Labor would provide political and economic support, and Kazan would provide the direction and the vision for the cooperative housing movement. Kazan had long chafed under the need to play second fiddle to unions and union leaders, who often wanted the building of housing cooperatives to take a backseat to a broader union agenda. He felt that when cooperatives became too closely identified with any outside institution, even their sponsoring institutions, they lost their independence. Kazan adamantly opposed any reservation of apartments in his cooperatives for union members, even for those unions who had financially contributed to the cooperative, and felt that the cooperatives were serving a broader and more universal social need than merely servicing the union movement. All working families, whether union members or not, would benefit from cooperatives. A permanent organization enabled Kazan to move on more easily to new projects, once a cooperative became fully self-governing, to help popularize the cooperative idea, and provide an umbrella organization for all housing cooperatives. The United Housing Foundation was formed in 1951.23 Some would argue that with organizations like the UHF, the union movement in postwar New York City lost its way, concentrating on building ancillary institutions rather than developing the core strength of its unions, and that in the end the extensive social democratic superstructure of the city availed them but little when,

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in the mid-1970s, it all came crashing down at once. The urban planner Hilary Botein has shrewdly argued that once the UHF was fashioned, Kazan was able to view the labor movement “from a benignly opportunistic perspective.”24 From the other side, Moses twitted the transformation of union officials into housing developers. “There is really nothing,” he said in 1962, “quite like the conservatism of a labor leader turned capitalist.” Both positions have their merit, but Kazan would have argued that the creation of affordable housing for as many working families as possible was hardly at odds with the original goal of the labor movement, and it is difficult not to agree with Joshua Freeman that union involvement in cooperative housing was “one of the greatest and least-known achievements of working-class New York.”25 The UHF, throughout its history, was actually only the visible part of a more complex arrangement. The year before its founding, Kazan organized the Community Services and Management Corporation, later Community Services Inc. (CSI), to be the general contractor for the cooperatives he developed. Community Services would hire and supervise subcontractors and would receive a 1 percent developer’s fee on completion of each project. This money was advanced to the UHF, which would be the public face of Kazan’s operation. The UHF would provide publicity for its projects, obtain the needed political support, work with the unions (nineteen in all) that were members of the UHF, and who would often provide funding for the projects.26 Kazan was the president of CSI from the beginning, but he was content until 1957 to let others serve as president of the UHF.27 Every time a new cooperative was started, a new corporation would be founded— such as Rochdale Village Inc., organized in 1960. These individual cooperative corporations would own the land on which the cooperative was to be built, hire CSI as the general contractor, and manage the cooperative in its opening years until the cooperators could take direct control of the board of directors of the corporation. (In Rochdale, this would not happen until 1969, some five years after all the residents had moved in.) Kazan would borrow a page from Moses and endeavor to wear as many hats as possible—for each of the cooperatives, Kazan would simultaneously be the president of the cooperative corporation, president of CSI, and a board member (and later president) of the UHF. These interlocking corporations ensured that Kazan would dominate every aspect of the construction and management of the early phase of his cooperatives.28 The partnership between Moses and Kazan endured to the end of their careers, in projects of increasingly gargantuan size, something that no doubt pleased both men. With Moses, Kazan and the UHF sponsored three Title I projects in Manhattan: the East River Houses at Corlears Hook, completed in 1956, with four buildings and 1,672 apartments; the Seward Park Houses (1961), also on the Lower East Side, with four buildings and 1,728 apartments; and Penn Station South (1962), in the Midtown area, with ten buildings on twenty acres and 2,820 apartments. Thereafter Moses and Kazan largely left Manhattan and concentrated on building large cooperatives in the outer boroughs on vacant land that therefore did not fall

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under Title I, and were developed through the state Mitchell-Lama middle-income housing program. Rochdale, at 5,860 apartments, was nearly twice as large as any previous UHF cooperative. The other UHF Mitchell-Lama cooperatives were the Amalgamated Warbasse Houses (1965) in Brooklyn, with five buildings and 2,585 units, and Co-op City in the Bronx. In 1968 the first of 15,383 families moved into this massive development. With its thirty-five highrises and 246 town houses it was almost as large as all previous UHF cooperatives combined.29 It would prove to be the last cooperative built by the UHF, and just about the last project, of any sort, with Moses’s imprimatur. Despite various bumps and strains, the alliance between Moses and the UHF was an enduring one. From Moses’s perspective, his alliance with Kazan was based on shared views of urban redevelopment. They agreed on the diagnosis—slums and tenements were physical and moral eyesores, at the root of almost all urban problems—and they agreed on the solution—substandard tenements need to be pulled out by their roots and replaced by new affordable workers’ housing, new housing that was antithetical in design and function to the old tenement. There were practical reasons as well, of course. Working with Kazan afforded a connection to the treasuries and pension funds of major trade unions, and he found in Kazan one who fit all his adjectives of approbation, someone who had “survived discouragements which would have floored a weaker man.” And the fact that Kazan ran a nonprofit organization, and could build housing for less than his for-profit competitors, was just an added feature in his favor.30 The admiration of Moses and Kazan was mutual. Although it was undoubtedly useful to have Moses’s power on his side, Kazan had worked closely with very powerful men before, such as Sidney Hillman, often with very frustrating results.31 Kazan didn’t admire Moses for his power—at best one respects, not admires, those who wield power for its own sake—but he admired Moses, according to Harold Ostroff, because he was trustworthy, and he would fight for his friends. “If you got Moses to be on your side, you knew that you didn’t need anything more than a handshake to know that Moses would be with you through thick and thin.”32 The relation between Moses and Kazan was not particularly close, but was rather a working friendship, each man with his own sphere of interests and influences. For Moses, writing in 1956, Kazan was the “working genius” of cooperative housing in New York City, who had created “a record of over a quarter of a century of steady, genuine undeniable progress,” the living refutation of “the bright, eager critics of our slum clearance” who “build nothing” and live on “mud-throwing and false, garbled statistics” who believe that the city should “fix up the slums with rubber bands and scotch tape.”33 What some would say of Moses, Moses said of Kazan. “Look about you in this City,” he said in 1962, echoing the famous epigraph about Sir Christopher Wren, and “see his monuments.”34

3. The Birth of a Suburb, the Growth of a Ghetto

Don’t ask me, said Simple, I don’t expect to have the money to spend on nothing more than a bottle of beer on Saturday nights. But if I did have a big bag of loot all at once, I bet you a fat man I would buy myself a house in Jamaica, Long Island, own a dog, dig a garden, and raise some chickens to eat. Langston Hughes

South Jamaica, before the early twentieth century, enjoyed a somewhat fugitive geographic existence as the southern and less-developed part of the Town of Jamaica. (South Jamaica first made it into the New York Times on August 1, 1853, in a description of a storm with hailstones the size of hens’ eggs.)1 Early references to South Jamaica often emphasized its rusticity. As late as 1929 there was mention of goings on amid the “woods of South Jamaica.”2 These woods were soon to vanish forever. In 1898, with consolidation, Jamaica had become a part of New York City, and with consolidation, Jamaica as a legal entity ceased to exist, and the town simply became a part of the newly formed Borough of Queens. Consolidation wrought a fundamental reorientation of southeastern Queens. Since the mid-seventeenth century the area had seen itself as part of Long Island, with its ties trailing to the east. But even though, as one observer reported as late as 1926, “many people . . . do not know that Jamaica is in New York City,” Jamaica residents increasingly looked west, considering their neighborhood as a periphery of the expanding metropolis.3 In the early twentieth century, as population and development increased, South Jamaica gained new life as the name of a neighborhood. The character of South Jamaica changed rapidly, as its forested areas were cleared for roads and highways, and its farms sold and subdivided. In 1929 a real estate developer marveled at how

Map 2. Rochdale Village vicinity, ca. 1968

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rapidly South Jamaica and the entire South Queens area had grown, and how much new private housing had been built over the previous decade. By 1940, the area was almost entirely developed, with little open space left.4 The northern part of Jamaica had always been more developed, and it now attracted middle-class and upper-class housing, some of it quite posh. The southern area of Jamaica, below Hillside Avenue, had more modest housing. By 1910 large portions of southern Jamaica were developed in “plain but good one- and two-family houses, close together on small plots, stretching in long rows along the streets.” These were initially occupied primarily by German and Irish families of modest incomes, moving out from Brooklyn.5 In 1939 the New York City Guide of the Federal Writers’ Projects sniffed that most new housing in southeastern Queens were “undistinguished products of the Queens building boom of the 1920s.”6 It was this southern area, just south of Jamaica’s central business district, that became the center of the black population in Jamaica. There had been a substantial black population of slaves in Jamaica before the final emancipation in New York State, in 1827. Jamaica’s Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church—now a central institution in South Jamaica—was founded in 1834. In the 1890s the black population led a heroic and ultimately successful struggle against Jamaica’s segregated schoolhouse for colored students, leading to a 1900 bill passed by the state legislature declaring segregated schooling illegal in New York State.7 But the main source of the increased black population in the early decades of twentieth-century Jamaica was migration from other parts of New York City after World War I, a pattern that was similar to but far less documented than the growth of the city’s other large black neighborhoods, notably Harlem and BedfordStuyvesant, where small wedges of black settlement established themselves, and then, through a variety of forces, gradually expanded in size and scope.8 The combination of extensive housing development in the early decades of the twentieth century, along with the growing desirability of new housing north of Jamaica Avenue, left landlords after World War I with vacant rooms, and they started renting to blacks, primarily from Harlem, and to poorer whites.9 An official with the New York Urban League wrote in 1926 that “until a few years ago the center of the Negro population [in Jamaica] was in the section around Portland and South Streets, living in old-law tenements—the population has a combination of Negro Italian and Pole frequently living in the same house.”10 But by the mid-1920s, large numbers of black families were moving to South Jamaica, not only to rent apartments, but to buy houses, and it became one of the few areas in New York City where blacks could escape the habitual problem of being charged excessive rents for apartments.11 South Jamaica was soon the premier area for black homeownership in New York City.12 This was in part through conscious effort and planned design. Merrick Park Gardens, off Merrick Boulevard and 108th Avenue, was developed by J. Franklin Patterson around 1917. By 1925

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the Frederick Douglas [sic] Realty Company, with its headquarters on New York Boulevard (which would later form the southern boundary of Rochdale Village) was also building private homes for blacks, sometimes in conjunction with local Jewish developers.13 The Urban League official James H. Hubert, wrote in 1926 that it had “developed into one of the finest Negro colonies of the state.”14 There was, needless to say, considerable white resistance to black homeownership in South Jamaica, but this did little to stop its growth. By 1925 the New York Amsterdam News was reporting “an exodus of white residents from certain streets in Jamaica has started because of what they term ‘an invasion’ by colored people purchasing homes.”15 The next year a close observer of black South Jamaica wrote that “as was the case in Harlem many streets formerly closed to Negroes are opening up. One family quietly buys on the block, the neighbors become alarmed and begin advertising for ‘colored buyers.’ ”16 As this dynamic gathered force, in 1926 the Amsterdam News rhapsodized that South Jamaica had become “the poor colored man’s Mecca, in that today he can purchase a home for $500 to $1000 down.”17 In 1930 writing of South Jamaica the same paper claimed that it, not Harlem, was the “fastest growing Negro community in the world.”18 By 1932, there were 12,000 to 15,000 blacks in the Jamaica area.19 Middle-class black South Jamaica soon sprouted an active organizational life. Homeowners formed the South Jamaica Property Owners Association in late 1926 to address their concerns.20 A few months later, at a meeting at Allen AME church, the Jamaica branch of the NAACP was founded.21 It would grow rapidly, gaining almost five hundred members in its first year, and several thousand within a few years.22 To the left of the NAACP, by the mid-1930s an active chapter of the Communist Party sprouted, as did the Committee for Equal Opportunity, with similar politics, originally organized to get Jamaica Hospital to hire black physicians and dentists.23 These organizations fought to eliminate the barriers, social and legal, placed in the way of black homeownership. In many instances it required considerable bravery to be the first black family on a block, with white response ranging from acts of vandalism (red paint splattered on walls; windshields broken in driveways), to death threats, as one family found in 1927, in the form of a flaming cross on their front lawn. The struggle for black homeownership, against illegal and still quite legal means of discrimination (such as restrictive covenants) continued into the 1960s.24 The fight for full black equality in Jamaica and South Jamaica was waged on many fronts in the 1930s and mid-1940s, often with interracial support. In 1946 the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP convinced the Gertz Department Store, the flagship store on Jamaica Avenue, to hire blacks in the sales department for the first time.25 (This particular battle would have to be fought again.) In 1945, when the notoriously racist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo called a local Italian woman “my dear dago,” there were joint rallies of blacks, Jews, and Italians in Jamaica calling for his impeachment.26 There were also fights against segregation at local restaurants and theaters, and against the casual racism of the day, as when, in

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1941, the NAACP persuaded the local A&P supermarket to discontinue stocking “Nigger Head Stove Polish.”27 In the late 1920s and 1930s black South Jamaica also did battle, figuratively and sometimes in the flesh, with the Ku Klux Klan, which had its most visible chapter in New York City in Jamaica, with its epicenter in St. Albans, an area that in an ironic twist by the 1950s, would become synonymous with middle-class black suburbanism, but that in the 1920s was still entirely white. In 1927, during their late 1920s heyday, 1,400 Klansmen and -women marched in a Memorial Day parade on Jamaica and Hillside Avenues, despite much jeering and occasional confrontations with the crowd. There were allegations by Klansmen of police brutality, and no doubt the heavily Irish police force were not sympathetic to the Klan’s militant anti-Catholicism.28 The next year, a Klan rally on the Fourth of July brought out between 3,000 and 5,000 participants to St. Albans, to hear speakers denouncing Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith, Negroes, and other perceived social ills. The evening was topped off by the burning of a forty-foot cross, to be followed, the next week, by the burning of a ninety-foot cross on nearby Rockaway Boulevard, which local Klansmen proudly claimed as a “Klan’s world record.”29 (At about the same time a Klan spokesman announced plans, never realized, for an elaborate Jamaica “Klubhouse.”)30 The Klan would sharply decline in Jamaica and elsewhere in the North as a major political force shortly thereafter, but the racist sentiments that had engendered them remained. There were cross burnings on Hillside Avenue in 1936, and again in 1940.31 There were enough memories of the Klan that in 1946, when blacks started moving into St. Albans, some found notices on their doors from the “Ku Klux Klan District of St. Albans.”32 But beyond the explicit problems caused by white racism, the broader and perhaps more fundamental problem that confronted South Jamaica was the growth of poverty and its attendant social ills. South Jamaica, once it became identified as an area of black settlement, attracted poor as well as middle-class blacks, and hard-won middle-class respectability existed cheek by jowl with areas of extremely distressed housing. For all the pride in black homeownership in South Jamaica, there was a steady and growing population of poorer residents, living not, for the most part, in tenements, but in poorly constructed, badly overcrowded and dilapidated frame houses.33 By 1935 South Jamaica was described as having “some of the worst slums in the city,” with many apartments “without electricity and running water,” people living in “wooden hovels,” flimsy firetraps with “housing horrors comparable to Charles Dickens’ London.” It was an area with inadequate facilities for transportation; poor roads and sewage, including many ill-marked and guarded Long Island Railroad street-level grade crossings; poor schools; a lack of recreational and shopping facilities; and rising problems with crime and gang violence.34 There were also problems with prostitution, in the red-light district near the LIRR embankment, where “lounging women [are] waiting to steer a prospect into any one of a score of side street bagnios,” notorious throughout Queens.35 By the 1940s, lawlessness

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was reportedly keeping South Jamaica residents shuttered in their homes at night, and the Jamaica branch of the NAACP demanded that South Jamaica receive more police protection and that Negro officers be assigned to the area.36 As in many black communities, the other side of the coin of police neglect was police bias and brutality against black suspects. These concerns were aired in 1938 when a white man was killed in a racially charged melee; seven blacks were charged with homicide, five whites were charged with disorderly conduct. The NAACP claimed the police investigations and indictments were biased and succeeded in having the charges reduced.37 Accusations of police brutality would continue into the postwar period.38 There were various efforts by the black community in South Jamaica to address the problems in their midst: social outreach programs, settlement houses, calls for increased recreational facilities, and demands for badly needed improvements to the housing and infrastructure by various civic groups. An interracial South Jamaica Community League was founded in 1935.39 The same year the Committee for Equal Opportunity opened a short-lived settlement house in South Jamaica, the South Side House, which offered after-school activities and family assistance.40 Despite these efforts, by the late 1930s many outside observers had written off South Jamaica as an area with a declining house stock, poor transportation, and a burgeoning black population. The notorious 1938 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) study, whose multicolored charts put “redlining” into the language, with red designating areas not worthy of new real estate investment, unsurprisingly gave South Jamaica an essentially failing grade, a large scarlet D.41 Without new private investment forthcoming, residents of South Jamaica looked to the government for assistance. Perhaps the most universal demand in South Jamaica in the 1930s was for slum clearance and new recreational facilities. Two playgrounds opened in South Jamaica in the late 1930s, and Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses came for their dedications.42 In 1940 South Jamaica Houses opened, representing the fairest hopes of housing progressives, one of the first projects of the New York City Housing Authority and the first to be consciously planned as interracial housing.43 (This would be somewhat controversial with the Jamaica NAACP, whose leadership felt that with the great need for minority housing, all the apartments should be reserved for blacks, though the Amsterdam News disagreed, arguing that “Negroes because they are in the majority in a certain neighborhood should no more insist on discriminating than they would want to be discriminated against.”)44 There were 9,000 applications for South Jamaica’s 447 apartments, which replaced 150 ramshackle frame houses in the most distressed area of the neighborhood. When it opened the development was 70 percent African American and 30 percent white, and was for many years widely touted as a triumph of interracial housing.45 But this would change over the course of the 1950s; South Jamaica Houses would lose almost all its white residents, and by 1960 would be almost entirely African American, prefiguring the fate of the interracial experiment beginning to unfold two miles away at Rochdale Village.

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The changes in South Jamaica Houses reflected the changes in South Jamaica as a whole. If in 1940 South Jamaica was a black neighborhood, it was an interwar black neighborhood; that is, one that still retained a lot of whites. A careful 1943 survey of New York City neighborhoods concluded that South Jamaica was a neighborhood of approximately 30,000, of whom only about one-third were African American.46 (Of course, the usual caveat applies. Like all New York City neighborhoods, South Jamaica has unfixed and wandering boundaries, and any discussion of its precise extent and population is inherently squishy.) But what made South Jamaica a “black” neighborhood was the overwhelming whiteness of the surrounding area, and in the 1943 survey, the adjacent areas of southeastern Queens, Springfield, St. Albans, Laurelton-Rosedale, Howard Beach, and Jamaica proper (increasingly defined as that part of Jamaica in which blacks didn’t live) all registered black populations of 1 percent or less. But South Jamaica was genuinely racially mixed. Harold Cruse, the author of the fiery black-nationalist classic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and not one to sentimentalize interracial harmony, grew up in South Jamaica in the early 1930s, and described his neighborhood as “not a typical American neighborhood at all. It had native Americans, Irish, Poles, Jews, Germans, Italians, and blacks, who lived side by side without much visible friction. There was no separate black neighborhood in Jamaica in the 1920’s and the 1930’s.”47 The black population in South Jamaica expanded rapidly after 1940. St. Albans, which in the 1943 study was recorded as having a minuscule black population of 0.02 percent, soon was the object of an coordinated effort, led by real estate agent Hugo R. Heydorn, to increase black ownership in the area. If restrictive covenants were upheld for St. Albans as late as 1947, the year before they were declared unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court, by 1948 at least sixty black families lived in St. Albans. In a short time St. Albans was the home of many of the members of the black upper middle class and entertainment elite, such as Lena Horne, Count Basie, and Roy Campanella.48 Parts of South Jamaica would remain an area of pride for black residents there and elsewhere in the city. Olga Lewis remembers visiting South Jamaica while living in East New York in the 1940s and ’50s. “It was a very nice, quiet neighborhood—as a black person you felt good saying I’m going to Jamaica. You usually were going to visit someone who owned a home. They had rentals, but primarily it was homeowners; it was a proud middle-class neighborhood.”49 Many had followed the path of Hugh Williams, a longtime Rochdale resident, who moved to Jamaica around 1952. He had been raised on West 143rd Street between Seventh Avenue and Lenox, but he “didn’t like the environment; there were a lot of influences that I didn’t really like, lots of drug use. One day I was standing on Lenox Avenue, looking at a lot of people older than I, and I said to myself, when I get their age, I don’t want to be here, I could do better—my sister lived in Jamaica, she had an extra room, and I moved there.”50 But the continued growth of a black middle class was only part of the story of the transformation of the neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. During this

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period, while the intracity migration continued, there was a new migration of black families directly from the South, primarily from North and South Carolina, who were for the most part less well off financially than those who had come during the pre-war black migration. A North Carolina migrant, Omar Barbour, who moved to South Jamaica as a young boy, remembers living in a run-down, overcrowded, and shabby rooming house, with peeling paint on the walls, a leaky roof, and an inadequate sewage system that turned the area into a swamp after a heavy rain.51 A 1948 report concluded that South Jamaica had more substandard housing than any other area of Queens.52 The late 1950s saw a rapid departure of whites from the area, and the black population of South Jamaica was, by one estimate, 40,000 in 1955, and 100,000 by 1960.53 The population of South Jamaica became almost entirely black (or rather, contingent areas in southeastern Queens that were almost entirely black were increasingly included in an expanding “South Jamaica”). Hillside Avenue, the conventional dividing line between Jamaica and South Jamaica, would become known by the 1950s as the Mason-Dixon Line of southeastern Queens. But even as South Jamaica’s poverty increased and spread, the neighborhood remained bifurcated. As a 1966 survey commented, unlike Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where large sections of the neighborhoods were severely blighted, “poverty does not manifest itself throughout the entire community but is concentrated in small areas frequently referred to as ‘poverty pockets.’ ”54 By 1960 many in South Jamaica saw their hard-won middle-class respectability in danger of being engulfed by the area’s growing poverty. They did not want the area to become, because it was a black neighborhood, a dumping ground for the city’s problems. When in 1955 plans were announced for a six-hundred-unit lowand middle-income complex that would have displaced about twenty households, the community reaction was quite negative. There were complaints about the injustice of forcing black homeowners to relocate, and Louis Childs, the African American president of the Baisley Park Community League (Baisley Park was a few short blocks from where Rochdale would be built) complained (somewhat implausibly) at a hearing before the Board of Estimate that “we have no juvenile delinquency now, no burglaries and no assaults. Are these what you are bringing us now? We don’t want the housing project.”55 The project was never built. If any mood characterized the community leaders of South Jamaica in 1960 it was a general sense of caution: anger at the persistence of racism, unease at the problems the recent influx of poorer blacks were causing, and wariness toward whites bearing gifts and making promises about the future. This was the mood of South Jamaica on the eve of the building of Rochdale Village.

4. From Horses to Housing

Two public events are taking place in Jamaica: one is in connection with a great housing development and the other is where the State is getting its first ante from gambling. This is progress and that is regression. We are giving something to the people and they are taking away something the people cannot afford to lose. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1940, on the occasion of laying the cornerstone for South Jamaica Houses, speaking of Jamaica Racetrack.

Horses raced at Jamaica Racetrack for fifty-six years, from 1903 to 1959. The track’s primary creator, Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan, was one of the most powerful and colorful of the leaders of Tammany Hall of his era, one of a long line of Tammany sachems who would also dabble in equine entrepreneurship. Jamaica would remain firmly in the ambit of Tammany throughout its existence. (Generally, if you didn’t like Tammany politics, you didn’t much like horse racing, and for progressives like La Guardia a hatred of both was a natural parlay.)1 The Jamaica track never had an impressive physical plant or enjoyed much respect among the touts. Common nicknames included “Foot Sore Downs,” and “the Meat Grinder.”2 The New York Times sports columnist Arthur Daley complained in 1953 that the track “has less comfort than a Bronx Express at rush hour.”3 When it closed there was none of the elaborate gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that, two years before, had accompanied the decision of the Dodgers and Giants to decamp for California. With two other nearby Thoroughbred tracks, Aqueduct and Belmont Park, the regulars perhaps permitted themselves a brief effusion of regret, shrugged their shoulders, and then moved on to other places to lose their money.4 The same demolition crew that had been pelted with rocks at Ebbets Field was able to work at Jamaica unmolested.5

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Figure 5. Shoppers in the Rochdale Consumers Cooperative Supermarket, ca. 1964, probably in the

temporary supermarket set up in the former grandstand of the Jamaica Racetrack. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

And yet, there was nothing second-rate about Jamaica Racetrack. In the early 1950s, with almost two million customers a year, the Jamaica Racetrack was the most popular sports venue in New York City, with a higher paid attendance than any of the city’s three baseball teams.6 Led by Man o’ War (who had two of his twenty victories at Jamaica) all the greatest names of the time in racing, human and animal, appeared on its oval. The Wood Memorial (named after a former owner of the track) was the most important race for three-year-olds in the New York metropolitan area after the Belmont Stakes. (It is now run at Aqueduct.) When the track opened, in 1903, its setting was rustic and bucolic, described in the opening day program as “near enough to the sea to get the salt breeze on the warmest days, nestled though it is in the heart of a bit of beautiful rolling, fertile country.”7 The ambience would soon change, and there would be no more talk of wafted breezes. The area was developed and urbanized, and tracts of modest private homes would soon proliferate in the area. The track was on the fuzzy boundary

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between South Jamaica and Springfield (or, as it would become known by the 1950s, with a new suburbanized name, Springfield Gardens).8 By 1943, a study showed that “development has taken place in every area adjacent to the large Jamaica Racetrack, including an area near Merrick Boulevard (just to the west of the track), which has become ‘a better class Negro community’ of private homes.” Within a decade, the area around the racetrack would be predominantly black, and this would cement its location within the expanding community of South Jamaica.9 Racetracks do not, as a rule, make great neighbors. They attract a raffish crowd of carousers and heavy traffic on race days, while otherwise standing empty and inert, as was the case with the Jamaica track more than three hundred days a year. And as Jamaica found itself increasingly surrounded by private homes in the 1930s and 1940s, it was not merely La Guardia progressives but also real estate developers who suggested that the site was being underutilized. As early as the late 1920s there were suggestions that Jamaica might be replaced by a track elsewhere on Long Island, and that the city and state would earn more in taxes if Jamaica Racetrack were torn down and the site developed for residential use.10 In 1941 a real estate developer complained that the Jamaica track depressed the real estate value of a thousand acres of surrounding real estate by at least 10 percent, and had all the real estate utility of a cemetery. He estimated that 850 private homes could be constructed on the site and that the city would reap a sixfold increase in tax revenues.11 But the war postponed any talk of closing the track. And in the immediate postwar period there was a great surge of interest in horse racing that confirmed its position as the most popular spectator sport in the United States. In 1952, more than 45 million people went to racetracks in the United States, compared with 14.6 million attending major league baseball games.12 But the new popularity of horse racing placed New York track owners in a quandary. To keep pace with new suburban tracks, the city’s aging and dowdy courses required sprucing up; at the same time, the increased popularity of racing led city and state officials to demand a larger percentage of the take.13 One possible solution, given that Jamaica, Aqueduct, and Belmont were within ten miles of each other on the southern rim of Long Island, was to sell one of them in order to raise funds to refurbish the other two. If, as was generally assumed, Belmont, the most prestigious of the three, remained open, the choice came down to Jamaica or Aqueduct. Although Jamaica had the highest annual attendance, it had a number of comparative disadvantages: no direct subway connection (only the LIRR); and because it was hedged in with private houses on all sides, it had less room for needed expansion. Furthermore, the density of the surrounding urban settlement made Jamaica’s underlying land more valuable than that of the two other tracks. There was the additional factor that Jamaica Racetrack was located in an African American neighborhood, and though it is plausible that that fact figured in the decision to shut it down, I have no evidence to support that idea, despite an extensive search. In any event, even without a racial dimension, the logic for selling Jamaica rather than Aqueduct was compelling. In September 1954, the Jockey Club, the organization that supervised Thoroughbred

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racing in New York State, announced a plan to sell Jamaica Racetrack, improve Belmont, and transform Aqueduct into a “dream track.”14 Although Jamaica had its defenders, some of whom argued that selling “the best earner and the most popular track,” was not the way to proceed, Jamaica seemed to be the odd track out.15 But the sale of Jamaica for housing was contingent on a number of related factors. The ownership of the state’s four Thoroughbred tracks (Saratoga in addition to the Long Island tracks), each owned by a separate, closely held private corporation, had to be consolidated into a new not-for profit corporation formed to govern racing in the state. This was done in 1955, with the creation of the Greater New York Association—it would be given a more descriptive name, the New York Racing Association (NYRA), in 1958—despite the worries of some that the consolidation was an example of creeping socialism that would stifle innovation in the racing industry.16 In 1955 the new association acquired the outstanding stock of Jamaica Racetrack for about $10.2 million.17 Expansion of Aqueduct required the participation and agreement of the Port Authority of New York, which owned the land adjacent to the track at Idlewild Airport that Aqueduct needed for expansion, and this took several years of negotiation. Probably most importantly, the right buyer at the right price had to be found for Jamaica. All this ensured, despite the announcement to sell the track in September 1954, that there would be several more years of racing at Jamaica. • • • One person who was, not surprisingly, very interested in the talk of the possible sale of Jamaica Racetrack was Robert Moses. Although he was city construction coordinator, his ability to determine the use of the site was not ensured. Ultimately it was the elected officials who made up the Board of Estimate (the mayor, comptroller, president of the City Council, and the five borough presidents) who would make the final decision on land use. Moses could make a proposal to the Board of Estimate, find backers and developers, and arrange financing, but others could (and did) as well. In July 1955, when the reorganization of the state’s racetracks had been approved, Moses wrote Mayor Wagner: “Will you please let me know if you wish us to pursue the plan to have the city purchase the Jamaica Track?”18 Plans to convert the racetrack to housing had been on Moses’s drawing board for some time. But two years later, after Moses had done much to move the project along, the final deal was still very far from being consummated. He wrote one of his aides, asking “What can we do to get a hold on Jamaica track before other interests go after it?”19 As in many of his deals, including the planning for Rochdale, Moses was more the middle man than the power broker, trying to simultaneously balance several competing groups of public officials with contending private parties.20 Before what would become Rochdale emerged as Moses’s favored plan for the site, he considered several other options. According to Abraham Kazan, Moses’s

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first idea for the site was for low-income housing.21 If this is true, there is little trace of it in the record, and there are reasons for doubting Moses ever pursued such a plan for very long. For one thing, if the entire Jamaica site had been used for low income housing it would have been by far the largest project in the NYCHA, and as we have seen in the last chapter, by 1955 local community groups were vociferously protesting far smaller low-income NYCHA projects in the area, not wanting this unique area of black middle-class housing to be overwhelmed by large low-income housing developments. Nevertheless, in Moses’s earliest extant thoughts he did suggest that a component of Jamaica be reserved for low-income housing. He wrote to Wagner in 1955 that he was thinking of using the site “for public, middle income and higher rental housing with appropriate incidental improvements.”22 Although he repeated this idea several times in the summer of 1955, it went nowhere.23 In early 1956 he was toying with the possibility of building prefabricated concrete houses. This development would have been, in Moses’s words, “middle-income stuff ” with the houses selling for about $8,000, comparable to the price of a new house in Levittown and other suburban developments. This too went nowhere.24 In the summer of 1955, when Walter O’Malley first announced publicly that, if the Brooklyn Dodgers didn’t get the deal he wanted in Downtown Brooklyn, he would consider moving the club to Los Angeles, there was a brief flurry of interest in a new stadium at Jamaica. Moses wrote to John Flynn, the publisher of the Daily News, in August 1955 that while “the Long Island Rail Road Terminal [at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Downtown Brooklyn] is a dead issue with the Dodgers in it,” there might “be a new Long Island, as distinguished from a Brooklyn field in Queens at the Jamaica Track combined with housing and other improvements in one very fine imaginative plan.” Several days later he wrote much the same to John Cashmore, borough president of Brooklyn.25 The idea died a quick death, as did Moses’s other (and also eminently reasonable) suggestion that the Dodgers consider relocating to Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. O’Malley blamed Moses for the failure of a Downtown Brooklyn deal, and though many historians have sided with O’Malley on this, accusing Moses of driving the Dodgers from Brooklyn is unjust. Title I acquisition of the land desired by O’Malley would have been exorbitantly expensive for the city, and Moses was genuinely concerned that it was inappropriate to use Title I money solely to benefit a private for-profit concern that would create no new housing.26 Moses complained in another letter to Flynn in August 1955 that the Dodgers owner was issuing a “Macedonian Cry.”27 (Acts 16:9, for those rusty in their New Testament exegesis: “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing beseeching him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ ”) Although Moses thought the location of a new stadium near the Nassau County line might be attractive for suburban fans, O’Malley apparently had little interest, and given the racial composition of South Jamaica, he probably would rather have moved the Dodgers to Macedonia. Perhaps what is most interesting about the episode is that it shows Moses’s great enthusiasm for the potential of the Jamaica site.

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By 1956 Moses thought the best plan for Jamaica would be middle-income cooperative housing. The reason for his dropping the mixed-use plans are unclear, but there is little reason to doubt Abraham Kazan’s words that “by the time the Jamaica racetrack was made available Moses had learned that cooperative organizations were the most reliable and dependable [developers] to work with.”28 On October 4, 1956, Moses spoke at a meeting of the UHF, where he outlined his plans for a cooperative development at Jamaica. He proposed a $52 million cooperative ($34 million less than it eventually cost) with 4,600 apartments, with about a quarter of the 170 acre site devoted to schools, parks, and playgrounds. Kazan was interested from the outset in what would have been, by far, the largest cooperative project he ever tackled.29 But neither Kazan nor Moses were in a position to implement their plans for the Jamaica site without a lot of assistance, most specifically from the racetrack’s new owners, the Greater New York Association and its successor, the NYRA. Almost immediately after the Jockey Club announced the plan to sell Jamaica in late 1954, its new owners, the Greater New York Association, started to have seller’s remorse, and started to consider taking the track off the market because of Jamaica’s profitability and perceived difficulties in the expansion of Aqueduct. In April 1956, the Times ran an article under the headline “Role for Jamaica in Racing Hinted.”30 Moses’s speech to the UHF in October 1956 on the use of Jamaica for cooperative housing was perhaps an effort to nudge its owners towards selling. If so, the gambit failed. By the next February, he was writing to Mayor Wagner’s aides, asking him to write to Governor Harriman to see if he could pull the necessary strings to satisfy the Greater New York Association. “Either all the talk about large scale middle income housing (at Jamaica) means something or it doesn’t. This must be put on our program or stricken off it.”31 The next month Moses was encouraging Kazan to contact Harriman directly, bearing the same message.32 All in all, as the Times put it in October 1957, Moses was “Annoyed by a ‘Slow’ Track.”33 Nonetheless, negotiations continued, and Moses wrote one of his lieutenants in February 1958 that the chief lawyer of the Greater New York Association “says there will no trouble in agreeing on the price for the Jamaica track.”34 In April he conveyed to the organization an offer of $25,000 per acre, which would have come to about $4,250,000.35 This was dismissed as inadequate. In their 1957–58 Annual Report, the NYRA coyly refused to restate their intentions to sell the racetrack— “only time can determine the future of Jamaica”—and committed the association to keeping it open for at least several additional years, with a final determination to be made only after the renovations on the other tracks were completed.36 Moses, as only he could do, hit the ceiling. He wrote to the NYRA’s lawyer that “in the course of fairly long public employment and service, I do not recall anything quite like this runaround.” He wanted straight answers from the NYRA on the future of Jamaica; he reminded their lawyer that the NYRA now had a quasipublic function, and he threatened to take up with the governor their blocking of

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“a housing matter of very large public importance on which we have been working with the big unions and the financial interests.” Moses, as he often did when he was giving someone an epistolary dressing down, made sure that all the relevant people knew about his anger, and sent copies to Governor Harriman, State Attorney General Jacob Javits, and State Comptroller Arthur Levitt. Negotiations with the NYRA continued.37 Moses continued to push hard for the Jamaica project. Sometimes he bared his teeth, as in a November 1958 letter to the NYRA’s chief lawyer in which he wrote, “you are a man of action and in your more serious moments have a sense of the difference between time and eternity. Incidentally, I don’t like to be kidded by my friends.”38 And sometimes he worked behind the scenes to smooth out difficulties, as when he persuaded the Port Authority to lease to the NYRA four hundred acres near Aqueduct to be used for stables.39 The Jamaica project would mark a decisive break in the Moses-Kazan collaborations in two significant ways. First, unlike their other joint ventures since the creation of the UHF, they would not develop the cooperative through Title I, but through a state program, the Limited Profit Housing Companies Act of 1955, commonly known as the Mitchell-Lama law after its two sponsors, Republican State Senator MacNeil Mitchell and Democratic Assemblyman Alfred Lama, which provided extensive tax abatements and subsidies of up to 40 percent to developers of middle-income housing who agreed to limit themselves to profits of no more than 6 percent. The Mitchell-Lama law emerged out of the perception of a crisis in middleincome housing in postwar New York City, a sense that the almost exponential growth of suburbs was robbing the city of jobs, culture, and vitality, and that the city needed new ways to compete against the availability of attractive and affordable private homes over the city line. The New York Times ran a series of articles in 1952 about what one letter writer called New York City’s “vanishing middle class.” The paper warned that without a middle-income housing program, “New York will become an urban core inhabited mainly by those wealthy enough to afford luxury apartments or poor enough to remain in slums or qualify for public housing.”40 This concern became a major issue in the 1953 mayoral campaign, as one of the main planks in the victorious Robert F. Wagner’s platform, and was echoed by Averill Harriman the following year in his successful run for governor.41 Moses supported the Mitchell-Lama law, and by one account, even stole the credit for the initial idea. He too agreed, as he stated in a 1956 speech, that unless a city had a large middle class to separate “the crust which represents the poor and the icing that represents the rich” the extreme contrasts of poverty and wealth would make democratic life in cities impossible.42 But if there was broad (though by no means universal) support for the MitchellLama law and its goal of expanding middle-income housing, as a New York Times reporter wrote Moses in 1958, “nearly everyone has a different definition of ‘middle income.’ ”43 Harriman’s commissioner of housing, writing in the same year,

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Figure 6. The creators of Rochdale Village gather at the groundbreaking for Co-op City in May 1966,

from left, with juvenile groundbreakers: UHF executive vice president Harold Ostroff, Robert Moses, UHF lawyer Robert Szold, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and UHF president Jacob Potofsky, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, retired UHF president Abraham Kazan, and Bronx borough president Herman Badillo. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Records, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Photograph by Sam Reiss.

acknowledged that “middle income housing is a loosely used term with an infinite number of definitions and an equal variety of interpretations.”44 The rough tripartite division of housing into low, middle, and upper income was characterized as much by function as by price. In general, new low-income housing was built and controlled directly by the state or the city, generally controlled by the New York City Housing Authority, with per-room rents under $20. Upper income was privately owned housing, charging what the market would bear, with the lower limit at $35 or $40 per room. Middle-income housing was a term of art, which generally meant privately built, government aided, and offered at below market rates, as at Rochdale. The UHF generally shunned the label “middle income” for its cooperatives, preferring to describe themselves as builders of “low and moderate cost” housing or the makers of “houses within the financial means of working people.”45 The average carrying charges at Rochdale was $21 per room—as low as $16 per room, or

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as high as $22.46 Middle-income housing in the early 1960s was generally defined as falling between $20 and $30 per room, but could rise to almost $40 per room.47 Rochdale Village was on the low end of the range of middle-income housing, overlapping with the more expensive housing of the “lower income” variety. This was Moses’s view as well: middle-income housing was subsidized private housing in the range of $20–$30 per room, the lower in the range the better.48 In 1958 he stated that “by combining partial tax exemption and liberal mortgage financing, the present normal rental of $38 to $40 per room can be brought down to $25 a room. And non-profit cooperatives could reduce these rates further to $20 to $22 a room.”49 In his 1956 speech on Jamaica Moses proposed that, if proper financing was found, the apartments could be made available at a rent or carrying charge of $21–22 per room per month. When Rochdale opened in 1963, Moses proved a good prophet.50 But determining the rental price of a middle-income cooperative was as much a matter of politics as economics, and this was one reason middle-income housing was so difficult to define. There were always those who felt that it was unfair to build new middle-income housing, since many people of comparable income were getting by without any governmental largess. As one irate homeowner wrote Governor Rockefeller in early 1959, “What is ‘middle income’ housing anyway? If it’s up to $6,500 a year, there are plenty of families in this bracket that own one family homes. The more middle income projects are set up, the more these same home owners will have to shell out in taxes.”51 On the other hand, as a 1958 report by the State Division of Housing claimed, there was a “housing void” for families with annual incomes between $5,000 to $7,000, who “cannot afford purchase or rental housing on the open market; yet are not eligible for public housing because their income is slightly higher than the maximum permitted.” As a result, the report concluded, “many of these families dwell in slums or crowd into accommodations inadequate for the conduct of decent family life.”52 For Moses, determining the proper rental rates for middle-income cooperatives involved finding a golden mean; too low and it would seem like too much of a giveaway to middle-income families, too high and private developers would complain about the government treading on their toes. Moses was careful not to bundle together too many tax breaks in a single project. For this reason, he had refused to combine Mitchell-Lama tax breaks with Title I funding.53 He warned his friends in the cooperative movement in 1958 that they “must be careful to recognize the limits of city aid. It is theoretically possible to reduce rentals still further by more and more tax exemption.” However, this could not be done, because it would “cause widespread opposition from those who pay in full to projects.”54 And when in 1958 a UHF official proposed an expanded tax abatement that would bring down the per room carrying charges at Jamaica to $17 per room, Moses would have nothing to do with it, complaining that the proposal’s “tax reduction figures are completely unrealistic” and would especially make a bad impression on “the public, especially the surrounding population in Queens.”55

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And the Jamaica project would have many critics. Longtime housing gadfly Vito Battista in 1960 railed against “discriminatory practices bankrupting small property owners and taxpayers,” among which he singled out the Jamaica project as a “big pie” for favored “land barons,” who reaped the rewards while “forcing other taxpayers to foot the tax bill.”56 A more powerful critic was Queens borough president James J. Crisona, who wrote Moses in March 1958 of the difficulties he had encountered in reducing “the resistance of the home owners to this project because of the tax exemption feature.”57 Moses played one side off against the other to reach the compromise he had wanted all along, of about $21 per room carrying charges. But although middle-income housing could be financed either through Title I or Mitchell-Lama, by 1959 Moses was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Title I process as a whole, and especially the attenuated waits for approvals. In 1959 he complained to J. Anthony Panuch, a special adviser to Mayor Wagner on housing issues, about the “tremendous red tape and delay” in approvals and that the regional office of the Housing and Home Finance Agency had “gone to great lengths to delay and interfere with projects, bypass the official committee and stimulate, encourage, and confirm irresponsible press stories and ‘disclosures’ especially those involving Title I.”58 Kazan similarly felt that Title I led to piecemeal urban renewal at best. Compared with Kazan’s model, in which 20,000 units of new cooperative housing would be built annually, Title I kept new housing down to a trickle. Rather than transforming the city’s housing problem, Title I ensured that the best efforts of housing reformers would be a frustrating game of catch-up. “From experience we find that it takes three years before a Title I job is approved and another two years to build it. The increasing shortage of housing during this five-year period more than offsets the number of units that are built.”59 For both men the Mitchell-Lama route, which by 1958, its third year of operation, had twenty-five housing projects either planned or under construction, was the obvious alternative.60 And by the end of 1959 Moses would write that the “Jamaica Track project under the Construction Coordinator and with state aid and no federal participation is the most important development by far in pointing the way, establishing a future, workable, large scale middle income cooperative program.”61 The Jamaica project marked another, and even more significant, break with previous Moses-Kazan collaborations. Since only horses needed to be relocated, and involved a single property owner, it did not require the use of eminent domain, the most controversial aspect of Title I funding, which permitted municipalities to acquire parcels of urban land and present them at reduced rates to developers. One of the reasons he regularly in the late 1950s called Jamaica his favorite ongoing project, Moses said gleefully on more than one occasion, was there were “no people to move.” As early as his letter to Wagner in 1955 about the racetrack he emphasized that the site would be “vacant.”62 In one of his final efforts to close the deal, a frantic telegram to Governor Nelson Rockefeller in January 1960, Moses stressed that the project “does not involve moving people.”63

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Tenant relocations had become an increasing problem for Moses. Of all of Moses’s main policy initiatives, those that involved relocating people were by far the most controversial, and by the late 1950s, as the size and ambition of his projects grew, so did the clamor of criticism against Moses’s relocation plans. In 1959 he wrote to Anthony Panuch that a “major difficulty is increasing trouble where relocation from presently built-up areas is concerned. No reliable official support. This promotes irresponsible press criticism and attacks by self-serving civic and tenant organizations. . . . The minute opposition of any kind develops, the local officials concerned fall apart, lose their nerve and interest.”64 Abraham Kazan remembered, “the difficulties he [Moses] had encountered in clearing the Lincoln Center site were still fresh in his mind when he learned that the Jamaica racetrack was going to be given up.”65 Kazan also was happy to have a project without tenant relocations. Relocations had been required in all of Kazan’s Lower East Side cooperatives. In alliance with Moses, the UHF became one of the most prominent beneficiaries of Moses’s aggressive use of Title I. But by the late 1950s Kazan’s cooperatives were becoming increasingly controversial for this very reason. The expansion of the Seward Park cooperative was blocked in the late 1950s, largely because of community opposition to demolitions.66 The massive cooperative planned south of Pennsylvania Station— itself soon to become New York City’s most famous martyr to the wrecking ball— spawned community protests over the demolition of a fifteen-block area, opposition that was eventually overcome through compromise.67 And in 1959–60, in the Cooper Square area of what was beginning to be called the East Village, community protests derailed another planned UHF cooperative, the Robert Owen Houses. When the plans for the Robert Owen Houses fell through, the UHF encouraged the several hundred people who had already applied for apartments to apply for a place in Rochdale Village.68 The interest of Moses and Kazan in projects without tenant removals went beyond worries about political fallout. It was obviously less expensive to build without needing to pay for tenant relocations, and permitted faster demolition and construction, which also provided a financial savings. Beyond the lack of tenants, both Kazan and Moses were excited by the size of the Jamaica lot, 170 acres of undivided space. As Moses mused in 1957, the site “would be on a big-enough scale so that we could do a bang-up planning and building job there.”69 In 1958 he encouraged labor unions to “tackle a giant cooperative project at the Jamaica track where at least 20,000 people of moderate means might live in comfort on one hundred and seventy acres of presently vacant land, in the very center of the City, under as nearly ideal conditions as we can muster in this vale of tears.”70 But as 1959 began, the deal was far from sealed. In April 1959 Moses proposed to Kazan to purchase the racetrack for $6 million, as part of an $82.5 million project of which the state would contribute $19 million.71 As this indicates, Moses still assumed that the UHF would be able to pick up the lion’s share of the project’s costs. But the UHF, backed by a consortium of labor unions, had no funds of its

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own. Each cooperative venture had its own separate syndicate of backers, usually a combination of labor union pension funds and savings banks. The ILGWU had been particularly active, and was the major union sponsor for two cooperative projects, the East River Houses—sometimes known as the ILGWU Houses—and Penn South. Local financial institutions such as the Bowery Savings Bank were also major backers. But neither unions nor banks were particularly interested in investing in developing Jamaica Racetrack. As Kazan said in his oral history, “The UHF finances were not in good shape. Moses assumed the UHF was rolling in dough. I didn’t dare tell him the true facts.”72 The ILGWU, having invested in two UHF cooperatives, was reluctant to tie up more of its money in a project its president, David Dubinsky, considered more risky and far more expensive than any previous UHF cooperative.73 No one else wanted to back the UHF’s plans for Jamaica, either. Moses tried to get Chase Manhattan Bank to loan some money for the project. The chairman of the bank, John J. McCloy, whose imperiousness was at least equal to that of Moses—a man who as assistant secretary of war during World War II had been a chief implementer of the Japanese internment policy on the West Coast—no doubt looked at the controversies surrounding Moses’s tenant relocations as strictly penny-ante. He turned down Moses and the UHF cold. McCloy told Kazan that you are “dreaming” if he thought the bank would go along with Moses’s proposal.74 Proposals to get the Equitable Life Assurance Company, Ford Foundation, or New York Life on board went nowhere.75 Moses would take a second bite of the apple with Chase Manhattan, trying to interest the somewhat more pliant vice-chairman, David Rockefeller, in the Jamaica cooperative, but this too failed to materialize. Moses was still at square one.76 Moses was, as we have seen, certainly not above threatening his allies. He wrote an aide in April 1959 that he wanted “a definite answer from Mr. Kazan and Harry Van Arsdale [the powerful president of the New York Central Labor Council, and one of the most important backers of the UHF] as to whether or not their groups will sponsor the Jamaica Track project. . . . Let’s say if he’s not interested we are going to approach others immediately.”77 But this was an idle threat. Kazan was of course deeply committed to the project, and no one but Kazan could have provided cooperative housing at the size and scale needed and at the price Moses desired— about $21–$22 per room—as efficiently as the UHF. But both sides continued to press their own interests. Moses, in the midst of the Jamaica negotiations, provoked a temporary rupture between himself and Kazan when, in 1958, he accepted Fred (father of Donald) Trump’s bid for the land in Brooklyn Kazan had coveted for a large cooperative project.78 (Trump was offering more than Kazan, and for his own political reasons and for placating potential critics, Moses wanted to see some of the for-profit developers get a cut of the middle-income development pie as well.) When Kazan sulked over what he considered Moses’s betrayal in the deal with Trump, and made noises about his lessened interest in Jamaica, Moses tried to coax him back into

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negotiations, and eventually backtracked from his decision to give the entire plot to Trump; he worked out a compromise, eventually adopted, in which the UHF and Trump would share the land, and the two developers would build, respectively, Amalgamated Warbasse Houses and Trump City.79 Moses tried to assuage Kazan’s hurt feelings, and reminded him of his broader ambitions: “Let me add that I am more than ever convinced that the Jamaica Track project, properly carried through, because of its size, conspicuous location, freedom from tenant removal, and from Washington red tape, etc., will pave the way for the big state aided middle income cooperative program we all want.”80 At the same time, when Kazan balked at the $6.5 million land acquisition costs, Moses told him that there was no other way forward, and tried to get him to go along with a promise and a veiled threat. “It will be very easy to wreck this plan, and if it goes down, your larger program which might be advanced if we have the example of Jamaica Race Track will go down with it.”81 There was another problem with the Jamaica project that could be discussed only in whispers—Jamaica Racetrack was in South Jamaica, and there were many who saw the building of a huge middle-income cooperative in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood as a profoundly risky venture, one that would not attract whites, and one that, because it was more expensive than low-income housing, would be out the range of many black families as well. As Kazan related in his oral history: “The property was located in South Jamaica, a section of the borough populated with colored people. To induce white people to move into a predominantly colored area was a difficult task to accomplish. This was the primary reason why Harry Van Arsdale, member of the board of the UHF, was very cool, or at least not enthusiastic about the project.”82 Other labor leaders who usually backed the UHF also worried that whites would be afraid to move to South Jamaica and blacks would be reluctant to move into a massive cooperative in sufficient numbers.83 Kazan felt the only way the cooperative had any chance of success and of not becoming, in his words, “a white elephant,” was to keep prices as low as possible, and to achieve this, the interest rates on the funds lent to the UHF had to be shaved to the absolute minimum.84 Whether Kazan would have walked if favorable terms were not arranged is not clear—it seems unlikely—but in the end the deal was at least as important to Moses as it was to Kazan. He would not let it fail. Perhaps external events made him even more determined, more committed to closing a deal that he knew would win plaudits. The summer of 1959 was perhaps the most difficult period in his public career. A series of exposés, especially at the troubled Manhattantown project, created a cloud of scandal that even Moses’s usually effective publicity machine was unable to blow away, and the critical voices went beyond the usual voices in the city’s liberal press, like the New York Post and the Nation, and breached the pages of the usually supportive (some would say sycophantic) New York Times.85 Moses was undeterred, and when pressed that summer he continued to emphasize his unfinished work, with the Jamaica project often given pride of place.86

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The final day of racing at Jamaica was August 2, and on August 20, the Board of Estimate tentatively approved the Jamaica deal. Nonetheless, the last months of finalizing a project are invariably the most hectic and pressured, and the effort to close the deal on Jamaica proved no exception. Moses still needed a way to fund it. The road to funding went through Albany, and Moses proceeded to pay court to Governor Rockefeller. Rockefeller was sympathetic to the cause, though he and his staff required some prodding. Rockefeller had never met Kazan before, and Moses thought that a meeting would improve the chances of the deal, writing Rockefeller on September 17, 1959, that Kazan and his allies “know their stuff and they won’t waste your time.”87 James Gaynor, Rockfeller’s commissioner of housing, tried to block the deal by urging the governor not to meet with Kazan, arguing the tax breaks were too extensive; Gaynor feared a face-to-face meeting at which the eager-to-please Rockefeller might give away the store, making concessions he was not authorized to offer.88 Moses managed to get past this roadblock, arguing that Kazan was the only person who could bring off this cooperative development, that Kazan would walk if the per-room average cost was greater than $21, and that all the planned tax breaks were necessary for the deal’s completion.89 The meeting was arranged: just Kazan, the president of the Amalgamated Bank, Rockefeller, and a secretary. Kazan initially was worried. “I wasn’t convinced about anything when I went into the room. The difficulties that we generally had in negotiating for mortgage money were caused by the fact that cooperators were not very popular with bankers and other people not thoroughly acquainted with the idea of cooperation. . . . Nelson Rockefeller didn’t have any experience with cooperatives himself.” Kazan told the governor that he “needed someone to really roll up their sleeves and go to work in order to get the project built.” He got the answer he wanted (and perhaps the answer that some of Rockefeller’s associates feared). “The governor announced that not only would he be willing to roll up his sleeves but to take off his shirt and go to work and see that the job was done. . . . The meeting was informal, with a very friendly approach to the matter. . . . He was really interested in doing something for the project. He was very, very easy to talk to. No highhattedness about him.”90 Of the $86 million it cost to build Rochdale, all the money provided by outside sources came from various state agencies. Moses thereafter arranged, as he invariably did with his projects, the necessary real estate tax exemptions with the city comptroller.91 Without the collaboration of the two most powerful men in New York State, Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller, Rochdale Village never would have been built.92 After making some progress in the late summer and fall of 1959, negotiations with the state agencies stalled over the interest rates and the conditions of the loans, leading to a possibly Moses-inspired editorial in the New York Times on December 4, 1959, “Great Housing Opportunity,” urging Rockefeller to act with dispatch.93 The

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NYRA, now paying mortgage and upkeep on a property that they had no intention of using again for racing, was placing increasing pressure on Moses, informing him that alternative suitors for the Jamaica site were available and willing to pay more than the UHF.94 Moses tried to placate the NYRA, at once begging for more time and threatening them. And he continued to work on Kazan, telegraphing him that he needed to get his act together. In Kazan’s words, “In the meantime Moses was just as fearful as I was that the racetrack would be sold to someone else. On December 31 he sent me a long telegram insisting that I get my hard headed labor officials to realize that the racetrack people will dispose of the property and will not wait for us if we were going to dilly dally much longer.”95 Moses kept bombarding Rockefeller and the relevant members of the state government with the message that hesitation could result in failure.96 As an anonymous state official scribbled on a memo: “Moses keeps hollering that we will lose the opportunity unless we have immediate action.”97 More snags led the NYRA to tell Moses that “one problem after another, sponsorship, financing, tax exemption, et cetera, has appeared to delay the transfer of the property” and that as a result the NYRA would offer the racetrack for private sale.98 This led to another flurry of desperate telegrams from Moses to Rockefeller and Wagner. After laying out the problems and his suggested solutions Moses concluded with a reminder to the governor that “this is the largest and most significant middle income cooperative housing project in the country.”99 The $86 million deal was announced on February 16, 1960. The State Department of Housing was to provide $19 million from a housing bond issue tied to Mitchell-Lama projects. The State Teachers Retirement System and the State Employees Retirement System, neither of which had lent money for housing before, would each provide mortgage loans of $28.5 million.100 (The UHF would provide $10 million, to be raised from down payments by Rochdale residents.) Even after the financing was announced in Albany there was one final hurdle to clear, and a final chance for the deal to fall through. Before the deal could be approved by the Board of Estimate, another real estate developer, John J. Reynolds, came forward, maintaining he had been frozen out of negotiations, and claiming he could provide the city with more money for their trouble than the UHF. (He probably was the “other bidder” the NYRA made reference to in their correspondence with Moses in late 1959.)101 Reynolds was a prominent real estate developer, a longtime adviser to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and a close associate of Joseph Kennedy in many deals.102 Reynolds argued before the Board of Estimate that he could develop the racetrack without any tax abatements. “This is practically a giveaway,” said Reynolds. “Every real estate man in the city should be down here today objecting to this transaction.” Kazan claimed that Reynolds made “a vicious attack on me personally” before the Board of Estimate.103 The Municipal Court justice Jenkin R. Hockert, who represented the Central Queens Allied Civic Council and the North Shore Council, spoke before the Board of Estimate, decrying those who were thinking of moving

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to Rochdale as shirkers and societal parasites. “I, for one, would be ashamed to live in a half-tax cooperative knowing that although I was financially capable I was not carrying my full responsibility.”104 There was, perhaps, an undercurrent of antiSemitism in some of these attacks; apartment-dwelling Jews reap the benefits of Mitchell-Lama tax abatements while hardworking gentile homeowners do not. In any event, the efforts of Reynolds and those who supported him did not work. Mayor Wagner was not impressed, especially when Reynolds mentioned that apartments in his development would rent for an average of $38 a month. That, said Wagner, didn’t sound like middle-income housing to him.105 On April 28, the Board of Estimate approved Rochdale Village 20–2, with James J. Lyons, the Bronx borough president, casting the only dissenting votes. (Borough presidents had two votes on the Board of Estimate.)106 This was one of Moses’s last major deals. Only the week before, his Slum Clearance Committee was replaced by the Housing and Redevelopment Board, and the powers he had long exercised over the city housing policy were waning. In all the complex negotiations over Rochdale in Albany, he was an outside exhorter, with no real power in the governor’s councils, and he was reduced to hectoring from the sidelines. Moses had written to Rockefeller in the fall of 1959, “I had the devil’s own time persuading the labor leaders to agree to sponsor this project.”107 Moses was being too modest. He had a difficult time with almost everyone involved in the development of Jamaica Racetrack, from labor leaders, to bankers, to government officials. It would have been very easy for the plans for a huge integrated middle-income housing cooperative in South Jamaica to fall apart because of its inherent difficulties and challenges; the need to balance tax breaks against political realities, the need to find funding for a project that most intelligent observers deemed risky and speculative, and the need to control the racial fears that threatened to derail it. If many share in the credit for the creation of Rochdale, its prime mover, its only begetter, its power broker, was Robert Moses. The existence of Rochdale Village is a tribute to his powers of persuasion and his dogged persistence.

5. Robert Moses and His Path to Integration

We middle of the road conservatives who get Irish confetti from both sides . . . Robert Moses

I can imagine a common reaction to the previous chapter. Robert Moses, the stalwart champion of integrated housing? What about his role in keeping black tenants out of Stuyvesant Town? And isn’t this the same Robert Moses for whom Robert Caro in The Power Broker included twenty index entries under the heading “Robert Moses, prejudice against poor and non-white,”1 and whom Caro described as despising “people of color,” as thinking blacks were “dirty,” and as wanting to keep them “in their place”?2 The same man for whom a Google search reveals more than half a million hits for “Robert Moses” and “racist”? The same. A New York Times review of an exhibit in 2007 that tried to take a new, post-Caro, look at Moses concluded that while some aspects of his career might be up for revision, the stark facts of Moses’s racial attitudes are not; his racism “draws no argument from even the most ardent revisionist.”3 I will leave the ardency of my revisionism for others to judge, and I certainly won’t argue that he wasn’t racist. But the complex subject of Robert Moses and race cannot be summed up in a single pejorative descriptor. There is no gainsaying the standard indictment, and indeed, I can add to it. For most of his long career, Moses was among New York City’s most prominent, persistent, effective, and outspoken opponents of civil rights legislation. He regularly growled at anyone he suspected of being a “professional integrationist.”4 As late

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as 1959, Moses would, in a speech, make reference to an “old darky.”5 (However, my perusal of a good chunk of Moses’s private correspondence found it free of the standard racial vulgarisms.) His actions in support of discrimination at Stuyvesant Town are indefensible, as is his record in displacing tens of thousands of poor and minority families from their homes with few alternative housing options. Some, like a recent essayist, make use of the lazy historical exculpation from context, arguing “Yes, Moses was probably racist, but who wasn’t in his day and age?”6 This does a great disservice to the many genuine opponents of racism and discrimination whom Moses regularly tangled with. The standard indictment stands, but it only makes Moses’s apparent about-face and emergence as an unlikely champion of integration at Rochdale Village all the more mysterious. There is a short answer and a long answer to the question of why Robert Moses fought for the creation of Rochdale Village. The short answer is that Robert Moses was a pragmatist who above all wanted his deals to be consummated. And when you combine a white developer with roots in the Jewish labor movement and a massive housing cooperative in a black neighborhood, you get a final result with a lot of Jews and lots of blacks. Rochdale wouldn’t have worked if the United Housing Foundation wasn’t satisfied that it could draw on its usual clientele for the new project, or if local blacks weren’t convinced that they too would in some way benefit. Integration was inevitable in Rochdale, and Robert Moses was certainly shrewd enough to take credit for the inevitable. The long answer is, as long answers tend to be, somewhat more complex and circuitous. Robert Moses was a pragmatist in some ways, and a man of unswerving and unbending principle in others. Without ever really changing his core values, Moses eventually learned how to accommodate himself to racial integration, and even to persuade himself that in doing so he was remaining true to his most fundamental beliefs. It is a story that goes beyond Robert Moses himself, to the changing political climate that made the building of Rochdale Village possible. • • • Although he would work with progressives and liberals of all stripes during his long career, Moses always called himself a conservative, and in many ways he always remained a nineteenth-century liberal, that is, a believer that government worked best when its ambitions remained modest and when it remained unobtrusively in the background unless forced by events to take a more active role. His basic attitudes to politics and social relations were formed early in his life, in part by his class background, and in part from his education. Change was necessary; social revolution was not. Sometimes government had to build bridges or housing, but it had no place in trying to muck about in the natural order of things. There was a natural hierarchy of talents, classes, and social groups that needed to be respected, and this couldn’t be altered by wishful thinking or decree. Moses counted as a formative influence at Yale the social theorist William Graham Sumner, a major figure in late

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nineteenth century social thought and a man who was profoundly skeptical about popular democracy and the possibilities of social reform. Sumner is probably best remembered for his 1894 essay “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over,” a sentiment that had Moses’s complete concurrence. Writing in 1939, Moses praised Sumner for “throwing vitriol” in his students’ faces and challenging conventional pieties about democracy. Moses’s own attitudes toward democracy were complex. He certainly believed, deeply and genuinely, that in his career, to quote the title of one of his books, he was “working for the people,” but this often involved working for them in ways that did not meet with the approbation of their self-appointed representatives.7 Moses, a lifelong Republican (and the Republican candidate for governor in 1934, his sole and disastrous foray into electoral politics) always distinguished his brand of conservatism from reaction, and called himself a “forward-looking conservative” in 1939, and a “middle-of-the-road conservative” in 1960, one of “those who lean a little to the right.”8 If the reactionary, in Moses’s view, was simply opposed to all change, Moses believed that social change could only be accomplished with Fabian caution, and that any effort at sweeping transformation of a society’s basic structures was either doomed to failure, or if compelled with sufficient governmental force, bound to be worse than the injustices and inequities it was trying to alleviate. And he applied his sense of the need for slow and steady change to racial matters, and believed that gradualism was as important there as for any other social issue. Moses believed that talents and abilities were distributed unequally, and while society and government had an obligation to help the less fortunate, it should not, and really could not, alter this inconvenient truth. He never singled out racial minorities for special animus, but felt that as people starting at the bottom of the ladder, the climb to the top or even somewhere in the middle would necessarily be slow and prolonged. He approached racial divisions from his sense of the necessity and permanence of vertiginous social differences. His first known public statement on race was in 1911, when he was (somewhat bizarrely) a colleague of W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas on the American delegation to the first Universal Races Congress in London (added by his American classmates at Oxford), where he publicly attacked the notion of self-government in Britain’s colonial territories (after which his outraged audience rushed the stage, forcing Moses to beat a hasty exit). He was already, at age twenty-three, an outspoken social and racial conservative, fully formed and quite set in his intellectual ways.9 In the 1914 publication of his Columbia University dissertation, The Civil Service of Britain, we first get a good glimpse of his social attitudes. In many ways it was one of the most revealing things he ever wrote, a paean to the British civil service in the halcyon days of empire, and in particular, its rule of India. (In his tribute to the quasi-governmental British East India Company, one can see the glimmer of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and other public authorities he would create in his mind’s eye.)10 What Moses praised the British Civil Service for, above all,

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was its self-cultivated and self-conscious elitism, its disdain for the grubby world of political patronage. Moses urged that American reformers get beyond “false democratic theories” of government, which assumed all people were of equal ability. This in the end would only serve the interests of party bosses. What was needed was efficiency, and Moses quoted a favorite couplet by Alexander Pope: For forms of government let fools contest Whatever is best administer’d is best.11 It was, Moses wrote in his dissertation, “in a sense a cruel thing to set up class distinctions,” and to deny the possibility of advancement to those who, through no real fault of their own, lacked the opportunities for higher education. But, Moses asked, “Where does our sympathy lead us? Can the state repair the defects of heredity or of early education?” Moses’s answer to this rhetorical question was a resounding no. A fair society demanded that educational opportunity be available to all, and that “ability and promise are lifted as far as possible above want and social handicap” but realistically, “those who are fit to rise above the ranks will be few and far between.” If in time he modified some of the priggishness of these conclusions—as he would later write, his most important political mentor, Al Smith, a man of limited formal education, was a walking refutation of large parts of his dissertation—he would retain a sense of the unappeasability of class (and racial distinctions) throughout his career.12 One of the keys to understanding Moses’s attitude toward race and ethnicity was his ambivalence toward his own ethnic background. He was raised in an upper-class German-Jewish milieu where high degrees of assimilation were the norm. He had a lifelong abhorrence of cultural or ethnic identity of any kind. He was raised not as a Jew but within the Ethical Culture Movement (an offshoot of radical Reform Judaism), which proclaimed that any attachment to a particular creed or ethnic identity was a form of superstition. Caro writes that Moses was never circumcised, he had no formal and few informal connections to Judaism, and his funeral service was held in an Episcopal church.13 Nothing was more inimical to his thinking, or more likely to outrage him, than the common assumption that merely because his parents had been born Jewish, Jews or Judaism had any necessary claim on his loyalties.14 What followed from this was his belief in the importance of the individual over the group, a denial of any ethnic or racial group rights, and a deep suspicion of ethnic and cultural politics and of ethnic leaders who arrogated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of others in their group. Moses was a lifelong opponent of Zionism, which challenged all his basic assumptions about the lack of a national and cultural identity in Judaism. When Moses was a special adviser to the U.S. occupation army in Germany after World War II, though he was moved by the plight of the Jews in the Displaced-Persons camps, he was dismayed by their attachment to Zionism. “The Jews, under the constant prodding and indoctrination of Zionists and as the result of exceptionally bitter

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experiences, are fanatical in their determination to go to Palestine.” If the other nations of the world could find homes for the displaced Jews, and refute the assumptions of Zionism, he wrote, it would mark “at least one milestone on the long, thorny, and weary road to the millennium.”15 And he again would tangle with Jewish groups in 1964 when, as president of the World’s Fair, he allowed the Jordanian pavilion to retain a mural depicting the suffering of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, despite a chorus of protests from local politicians. He would later complain of “a burst of stimulated indignation by pro-Israeli groups,” and the efforts of “fanatics” and “professional religionists” to disrupt the fair, the incident proving, Moses wrote, “that there were no Arab votes in New York.” (For his efforts, King Hussein awarded Moses the Star of Jordan Decoration of the First Order in 1965.)16 A telling exception to Moses’s aversion to association with Jewish organizations was his connection to the fiercely anti-Zionist (and politically conservative) American Council for Judaism that reflected the anti-Zionism that was common in his German Jewish milieu. In 1959 they sent Moses a letter that described him as “a friendly observer of our organization for some time,” and asked him to address their annual convention. The letter to Moses complained of recent political appeals to Jews including “efforts to catapult Jews into the desegregation issue through fear of Antisemitism,” and rejected the common tactic by such liberal organizations as the American Jewish Congress to link the fate of blacks and Jews as groups facing discrimination. If Moses, prudently, refused to speak to the group, he did allow that “all I can say is that, while I have no definite religious affiliations, generally speaking I share your convictions and endorse your point of view and that I believe in your immediate objectives.” Group rights for minorities were a challenge to his own identity as a non-Jewish person of Jewish extraction.17 But when given an unflattering reminder of his Jewish background, Moses could react violently. In 1929, at a meeting of the New York State Parks Council, Moses was undoubtedly being his usual overbearing and obnoxious self, one profoundly annoyed council member, Raymond H. Torrey (still fondly remembered as a pioneer conservationist and one of the creators of the Appalachian Trail), called Moses a “big noisy kike,” at which point Moses assaulted Torrey and tried to choke him, then threw a heavy ashtray or spittoon (accounts vary) in his direction. (Caro, reflexively taking the side of every Moses critic, predictably enough defends Torrey, arguing that he was usually mild-mannered and scholarly, but in this case was just angered past the point of endurance by Moses’s bullying. Caro even throws in the old chestnut that some of Torrey’s “closest friends were Jewish.”) If Moses overreacted, it is hard not to have sympathy with his account of the incident as reported in the Times (which did not use the k-word), that the gentleman in question “used an epithet which has never been addressed to me in all my life and I think he deserved much more of a thrashing than he got, and I guess pretty nearly anyone would agree with me as to this.” Indeed. Moses lived in a world where one word could still cut through all the polite assumptions about his place in gentile

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society. Any sort of ethnic group identity for Moses was just a way of letting others define you.18 Moses’s outrage at bigotry was not limited to instances when he was the target. The most searing episode of bigotry he experienced in his professional career occurred in 1928, when as a staffer to Al Smith during Smith’s presidential campaign, he saw the election first hand. Moses saw Smith’s loss as the defeat of urban tolerance and progressivism by rural, southern, Ku Klux Klan–inspired narrowness and fanaticism, giving Moses an unforgettable lesson in both the limitations of democracy and the depths of human depravity. In 1957 Moses wrote to the historian Oscar Handlin, who had just completed a biography of Smith19: I don’t think you have stressed enough the cross burning and bigotry Smith ran into during the 1928 campaign, an experience from which he never really recovered. He would not believe such a spirit could exist in this country. Incidentally, the Governor never saw most of the foulest attacks which came by mail while he was away from Albany. The staff threw them away on the ground that it would do no good for him to see them. I saw a good many of them and they were incredible even from the viewpoint of this somewhat detached and cynical observer. There is little evidence that race or the fate of blacks in the United States were particularly important to Moses before the 1930s. Racial concerns were peripheral to Moses during his time with Al Smith in Albany (most of the decade from 1918 to 1928), which reflected a lack of attention within the Smith administration itself.20 On the other hand, the Smith administration was sympathetic to black demands for inclusion in areas of housing, recreation, education, and areas where government could directly influence policy. Smith vigorously campaigned for black votes, was stalwart in his opposition to the Ku Klux Klan, and had broad black support. Moses shared this agenda, one committed to ending arbitrary discrimination in government services but without a sense of urgency on the deeper questions concerning the status of blacks in the United States.21 However, after 1934, when Moses was appointed New York City parks commissioner, racial matters became more central to his work. Indeed, Moses almost immediately made as a top priority and most visible project one of the most socially sensitive areas within public works, the building of public swimming pools, where wet young people frolicking in various states of undress tended to ruffle various sexual and racial anxieties. If in New York City, unlike many other cities of the time, there was no formal ban on interracial swimming, there was de facto segregation in many facilities.22 Moses saw his role as providing equal services to all citizens, but he did not see his role as challenging the prevalence of segregation among existing social mores (although neither, Robert Caro to the contrary, did he see his role as exacerbating it).23 Indeed, Moses was troubled enough by the de facto segregation in the city’s swimming pools to write about it at length. In a series of lectures he

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gave at Harvard in 1939 on “theory and practice in politics,” he described how he felt powerless to combat segregation in the Jefferson Pool in an Italian neighborhood in East Harlem, even though an all-white pool was “against the spirit and the letter of the State Constitution and the Civil Rights Law.”24 But what, Moses asked his audience, was he to do? Protecting the pool site would have accomplished little, according to Moses, because the real problem was not in the pool itself, but with persons of color walking through a neighborhood in which they were not wanted. This problem would continue for decades, and Moses did not know how (and had no authority) to solve it.25 The solution to the “delicate” pool problem for Moses was to open a separate pool in Black Harlem, Colonial Park Pool (now Jackie Robinson Pool), comparable in its facilities to Jefferson Pool. Public swimming in Upper Manhattan, if largely racially separate, would be more or less equal. “Our problem ended in a practical way and the theory of the Bill of Rights remained intact.”26 In a telling passage from the same lectures, he writes of the need for “a little honest indignation” for those toiling on the bottom rungs of society. Although he doesn’t explore the ways their plight might be remedied, the objects of his sympathies included not only “Lifschitz the sweatshop worker” and “Baccigaluppo the seasonal day laborer” but also “Taliaferro the urban Negro, who can’t get into a union.”27 And Moses’s commitment to equality of opportunity went beyond pronouncements from the lectern. In 1941, when a black vocal quartet won a Department of Parks–sponsored singing contest and was denied the right to participate in the national finals, Moses, who was a great aficionado of barbershop-quartet singing, promptly and very publicly resigned from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing that had prevented the black quartet from competing.28 But though Moses opposed the bigoted and invidious treatment of racial minorities by the government or private parties, he was profoundly skeptical of using the government to require private persons or organizations to adopt nondiscriminatory practices. And this, liberals might have asked Moses, raised the question, “If moral suasion failed, as it generally did in such cases, just how was Taliaferro going to gain entrance to that Jim Crow union?” By the late 1930s there was a new urgency to the demands for the expansion of rights-based liberalism, a new racial liberalism that was stirring what would emerge as the civil rights movement. Moses’s opposition to the expansion of rights-based liberalism was wrapped up in his opposition to FDR and the New Deal. If for Moses, Al Smith was the most impressive politician of his generation, his successor as governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the worst, a judgment Moses based on a combination of personal and ideological factors. In 1934, during his unsuccessful Republican bid for governor, Moses, with the New Deal in his sights, argued it was “a detestable thing to stir up one class against another and to promise the masses circuses when there is no bread.”29 The next year Moses accused Roosevelt of trying to “usher in an economic millennium by Presidential decree.”30

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(This did not prevent Moses from working with the Roosevelt administration and vice versa, when it was in their mutual self-interest.) And by 1944, Moses had added a racial component to his critique, arguing the president had “promoted factionalism, stimulated minorities, appealed to class prejudice and divided our people. He has sought to keep power by every art known to demagoguery.”31 There is no better example of Moses’s fight against the sort of liberalism that had unduly “stimulated” minorities than his fight against the civil rights plank at the 1938 New York State Constitutional Convention. Under the general direction of Governor Herbert Lehman, the convention was a high-water mark of New Deal liberalism and of the expansion of a rights-centered view of citizenship. The new constitution enshrined a number of rights not included in the Bill of Rights or other federal guarantees; the right of labor to form unions and engage in political and economic actions, the right to decent, affordable housing and clearance of slums, and the right of the poor and the indigent to have appropriate support from the state. It also included a civil rights plank, which would have prohibited discrimination on the basis of “race, color, creed, or religion” by any “firm, corporation, or institution.”32 Moses was a Bill of Rights minimalist. To expand rights were to dilute them. They needed protection, a chastity belt against their would-be violators. “It is,” he would write, “the immediate jewel of our political virtue which must be jealously guarded.”33 Moses reacted with horror at the civil rights plank. Its promise to “every racial and religious group an end of all social discrimination . . . gave the more conservative and responsible members of the convention cold chills.” He would write in 1939 that34 you cannot legislate tolerance by constitutional amendment or statute. There are no constitutional sanctions to enforce the essence of the Ten Commandments as summarized in the Sermon on the Mount, namely, that each should respect his neighbor’s rights as he does his own. It is difficult enough to attempt to carry out guarantees of equal protection by the government. It is impossible as applied to private persons, firms, corporations, and institutions. Social equality is of slow growth and rests on mutual esteem and respect, not on force. For Moses the problem of establishing such a right would be its inherent unenforceability. Prohibiting “hotels and clubs to discriminate against Jews . . . for private firms, property owners, theater managers, labor unions, and other individuals, firms, and corporations to discriminate against negroes [sic] . . . would simply stimulate cute minds to find new and ingenious ways of doing just what they have been doing, and we would fan the flames we seek to quench.” But an unenforceable law would be an invitation to myriad legal challenges. “We would encourage scamps and professional agitators to blackmail not only bigots but those who cannot afford to comply with silly laws.”35 Moses’s solution to this imagined nightmare was a cunning bit of pettifoggery, which limited the scope of the clause to the existing corpus of civil rights legislation,

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which did not extend protection against third-party discrimination.36 Moses was proud of his act of emasculation of the 1938 statute, and wrote about it on numerous occasions, nowhere more prominently than in a 1943 article in the New York Times (which appeared the day the Harlem riots broke out), which serves as perhaps Moses’s most comprehensive statement of his racial philosophy.37 The article contains a fine tribute to the Harlem Renaissance and other recent achievements by African Americans in the cultural arena, and it is difficult to imagine any other prominent New York City politician in 1943 quoting a quatrain by the African American poet James Weldon Johnson to make a point. The article contained a combination of sharp observations married to rather conservative solutions. He wrote of the city’s “Negro problem,” created by whites, exploited by avaricious landlords and complicit lending institutions, in a “conspiracy of silence to hide the facts because they are unpleasant.” Moses, in a rhetorical pose he found very comfortable, was the lone voice decrying all the special interests standing in the way of slum clearance.38 But though many liberals would have agreed with his analysis, and even with his solution, a program of massive urban renewal, their paths diverged when it came to the political implications of the deteriorating social conditions faced by black New Yorkers. With the controversy over Stuyvesant Town still raging, Moses wrote that the housing problem for minorities had led “demagogues to shout for immediate social equality than to work for attainable objectives.” For Moses, “the truth is that the path to fair and honorable treatment of our colored citizens is a long and thorny one to be traveled slowly and surely with wise and patient leadership.” Rather than “immediate social equality” (as always, a nebulous phrase when used by Moses and other racial conservatives). Moses recommended following “in the footsteps of Booker Washington” in seeking improvements in housing, health, and physical conditions, and in wider opportunities for employment. Moses recounted that when the first blacks joined the New York City police and fire departments at the turn of the century, they faced decades of persistent racism. Now, Moses argued, there was an African American captain of police and a deputy battalion chief in the New York City fire department. “This may seem to some pretty slow progress, but all real progress is slow.” For the city’s liberals, it was the fight over Stuyvesant Town, the massive East Side middle-income development built in the early 1940s, that made “Moses” a byword for racial reaction. Met Life was resolute in not permitting any African American tenants at Stuyvesant Town, and Moses backed their decision, for which he was, needless to say, pilloried by civil rights groups and many city officials.39 His reason for backing Met Life, beyond his distaste for antidiscrimination ordinances in general, was his conviction that, if in addition to the inherent difficulties of building housing in New York City, developers would also have to obey nondiscrimination ordinances, they simply would build in the suburbs, which is what they wanted to do anyway.40 Civil rights legislation will “effectively stop any future housing developments by the insurance companies and the banks.” If Stuyvesant Town failed, Moses warned, “there would be no more proposals of this character.”41

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Moses was hardly inventing a nonexistent issue. Private developers were indeed vitally needed to help relieve the postwar housing crisis, and many preferred to build in the suburbs in the first place, where land was cheaper and easier to acquire, where their racial policies would not be scrutinized, and where the archetypal postwar suburb, Levittown, would soon rise from the potato fields of Hempstead with nary a black family. And in the wake of Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life did indeed forswear any similar ventures into urban housing.42 But a wiser man, or perhaps a more courageous man, would have demanded that the suburbs rise to a higher standard than the city sink to a lower one. Moses’s racial conservatism was again on display in the spring of 1945, when the New York State legislature passed the Ives-Quinn bill, and became the first state to pass a statute outlawing discrimination in employment. Moses was a prominent opponent.43 “The passage of this bill,” he argued before a legislative hearing in February 1945, “will set the clock back.” Moses acknowledged that the underlying problem was very serious. “I am fully aware of the fact that discrimination has been practiced by many employers, often without rhyme or reason. Everyone knows that Negroes had been outrageously discriminated against in the past.” However, Moses argued, the situation was getting better, and that “the best way to improve it faster is by education, moral suasion, conference and reason and not by coercion backed by fines and jail sentences.”44 Moses further argued that the “most vicious feature” of the Ives-Quinn bill would eventually lead to the establishment of quotas in employment and education, and he specifically mentioned the infamous “numerus clausus” which limited the number of Jews in European and American universities to a “fixed number proportionate to their percentage in population.”45 Moses might not have been very forward thinking, but here he was prescient. Those who have argued that, by raising the issues of quotas, Moses was raising a largely phony and nonexistent issue in the civil rights world of 1945, ignore the extent to which proportional hiring was already being practiced in New York State in the early 1940s. Moreover, on the broader issue, Moses was surely correct that one cannot really separate serious efforts to create equality of opportunity without paying attention to the racial percentages of those hired or admitted to schools, as the history of civil rights and affirmative action in the 1960s amply demonstrated.46 Moses was joined in his opposition to Ives-Quinn by many Teddy Rooseveltian or Wilsonian progressives out of synch with the New Deal, such as Mayor La Guardia’s adviser C. C. Burlingham, 1924 Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis, and even Oswald Garrison Villard, a prominent leader of the NAACP in its earlier years, who felt that Ives-Quinn would be the Volstead Act redux, its inherent unenforceability, like Prohibition, making a bad situation worse.47 But Moses was a generation younger than these gentlemen. Their careers were winding down as World War II ended, and Moses would never have more power or visibility than in the decade and a half after 1945, when his racial conservatism came into ever sharper contrast with prevailing attitudes. Into the last third of the twentieth

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century, he remained the last of the old progressives. But by 1945, and with the passage of the Ives-Quinn law, Moses and the other old progressives were tackling a new foe that had been thrust into the forefront of New York State’s and the nation’s debate on racial equality: “integration.” It was not a new word; the earliest citations from the Oxford English Dictionary are from the seventeenth century, among them a 1658 work that defined integration as “a making whole, or restoring.” But it had a new meaning, one that it had gained only in the mid to late 1930s, that of the full inclusion of racial minorities in the warp and woof of the fabric of American life, the making whole, or restoring of American democracy. Integration was in part about passing laws. By the late 1950s New York City, spurred on by supporters of integration, had enacted prohibitions against discrimination in public housing, publicly assisted housing, education, public accommodations, and multiple-unit private rental property, all told giving New York the most comprehensive array of antidiscrimination ordinances of any major city in the United States. Although radicals (and many liberals) wanted more, and wished the net of regulation were both stronger and wider, the incremental increase of civil rights legislation was seen by liberals and many on the left as a crucial element of a comprehensive civil rights strategy.48 Integration was also about changing minds. One of the cardinal beliefs of opponents to civil rights legislation like Moses was that “you can’t legislate morality”; but integration advocates felt that morality could be altered through education, exhortation, and regulation. The bible of social engineering, as this view of government became known, was Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), a 1,500page paean to the potential for social engineering to ameliorate the race question. Myrdal in the final pages of An American Dilemma concluded that America had to demonstrate a “progressive trend,” by which “the Negro became finally integrated into modern democracy.” Integration would be an example of the future of social engineering, “the drawing of practical conclusions from the teaching of social science that ‘human nature’ is changeable and that human deficiencies and unhappiness are, in large degree, preventable.”49 Robert Moses, the master builder, was not a social engineer. And yet nowhere did the temptation to social engineering provide as many practical opportunities as in the area of housing. Numerous sociological studies in the late 1940s and early 1950s supported the conclusion that, once people found themselves living in interracial settings, their former biases and prejudices were revealed as illusions. This would become a credo for many supporters of integrated housing in the 1950s and early 1960s; all one had to do to demonstrate integration’s utility was to try it, and thereby puncture the entire intellectual tradition on which people like Moses had based their understanding of race. In 1951 a pioneering study of interracial housing in the New York metropolitan area offered a very positive evaluation of South Jamaica Houses, and attacked Moses’s old teacher, William Graham Sumner, as the archetype of the old, now exploded notions of human nature:50 We are, in effect, rejecting the notion that has characterized much of sociological thinking in the field of racial relations: the notion originating with William

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Graham Sumner, that “stateways cannot change folkways.” The evidence of our study is that official policy, executed without equivocation, can result in large changes in beliefs and feelings despite initial resistance to the policy. Thus, it is clear from our data that although most of the white housewives in the integrated projects we studied did not, upon moving into the projects, like the idea of living in the same buildings with Negro families (and certainly the community as a whole did not favor it), a considerable change in attitudes and “folkways” has taken place as a consequence of their experiences resulting from a “stateway.” Moses never changed his belief that human nature could not be changed by moral persuasion, never believed in the grander goals of integration, and never changed his basic attitude toward civil rights legislation as a species of pernicious meddling. In 1956 the New York Post claimed that one subject on which Moses “has not altered his views is the matter of anti-discrimination legislation in the field of housing,” and he was quoted as saying “his only regret is that he lost” the battle against antidiscrimination ordinances.51 When in the same year he was asked his private opinion of a fairly modest open housing proposal by the city government, he snorted, “In my book there is nothing more contemptible than stimulating racial, ethnic, religious, ideological and economic controversies by unsupported generalizations about discrimination, warnings against obscure conspiracies and promises of immediate magical solutions of long range problems.” As was so often the case, his concern was that in forcing private landlords to obey antidiscrimination statutes, government would only “promote tension and conflict rather than end it,” and “set back the clock a quarter century.”52 He again preached gradualism. “Responsible leaders” know that integration and the improvement of race relations “must be done slowly, patiently and honestly and not by ukase, fiat and manifesto.”53 However, there is a “but” to this. Without ever changing his underlying philosophy, Moses accommodated himself to integrated housing. When in 1950 the state legislature banned discrimination in any future government-assisted private housing developments (like Stuyvesant Town), Moses went along without much comment, and even before that bill passed, he had started to adjust to the new reality.54 As early as 1952 he would tell his biographer Cleveland Rodgers that Met Life had “poor advisers” in the Stuyvesant Town fight, that they should have accepted black tenants, and that in general they ought to exhibit “more of the milk of human kindness” and “keep abreast of the times.”55 Where Metropolitan Life refused to tread, Moses found other developers, primarily nonprofits like the UHF, who were happy, even eager, to adopt nondiscriminatory housing policies, and he learned to tolerate their forays into social engineering. At times, as with his efforts to work with the Marshall Field Foundation in the late 1940s and 1950s in an abortive attempt to build middle-income housing in Greenwich Village, integrated or interracial housing was the primary goal of the endeavor.56 By 1956 he could even offer somewhat strained compliments to the State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD), the agency formed by

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the Ives-Quinn Act, allowing that it had “worked reasonably well,” albeit because the “left-wingers” had been kept in check.57 And in the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Moses didn’t hesitate to take credit for his support of integration in Rochdale. In early 1959 he wrote a friendly letter to Elmer Carter, the newly appointed African American head of SCAD, requesting a meeting. He cautioned Carter, using one of his favorite phrases, that “handsome gestures are no good” in the field of civil rights or open housing legislation. However, he called special attention to the Jamaica project as an example of a valid effort toward integration in housing, and sought Carter’s support for the development.58 As Moses no doubt knew, the UHF was increasingly vocal on the question of integrated housing. In 1956 the UHF published an article by Eleanor Roosevelt in which she argued that progress in civil rights had been “pitifully slow in the field of housing” and the North’s problems in this regard were as serious as the South’s. “A segregated community is an unnatural and unhealthy situation. Many of our other social problems can be traced directly to that condition. If we can solve the basic problem of housing we will at the same time accomplish much toward finding solutions to full employment, juvenile delinquency, and segregation in institutions like schools and churches.” And cooperatives, Roosevelt stressed, were key to solving the problems of both housing and segregation.59 The UHF regularly wrote about segregation in the North, the ineffectiveness of current laws, and the ways in which cooperatives might in some way ameliorate the situation. Roosevelt’s sentiments were echoed in UHF publications by Henry Lee Moon, the director of publicity of the NAACP from 1948 to 1974, and a resident and leader in a union-sponsored cooperative in Queens. Moon would offer the standard liberal justification for integration. “It’s good for a child,” said Moon, “to grow up with knowledge and consciousness of people of various races, creeds, religions, and backgrounds. It’s not healthy for a child to be reared in a ghetto situation.” Moon would later serve on the board of directors for both the UHF and Rochdale Village.60 Moses never lost his skepticism of civil rights legislation. In his 1963 article on Rochdale in the Long Island Press, he dismissed integrationist liberalism with some of his familiar code words. “We live and labor in a highly emotional, explosive atmosphere in which the humble, simple, and primarily physical aspects of decent living of the first half of the twentieth century tend to be obscured by fearfully large, complex, economic and social objectives, no doubt ultimately valid and undeniable but hardly immediately obtainable.” But yet, most of the rest of the article addressed the way that Rochdale reflected the diversity of the city, and would help improve the lives of its residents, who “need only a little help to be on their own” and how Rochdale would also be a boon to the black neighborhood in which it was located, with racial synergies of various kinds benefiting all.61 In short, though Moses remained opposed to civil rights legislation in general, he also felt that if there was a way to go about trying to create a racially egalitarian society, the UHF and Rochdale Village had hit on it; integration freely entered into

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by all parties, uncoerced, unmonitored, and unregulated, just people of different races choosing to live together. And in an era when race was central to the political discourse in New York City in a way that was unimaginable when Moses’s career was getting started a half century earlier, Rochdale Village would be his vindication, proof that he was not indifferent or insensitive to the plight of racial minorities, and that indeed, unlike the radicals and reformers, he could do more than talk about integration; he could actually do something about it. And indeed, some former critics took note of Moses’s achievement. Stanley Isaacs, the onetime liberal Republican Manhattan borough president, had tangled with Moses often, over Stuyvesant Town and many other issues. In her 1967 biography of Isaacs, his widow, Edith Isaacs, provided a long list of instances in which Isaacs had earned his reformer’s credentials by fighting the good fight against Moses. Then she turned to Rochdale. “It was Moses’s idea, for example, to acquire the Jamaica Race Track for city housing, and Stanley was delighted. Since it was a huge area, it could provide extensive housing for tenants without dislocating a single person. Stanley went all out to back him, and today a huge integrated middle income development is a reality there, with 25 percent occupancy by minority groups.”62 By 1966, from Moses’s perspective, support of integration at Rochdale could almost pass for middle-of-the-road conservatism, with the reactionaries and segregationist diehards on the right, and the noisily vehement left on the other. In 1966, at the ground-breaking ceremony for Co-op City, Moses would claim that “Rochdale in a quiet way has achieved remarkable success in integration and in happy relations among tenants.” This would be a claim he would frequently reiterate in his last years in the public eye. Increasingly, his plans for dealing with the slums and the gathering racial crisis of the times was to build more Rochdales, with Co-op City being the first of what Moses hoped would be many similar massive developments. Why not, Moses suggested in early 1968, let the UHF “begin really big slum clearance in the presently hopeless ghettos of Harlem, Central Bronx, South Jamaica, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, and Brownsville?”63 But Moses’s attachment to what Rochdale had become went deeper than a tactical adjustment to the shifting racial discourse. He became convinced that Rochdale, and cooperatives like it, were the best way for cities to save themselves and to mend their increasingly severe self-inflicted racial wounds. By the early 1960s Moses had become ever more worried about the fate of New York City and other cities, in part because of his loss of power, and in part because the 1960s was a very good time to worry about the fate of cities. In his 1963 article on Rochdale he wrote that “our American cities at the moment don’t know whom they will follow or what they want. Certainly cities are not for the tired, the discouraged, the cynical.” Rochdale was part of the answer to the cynics, and Rochdale’s achievement was indissolubly tied up with bettering race relations. Moses’s most remarkable statement about Rochdale was his last, when he spoke at Rochdale’s Community Center at the annual meeting of the National Cooperative League in October 1968. After praising Rochdale for what it had accomplished,

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Moses offered a typical blast at his critics. “You have also, in the distance, no doubt heard the familiar forces of detraction, debunking, and disapproval. New York is the world’s fanciest rabbit warren of critics. If the subject is cooperative, multifamily building on vacant land, the location is wrong, the plan faulty, the architecture boxlike, unimaginative, and contemptible. . . . Co-op City will still rise from the swamps and lift people from the slums when the critics have flung their last rotten eggs and gone to their reward. Pay them no mind.”64 In the end, Rochdale and cooperatives like it had become an essential part of Moses’s vision of city life, and he felt that the urban order he had labored so long to help create was under attack, and that the fires of the ’60s were turning the country against cities. As he spoke that October, the ongoing presidential campaign was on everyone’s mind, and Moses looked with alarm at the success George Wallace was having in the North as well as the South, and had visions of the burning crosses on hilltops that had greeted Al Smith forty years before. “The Kluxers in white sheets have raised the specter of urban genocide and they are booted, saddled, and riding.” Urban genocide. Or perhaps urbicide: the total destruction of cities as a type of social formation. For Moses, Wallace and his supporters were at their core anti-urban: narrow-minded and bigoted despisers of cities (and, a fortiori, New York City) and everything cities had achieved through cosmopolitanism and diversity. “I do not know whether the corporate intelligence of the United States can be insulted, but if so, the formula for Governor Wallace for meeting the urban crisis by an enforced back-to-the-farm movement has surely succeeded. Can such vicious balderdash bolster a protest vote?” For Moses, Wallace’s racism followed from the latter’s effort to imagine an America without its cities and its urban residents, mere excrescences on his mythical, all-white, and viciously xenophobic “heartland.” Moses had battled for urban America for half a century. If Moses proposed a program of building many Rochdale-like cooperatives to eliminate the problem of the slums, it was to cure a disease, not to kill the patient. Regardless of the outcome of the election, the Wallace supporters would be “an evil force to reckon with in the future.” But, Moses concluded, there was only one response, one refutation of Wallace. “This is the lesson of Rochdale,” said Moses in closing his speech. “Cooperation is the answer.”65

6. The Fight at the Construction Site

So I walked across the street and joined the picket line, and this was my first encounter with the civil rights movement in an activist’s role. And I stayed with the demonstrations the whole summer, every day. And the bug bit me. Herman Ferguson

Rochdale Village was a hot news item in the summer of 1963, hitting the front page of the New York Times on several occasions. This was a few months before the first families would move in to the development, but the news coverage was not about the expected opening of the largest housing cooperative in the world, which was dutifully noted that December with a small, perfunctory notice in the paper of record. Rochdale Village was in the news for reasons that had nothing, directly, to do with housing. At its construction site in July, August, and September, thousands of people marched in protest and attended nearby rallies, while hundreds of people were arrested in acts of civil disobedience. Rochdale Village was one of the foci of the largest mass civil rights protests ever seen in New York City. The year 1963 was perhaps the most crucial year in the history of the modern civil rights struggle, the year when the protests in Birmingham demonstrated, to all who wished to see, that Jim Crow was dying, when the movement met in triumph in Washington to provide the classic statement of its goals, and the year when the focus of protests slowly but decisively began to shift from the legal racial oppression of the South to the related but different problems in the urban black neighborhoods in the North. In the turbulent, heady year of 1963, Rochdale had an important place.

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Figure 7. Aerial view of Rochdale Village, ca. 1964. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center,

Cornell University.

In some ways, New York City in 1963 was in a position to be proud of its civil rights accomplishments. Certainly no municipality in the nation had a larger or stronger battery of civil rights protections, including the aforementioned bans against discrimination in housing, employment, entertainment, and education, and no city had more public and private institutions open on a nondiscriminatory basis. But very serious problems remained. Many of the ordinances were loosely enforced, at best, and this enforcement was often undermined by the city’s turbulent demographic transformation. Between 1950 and 1970, as population growth in the city remained flat, the white, non-Hispanic population of the city declined by almost two million persons (from 6.8 to 4.9 million), with a corresponding increase in the black, Puerto Rican, and Latino population, a shift that complicated efforts at fostering integration (especially in housing and the schools), and led to larger, more racially concentrated and more economically distressed areas of minority settlement, along with strenuous efforts to keep the “rising tide of color” out of “white” neighborhoods. In many areas of public life, such as politics and the higher echelons of business, blacks remained severely underrepresented.

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And in some areas, blacks were not represented at all. Perhaps the most glaring example of this in the early 1960s was in the building trades unions, a group of 121 craft unions that was responsible for a huge share of the several hundred thousand persons employed in the construction industry, then as now one of the largest and most dominant industries in the city. Entrance into the craft unions was tightly controlled by the existing membership, usually to the exclusion of minorities. In 1963 no more than 2 percent of building trades union membership were minorities (in a city whose minority population was approaching about 25 percent), and this pitiful level was reached only because some of the less benighted of the building trades unions had recently started minority apprenticeship programs, typically in entry-level positions.1 Candor about discriminatory practices would be a victim of the growing power of the civil rights movement, and the summer of 1963 was just about the last time a local labor leader would be quoted on the matter in the New York Times; an official of the International Union of Elevator Constructors told a reporter that their New York local of 1,400 had “maybe three” blacks, because most blacks were “afraid of heights.” Local 28 of the Sheet Metal Workers International Association, which had no African Americans among its 3,300 members, angrily denied engaging in discriminatory practices. The International Association of Structural Iron Workers likewise had no blacks among its 1,000-man local, but wanted credit for their large number of American Indians, the so-called Mohawks in High Steel, as the Joseph Mitchell essay had it, who had developed a reputation for working at high elevations.2 Discrimination in the building trades unions was not only unrepentant, it was highly visible. Black communities in the early 1960s further suffered from meager essential services to their neighborhoods. In a South Jamaica community meeting with the Queens borough president in 1962, local residents complained of the lack of black police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and teachers in the area, and that all the construction jobs were taken by whites.3 Whenever new construction went up in South Jamaica, one man who grew up there in the 1960s remembers, one of the first questions local residents always asked was, Can the men get jobs at the construction site? At Rochdale, the answer was, almost certainly, no. The injustice of the situation was compounded because of the high rates of unemployment in black neighborhoods, and because jobs in the construction industry, while often highly skilled, did not require much in the way of formal education or initial capital investment, and because, in the end, many blacks did end up working in construction, but in off-the-books jobs with firms that were often mob controlled, and at which they sometimes had to summon up their courage to ask for their pay.4 In many cities in the North in 1963—in Philadelphia, Newark, Trenton, Cleveland, and Brooklyn, as well as in South Jamaica—discrimination by the building trades unions catalyzed massive demonstrations, and the style of the protests, with marches and mass picketing, civil disobedience, and sit-ins, was an indication that the fervor of Southern protests that had so galvanized the civil rights movement

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had moved north.5 The targets of the demonstrations were somewhat more elusive than the blatant legal discrimination in the South. Racial discrimination by unions was by 1963 illegal in New York City, but the legislation was relatively toothless and easily evaded. In any event, to further protect their Jim Crow status, the building trades unions all had extensive waiting lists for their apprenticeship programs (entrance into which was a requirement for union membership) and these waiting lists were, of course, overwhelmingly white, so the reward for a black applicant who was finally accepted by a union could be the privilege of waiting at the back of a long queue for an entry process that stretched for years. By bringing political pressure to bear, demonstrations were slowly forcing building trades unions to alter their hiring practices. In the spring of 1963 demonstrations had some success in Philadelphia, and in early June, Herbert Hill, the labor director of the NAACP, suggested that similar protests be undertaken in New York City.6 The most effective way to protest against these politically well-entrenched unions was by getting politicians to place pressure on them, in part by forcing politicians to chose between support from the unions and from the civil rights community. In 1963, no politician in New York State was more powerful than Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and given his expansive promises to fight for equal opportunity for all New Yorkers, few were easier to embarrass if it could be shown that there was a substantial gap between rhetoric and action. Therefore in June, a coalition of civil rights organizations decided that they would concentrate their protests against large state-funded construction sites in the city. The two largest such projects were Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and Rochdale Village in Queens.7 Even before the protests started at Downstate Medical on July 15, there were protests at an extension of Harlem Hospital. Subsidiary protests broke out at Bronx White Castle outlets, the aptly named chain whose owners refused to hire minorities to peddle their tasty twelve-cent mini-hamburgers; in the NYCHA Rutgers Houses on the Lower East Side; new construction projects at Foley Square; and at luncheonettes that had formal or informal policies of discrimination (or in the case of chains like Woolworth’s, that had discriminatory policies in the South, if not in the North). There were sit-in demonstrations at City Hall, at the New York City offices of Governor Rockefeller, and there was talk of protests at the World’s Fair and Shea Stadium sites in Flushing Meadows, then under construction.8 The rhetoric at these events was often fiery, as in Brooklyn where, on August 1, after a near riot that involved much pushing and shoving between demonstrators and police, a black minister from Brooklyn compared New York City to Alabama, the United States to South Africa, and pronounced that “this nation is going straight to hell.”9 At the end of July, the New York Amsterdam News, in a banner headline, declared “The ‘Revolution’ Spreads all over New York” and that “the suddenly volatile petrol of long-standing Negro discontent and unaddressed grievances flowed together through the five boroughs.” (Completing the metaphor, the paper maintained that unless something was done immediately, a full-scale “racial holocaust” was in the offing.)10 On July 22, when two hundred people were arrested at a demonstration

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in Brooklyn, the New York Times called it the largest mass arrests in New York City since the Harlem riots in 1943.11 The protests certainly caught the attention of New York City that summer. For some it served as a call to action, for others it roused them from a complacent belief that “civil rights” was an issue only below the Mason-Dixon Line. In some it stirred something darker, which was beginning to be called the “white backlash.” By the summer of 1963 there were reports of the formation of a shadowy organization known as SPONGE (Society for the Prevention of Negroes from Getting Everything), which existed primarily as a graffiti tag and guys mouthing off in bars. A commuter interviewed by the New York Times in early August on the protests insisted they had affected his subway commute. “They [that is, blacks] used to step on your toes in the subway, but now they stomp on your whole foot.”12 For this man and others, it would be a summer of foot-stomping. • • • The demonstrations at Rochdale began on Tuesday, July 23, 1963. Three organizations shared responsibility for the protests: the Jamaica Branch of the NAACP, Long Island CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and a new organization, the Coordinated (or United) Clergy of Jamaica, formed for this protest.13 In a rally in a church the previous Sunday to gain local support for the demonstrations, the rally leaders made their case, and pointed out what nearby residents had known for months, that the Rochdale contractors, needing to augment the workforce, had brought in union members from out of state. Cars with license plates from as far away as Alabama, Mississippi, and even Texas were regularly parked around the construction site, while local blacks were not hired.14 The goal of the demonstrators was to block deliveries to the site and to halt or slow construction until their demands were met. The main entrance on New York (now Guy Brewer) Boulevard was the focal point of the demonstration. Civil disobedience was carried out by a minority of the picketers. While the bulk of the protesters carried signs, a select group went in front of the entrance and knelt in prayer or lay down, preventing the passage of trucks to the site. Those who participated in this act were warned three times by the police that if they failed to move they would be arrested. When the protesters held their ground, they were arrested and transported to the Queens County Court on Queens Boulevard for arraignment. On the first day of the demonstrations there were about two hundred protesters, with twenty-seven people arrested, including ten members of the clergy and two lawyers.15 Day to day, the protesters ebbed and flowed, reaching as many as 350 but generally numbering between 50 and 100, and they were sometimes outnumbered by police, who maintained a force level of around 130 officers.16 (On some days the chants were led by Barbara Brannen, formerly of the National Negro Opera Company.)17 There was a trough in mid-August when there was some feeling the demonstrations were “bogging down” and some fleeting thought given to suspending the protests.18

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The demonstrations did slacken in late September, with the beginning of the school year—teachers and students on break for the summer had made up a large percentage of the regulars—and ended for good in October.19 By the time the demonstrations had run their course, between two hundred and three hundred people had been arrested at Rochdale, probably about half of those arrested at the larger sister demonstrations at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.20 The marches attracted a lot of attention, and a fair number of celebrities. Baseball great Jackie Robinson marched at Rochdale one morning, and the rally was endorsed by Martin Luther King Jr., speaking only a mile or so away at a press conference at Idlewild International Airport.21 The comedian Dick Gregory was scheduled to appear before he was arrested at a civil rights protest in Chicago.22 The rallies, which at the height of the demonstrations took place almost every evening, attracted many notables, among them John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), James Farmer of CORE, and Herbert Hill and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP (Wilkins lived in nearby St. Albans).23 An outdoor rally in St. Albans to support the Rochdale protesters, held on July 28, 1963, attracted five hundred people and twenty ministers, and featured the Reverend Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, pastor of the powerful Concord Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant and one of the leaders of the demonstrations at the Downstate Medical Center site in Brooklyn, who called out labor leaders as “pious prostitutes who send money south and cut our throats up north.”24 But celebrities aside, these were essentially local demonstrations, rooted in South Jamaica. They were in some ways only the most visible face of a broader, community-wide organizing effort. At an August rally at the Amity Baptist Church, William Booth, president of the Jamaica NAACP and one of the leaders of the protest, said that now was the time for radical, sweeping change: “The only way that we could go more slowly, is to go into reverse. For a hundred years we have done little more than stand still on civil rights.”25 At one rally the demonstrators were entertained with a pageant, “From Slavery to Freedom,” performed by the Rochdale Freedom Singers.26 The Rochdale Freedom Singers continued to appear through 1964, in one venue with the famed modern dancer Pearl Primus.27 A local columnist observed, after seven hundred people attended a rally at Morningside Baptist Church on Merrick Boulevard in early August, “the Rochdale Village situation has served to organize Jamaica more than has any other community problem.”28 The demonstrations were generally peaceful, and the local police were basically sympathetic to the protesters. The Amsterdam News in August 1963 had a photograph of Booth and Assistant Chief Inspector William Kimmins sharing a joke in front of a hearse with a “Bury Jim Crow” sign.29 Although the first protesters were arrested and spent time behind bars, William Booth soon worked out an arrangement with the local police and courts whereby the arrested protesters would be brought before a special judge at the Queens Court who would fine them the equivalent of a traffic violation and let them go, which sometimes led to committed protesters being arrested several times in a single day.30 The police detail prided itself

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on its sensitivity; all officers had been given special training on the background to the picketing, and were under special orders not to look “either disgruntled or disgusted.” The protesters, said Inspector Kimmins, “have been fair with us for the most part. They’re pretty responsible people.”31 However there were other, more fiery, protests. Lincoln Lynch, the head of Long Island CORE, on more than one occasion fought vigorously with the police when he was arrested, and complained about “police manhandling.”32 One close observer noted that when Lynch was arrested “he physically fought with the police, he never had an easy arrest, and he was arrested all the time.”33 Other arrests also fell outside the Gandhian nonviolent-resistance playbook. On occasion police officers were slapped or scratched, and one teenage girl was arrested for felonious assault after trying to push a patrolman under a cement truck.34 There were occasional taunts, and worse, from the workforce on the Rochdale site, some of whom, annoyed by the way the picketing was interfering with their lunch hours, were heard to shout “Up with Jim Crow, down with Communists,” and issue the inevitable cries of “nigger.”35 The Teamsters union, initiating what would prove to be a sorry history with Rochdale, denounced “bombthrowers” and “frustrated malcontents” for blocking deliveries to construction sites.36 On at least one occasion, a picketer was attacked by a construction worker.37 But though there was some friction during the protests with the police, on the whole, and to the dismay of some who complained that the calm handing of the arrests betokened a lack of true militancy, the Rochdale demonstrations were a model of a coordinated civil rights protests. But what attracted attention to Rochdale and the other protests in New York City in the summer of 1963, beyond their size and fervor, and what marked the protests as a decisive break from the past history of the civil rights movement, was the nature of their demands. The protesters at Rochdale were not merely calling for an end to racially discriminatory practices by the building trades unions. They were demanding that a quarter of all the jobs on the construction site, what both sides still referred to as a quota, be reserved for African Americans and other minorities, roughly equal to their percentage of the population within the city.38 With these protests, at Rochdale and in Brooklyn and other northern cities, the call for racial quotas or proportional hiring, which for many years had lurked in the background of the quest for racial equality, emerged as one of the most divisive issues within the civil rights movement. It would not be relegated to a quiet corner again. Although most civil rights liberals, from the 1930s through the debates on the 1964 Civil Rights Act had tried to evade the issue, declaring quotas anathema and incompatible with civil rights, the reality proved more complex, and in practice it was very difficult to guarantee equality of opportunity without some attention to racial percentages.39 Rochdale Village provides a perfect example of this. Despite discrimination by many of the building trades unions, there were African Americans working on the Rochdale construction site. Not all the building trades unions had equally backward

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policies. However, as William Booth pointed out, blacks tended to be concentrated in the lower level of construction positions, and most were laborers, plasterers, carpenters, or assistant bricklayers. There were no black electricians among the 115 on the job site (the one black electrician assigned to Rochdale refused to cross the picket line), nor any black plumbers, lathe workers, steamfitters, or elevator installers.40 The number of blacks working on the site diminished over the course of the strike. At one point during the protests twenty-three African American plasterers (half the plasterers on the job) walked off the job in sympathy with the picketers.41 There were disagreements about the number of blacks working on the job site. William Booth claimed there were about 150; Abraham Kazan argued for some 210, an unnamed state official, hostile to the protests, claimed there were “more than 300” blacks on the site.42 There were disagreements as well about the size of the total workforce, though no one claimed that, in fact, a quarter of those employed were African American.43 Abraham Kazan’s response to the whole controversy was a vain hope that it would all just go away. Kazan had a meeting, during the demonstrations, with the Queens DA and a group of protesters, described by Kazan “as twenty clergymen and a couple of white women.” Kazan said his hands were tied.44 For Kazan, whose UHF was crucially dependent on labor support, openly challenging the hiring practices in the building trades unions would have been impossible, or at least very courageous on his part, and this was a path he did not take. He argued (somewhat disingenuously, since he was the chief contractor) that “we can’t tell the contractors whom to employ, and we certainly don’t practice discrimination.” But he knew that if he used union labor, as he always did, it would of necessity be an overwhelmingly white labor force. In a press release issued at the height of the protests, Kazan emphasized the number of blacks that were working on the construction site, and offered his hope that the building trades unions would accelerate their efforts at increasing minority employment.45 He did not address the question of quotas. For the demonstrators, quotas raised the question of what it meant to integrate a workplace or a union local and provide equal access to minorities, especially if there was reason to doubt the good faith of those who, under duress, changed their previously discriminatory policies. Did 100 on the Rochdale construction site out of a workforce of 2,000 constitute integration? Did 200? If not, what did? The simplest way to ensure equality of opportunity was by paying some attention to the results. Rather than get into debates over process and promises (often empty) of an improved hiring system, a straightforward way of verifying good faith would be setting a reasonable quota. The rampant discrimination in the building trades unions made it a perfect test case for quotas, and as the historian Thomas Sugrue has shown, it was in part through grass roots protests against discrimination in the building trades unions, such as the Rochdale protests, that quotas re-emerged as a topic of national debate.46 “We are told a quota system is not possible,” said the Reverend Gardner C. Taylor at the protests in Brooklyn, “but Negroes have been living with a zero quota for 100 years.”47

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Indeed, it might be argued that discrimination in the building unions made the perfect case for quotas. Discrimination was systematic and blatant, and the waiting lists for membership, if strictly adhered to, would hinder minority union membership for years to come. But what seemed reasonable to the protesters seemed ludicrous to almost all politicians. Shortly after the protests at Rochdale began on July 23, Emmanuel Cellar, a Brooklyn Democrat, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a longtime liberal standard-bearer, said he would “rebel against quotas,” arguing irrelevantly that blacks were overrepresented, as a percentage of population, in jobs in the post office. Senator Jacob Javits said, “There is neither room for nor need for Negro or other exclusivity in civil rights.”48 Governor Rockefeller, using the ultimate Cold War cussword, declared that quotas were “unAmerican in concept and in principle,” and that “we can’t abandon our concepts of equal opportunity by giving special privilege to some.”49 (The liberal Republican U.S. senator Kenneth Keating, who attended one of the protest rallies, was one of the few prominent politicians to support the protests.)50 Many politicians raised the specter of backlash, including Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., the undersecretary of commerce, who argued that quotas would be an “embarrassing advantage that would boomerang in the long run.”51 If this was a reasonable concern, it also had the effect of giving white fears a veto over efforts to achieve genuine racial equality. Labor leaders, especially those close to the building trades unions, were even more hostile to the notion of quotas. Peter J. Brennan, the head of the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council, representing 122 unions and a quarter of a million union members, and the main target of the protests, asserted that the building trades did not discriminate against minorities. Like Rockefeller, he complained that quotas were un-American, and argued that his organization was “being asked to discriminate against whites,” words echoed by AFL-CIO president George Meany, a former Bronx plumber and onetime head of the plumbers union: “We cannot visit injustice on the white boy to make up to the black boy for injustice done to him in the past.” Harry Van Arsdale, head of the New York Central Labor Council (and whose own union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, was among the most enlightened of the building trades unions) was noncommittal, but promised improvements in the number of minorities in the building trades unions.52 With protests all over the city, and extended sit-ins at City Hall and Governor Rockefeller’s New York City offices, politicians had to do something, and they put pressure on the unions to do the same. On August 6, 1963, Rockefeller, after meeting with black ministers who were leading the Brooklyn Downstate demonstrations (Brooklyn CORE members were not privy to the meetings, and no one from the Rochdale demonstrations was invited) announced a plan that included tightening up enforcement of state discrimination statutes, withholding funds from construction projects if the “existence of discrimination” is found, and working with the building trades unions to set up a program that would increase the numbers of minorities in construction.53 This ended the demonstrations at Brooklyn Downstate, much to the consternation of most of the leaders of Brooklyn CORE.54

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The leaders of the Rochdale demonstrations were skeptical of the agreement between Rockefeller and the Brooklyn ministers, and the demonstrations continued in Jamaica. The skepticism was warranted. The agreement hinged on the (entirely voluntary) effort by Peter Brennan and the 122 member unions of the Building Trades Council to hire more minorities, and there was ample reason to doubt their good faith. After some arm twisting by Rockefeller, a six-person interracial committee was set up by Brennan to give special attention to the applications of minority candidates for union apprenticeship positions.55 But Brennan was never serious about the agreement—“If we have to put on a theatrical display to prove we don’t discriminate, we’ll do it,” he said—and was as good as his word. His effort to speed the hiring of blacks into the building trades unions was purely for show, without substance.56 Leaders of the Rochdale protests rightly dismissed the Brennan plan as a “public relations gimmick,” and William Booth called it “a lot of hogwash.”57 By the end of 1963, although twenty centers had been established in minority neighborhoods to collect applications for apprenticeships, by the end of the year, none of the 3,000 applicants had been admitted into apprenticeship programs, and almost all their applications had been rejected outright.58 Looking back at the Rochdale protests in November, many found the experience frustrating. Little had been accomplished. The demonstrations had neither appreciably slowed the progress of construction projects, nor led to increased black membership in the building trades unions. William Booth admitted to a great frustration over the apparent futility of the demonstrations. An unnamed leader of the summer protests told the Times that “picketing and demonstrating are not the answer,” but he had no idea what the right answer was.59 Booth was not the only one in the fall of 1963 pondering the consequences of the summer’s demonstrations at Rochdale. That October, Stanley H. Lowell, chairman of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, the city’s highest ranking civil rights position, shocked almost all respectable opinion when he became the first city or state official to endorse what he called “preferential treatment” for blacks on the union waiting lists to compensate blacks for historic inequities, arguing it was unfair to make blacks wait at the back of the line for new openings. Mayor Wagner denounced Lowell’s proposal, and said the notion of preferential treatment was barred by law, a sentiment seconded by the vice-chair of the State Commission Against Discrimination, who called it “utterly inconsistent with equality of opportunity, and utterly illegal.” The proposal was denounced as well by the New York City chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union as “violating the civil liberties of whites.” Lowell’s suggestion was condemned in a New York Times editorial as one worthy of the white supremacist White Citizens’ Councils.60 Lowell offered to resign but stayed on the job. He then claimed he had been misunderstood (though he hadn’t been), and rather than “preferential treatment,” suggested a more neutral term, one that had the advantage of being new and unknown and lacked the baggage of prior associations or connotations. On the basis of a recent Kennedy administration executive order on discrimination among federal contractors (one that, as it happened, went into effect on July 22, 1963, the day before the Rochdale

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demonstrations commenced) he suggested that what he had in mind might better be called “affirmative action.” The executive order was the first to use the term in somewhat akin to its current meaning, though it had remained largely unnoticed, and its use by Lowell was perhaps the first in relation to racial equality in New York City.61 If the immediate results of the Rochdale demonstrations were disappointing, the demands of the protesters for a systematic rethinking of what was meant by civil rights and racial equality could not be, and would not be, long ignored. • • • The Rochdale protests were also an indication of the changes under way in Jamaica in the early 1960s, and how the struggle for black equality itself was evolving. The Rochdale demonstrations brought together a broad coalition of support, from Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Congress to emerging black nationalist organizations, a coalition that would not be brought together again. While the protests were both planned and led by blacks, they were firmly interracial in their character. White demonstrators were plentiful both among the picketers and those who engaged in civil disobedience. Photographs of the demonstrators show a racial mixture at the Rochdale construction site. Whites were regularly interviewed as participant demonstrators.62 A number of those who were present at the Rochdale demonstrations, white and black, had already purchased an apartment at the cooperative, and saw their participation as part of their commitment to integration. The mother of William Booth was scheduled to move into Rochdale a few months after it opened, and Booth was excited about the prospects of Rochdale, believing it would “further integration and help the Negro community.”63 Other prospective Rochdale residents who participated in the demonstrations included Anita Starr, later a teacher in Rochdale’s elementary and intermediate schools, and Peter Schulberg, who was planning to move to Rochdale, and told a reporter that his participation in the protest, as much as living in Rochdale, was a part of his commitment to integration.64 William Jones remembers going, as a ten-year-old, to the demonstrations with his father, the year before his interracial family moved to Rochdale.65 However, the protests at Rochdale, from beginning to end, were planned and controlled by the black community in Jamaica, and one can detect some wariness on the part of blacks as to the appropriate extent of white participation, and some uncertainty on the part of whites as to whether they were really wanted. A leader of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP urged his fellow members to “join with those white people who have a terrifying need to blot out bigotry, and to know freedom.” A poem appeared in the October 1963 Bulletin on the plight of a “White Picket,” which implored black protesters not to turn their “cold hate” on him because: I walk on your picket line, victim of other’s guilt My skin aflame, white is my cross, your dark eyes make me wilt. These undercurrents aside, the Rochdale protests were certainly a time when white and black marched together.66

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And it was during the Rochdale demonstrations, as if to underline and punctuate their importance, that on August 28, the single most remembered moment from the entire civil rights movement occurred: the March on Washington. In the predawn hours of that Wednesday morning, hundreds gathered at the Rochdale construction site, boarded old buses without air-conditioning, and took the long trip to the Washington Mall. Not everyone went, and some, such as William Booth, stayed home and manned the picket lines, to ensure that the building trades unions and their contractors would not get a free day without protests because of the goings-on in the nation’s capital. As Booth later recalled, for him, the demonstrations at Rochdale were more important than the March on Washington.67 When Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous speech said, “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” many of the Rochdale protesters felt he was speaking directly to them. As one person wrote in the Jamaica NAACP Bulletin in September 1963:68 Dr. King did not speak specifically of southern injustice, notorious for its flagrant disregard of human dignity, he spoke rather of northern communities where bigotry lay subtle and mean white men turn from it and pretend that it doesn’t exist. We at Rochdale Village know of that subtle meanness, and we have brought back this urgent message from Washington. Do not turn away from your duties as black Americans; do not let complacency burden you with its weight of indifference and strip you of your dignity; do not turn away from this fight which is stronger than any physical effort associated with a shooting war. Join with the pickets at Rochdale and walk and chant your way to dignity and freedom. . . . We returned to Jamaica dedicated to our task at Rochdale. For the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, the Rochdale protests were, at the time and in retrospect, their finest hour, their greatest mass protest, the moment when, in the words of one contemporary, they threw over the traces of “old black middleclass complacency” and demonstrated that they were willing and able to get down and dirty in the quest for civil rights.69 The Jamaica branch of the NAACP was a mass organization. Over the course of 1963, the publicity from the demonstrations led to an increase in the branch’s membership from 5,000 to 6,000.70 Its old fight to defend the rights of black homeowners in southeastern Queens was still very much needed, and early in 1963 it came to the aid of Richard Ellis and his family after they had purchased a house in Springfield Gardens, and where they remained, despite the efforts of a local bank to renege on a promised mortgage and the icy hostility of their new neighbors, which included fire bombings, rocks thrown through windows, and threatening phone calls. (Richard Ellis purchased a shotgun for his protection.)71

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By 1963 the Jamaica NAACP, long a bulwark of the black middle class and a prominent social organization, had become a powerful political force in Jamaica, increasingly able to make and unmake candidates on the basis of their racial politics. But the very political success of the Jamaica NAACP was an indication of changes in the offing, as the leaders of the branch embarked on political careers that were not necessarily tied to the organization. This was the path taken by Guy Brewer, the leader of the Jamaica NAACP in the early 1950s, who a decade later was emerging as a politician in South Jamaica, notable for his very sharp elbows to anyone, black or white, who presumed to get in his way.72 (He was posthumously rewarded by the naming of New York Boulevard, the site of the main protests at Rochdale, in his honor.) If Brewer became a power in southeastern Queens, his successors, notably William H. Booth and Paul Gibson, the two most prominent leaders of the Jamaica branch during the Rochdale protests, would wield power on a citywide scale. Booth, a Republican, was from 1966 through 1969 Mayor John Lindsay’s commissioner of human rights. In 1974 Gibson, then working as an executive for American Airlines, was appointed by Abe Beame as the city’s first African American deputy mayor. The Rochdale protests had two other cosponsors, Long Island CORE and the Coordinated Clergy. Long Island CORE was only a few years old, and was not a social organization. Compared with the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, it was minuscule, with no more than thirty to forty members in 1962, though it claimed a membership of two hundred by early 1964, no doubt a testament to the busy and publicity-filled year of 1963.73 Although it had a black leader, Lincoln Lynch, like most CORE chapters, its membership was predominantly white.74 As its name implies, Long Island CORE was not a Jamaica-based organization but was centered in Hempstead, and had pursued civil rights actions not only in Queens but in Nassau and Suffolk counties as well. Like its parent organization, Long Island CORE had its heyday in the early 1960s, committed to both its integrationist vision of a future America and to militant direct action. Although within a few years, CORE would be riven by internal dissension and would largely self-destruct as a major civil rights organization, one of its points had already been made; the time of polite middleclass black protests against racial injustices was a thing of the past. The other cosponsor of the Rochdale demonstrations was the Coordinated Clergy of Jamaica, under the direction of the Reverend Robert Ross, which was organized for the Rochdale demonstrations. This too represented a new direction in civil rights organizations, one largely pioneered by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Although black churches had sometimes been active in the struggle for civil rights, they often remained in the background, and many prominent churches and church leaders were at best neutral toward civil rights militancy. But increasingly black church leaders were presenting themselves as an alternative to the NAACP as a source of civil rights leadership. Mainly it was the younger clergy and the newer congregations that participated in the Coordinated Clergy. Lloyd Burris of the Zion Temple Baptist Church in August criticized some of the old-line black churches in Jamaica for their

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“do-nothing” attitude during the demonstrations.75 As the Jamaica NAACP Bulletin put it in September 1963, “Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout the local clergymen who have lent their support to the Rochdale protests—and those who have not.”76 Indeed, conspicuous by its absence from the Rochdale protests was the oldest and most prominent black church in Jamaica, the Allen AME. For careful observers of the 1963 Rochdale demonstrations, it was clear the seeds of change had been sown. But perhaps the clearest indication of coming changes in the civil rights movement was a fourth group that became prominent during the Rochdale protests, a loosely knit collection of like-minded individuals. Its origins are reflected in its name, the Rochdale Movement. It was a fairly matter-of-fact name for an organization that was, in every sense of the term, radical in its actions and in its critique of both American society and of existing black organizations. The movement shared with the other organizations the goal of increasing black employment in the building trades, but its larger, nationalist critique of the civil rights movement sought black empowerment as its end, and was, at best, skeptical and often hostile about the benefits of integration. The Rochdale Movement was largely the product of a single person, Herman Ferguson. No one would be more changed by the protests at Rochdale, or would travel down a more unlikely path. Born in the early 1920s and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a small town near Fort Bragg, he attended Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and Wilberforce College in Ohio before coming to New York City at the age of twenty-two, in 1943, to join the merchant marine during World War II.77 While in the merchant marine he became an active member of the National Maritime Union (NMU), one of the most radical of CIO unions, and a union with blacks in positions of leadership, notably its Caribbean-born secretary, Ferdinand Smith. Ferguson spent much of his free time in the merchant marine reading the left-wing literature the NMU distributed.78 Although his politics would change considerably from the interracial leftism of the NMU, the lessons from its radicalism would be an important influence on Ferguson’s politics. After the war, Ferguson went to NYU, obtained his teacher’s license, and began to teach in elementary schools in Brooklyn. In 1957 he moved to Jamaica, and taught in schools in Hollis and Bayside. He was primarily concerned with advancing his career, “involved in getting a firm grip on the ladder up, getting established in teaching, looking for ways to support my family, paying my mortgage, and buying a car.”79 He was very successful in his career, and by the late 1950s had become an assistant principal, and black assistant principals at the time were a commodity, as he told me, “as scarce as hen’s teeth.” (He was likely the only black male assistant principal in the New York City school system.) Within the school system he had the reputation of a quiet, competent, administrator, one who concentrated on school matters.80 Although Ferguson had some involvement with CORE and local community organizations, through 1963 most of his interest in politics had been “of the armchair type” confined to discussions “around beers and barbecues.” He had strong opinions. He had no faith in politics and politicians, whom he considered “a species

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to be avoided at all costs.” He rejected the movement for integration as a plaything for the black middle class, a goal that “offered nothing to the hopes and aspirations of black people.” The Nation of Islam and Malcolm X made a big impression on him, with their program of self-determination, self-reliance, and separation of the races. As for integration, he considered it something “that could not ever possibly take place in the United States with its history of racism and white supremacy.” Ferguson attended a preliminary rally before the Rochdale demonstrations primarily as a spectator (he wanted to see civil rights leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young in person, his skepticism of their politics notwithstanding) and was unmoved by their calls for protests. When the demonstrations began, on July 23, he was asleep in bed; his wife woke him up and asked, “Why aren’t you going over to the picket lines? It’s all over the radio. The police are over there arresting people. You’ve been blasting these integrationists and talking about what needs to be done, and so on, now why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?” Feeling abashed, he went over to the nearby Rochdale construction site, and soon became a regular on the picket lines. He was interviewed on the picket line by a reporter from the Long Island Press in early August (and photographed, no doubt for the last time in his career with an NAACP and CORE sign around his neck), and told the reporter that he was planning to go back to his North Carolina hometown and enter every restaurant and movie theater that ever barred him as a youth. “This campaign here has proven to me that I—and many others like me—will do anything to achieve full equality.” He was as good as his word.81 Although Ferguson always maintained good relations with the demonstration leaders, he felt the protests were too polite, too coordinated. For him, the relatively cordial interaction between the police and the demonstrators amounted to a deal whereby the protest leaders could make their point and get their headlines, and the contractors could continue to make their deliveries. The progress of work at the Rochdale site was not being substantially delayed by the protests. “We found that they really were token arrests. The leaders of the demonstrations were whisked in a police vehicle to Queens Court on Queens Blvd. They would go before a special judge who handled nothing but these cases. They would fine them $5, and then these people [would go] right back to the construction site. People used to boast about how many had been arrested that day.” At the nightly rallies, in his jaundiced words, “all these integrationist songs were being sung, and there was a religious kind of fervor about it that would insure that there would be another large crowd there the next day.” In his opinion it was all so much grandstanding; those arrested were being used, and the protests were “designed more for publicity purposes than anything else.” Moreover, good relations with the police offended Ferguson’s aesthetic of picketing. For a protest to be real, there needed to be real anger on both sides. You didn’t want sympathy from the police, you wanted their billy clubs; this was a sign you were fighting for something that those running things didn’t want to give you. His model for demonstrations were his days on the waterfront with the NMU, “demonstrating for wages and job benefits; the police fought us bitterly, and when you

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got arrested, they roughhoused you. I had never seen such congeniality between the demonstrators and the police” [as at Rochdale]. His anger at the arranged arrests “was my trade unionism coming to the fore, more than anything else.” An article in the Amsterdam News in late August reported on Ferguson’s group and their discontent. “The Rochdale Village protest seems to be bogging down. Our offices have received calls from some persons who think that the fight is not being waged properly. . . . The only way gains will be made is when the construction people are made to lose time and there is a definite showdown.”82 Ferguson and his group planned guerrilla tactics. They had learned that cement was mixed off-site, and unless it was delivered to the construction site in a reasonable amount of time, it would harden and become unusable. If the trucks were under guard at the site, elsewhere they were less closely watched, and Ferguson and his allies tried to sabotage the trucks at their staging areas elsewhere in Queens, putting sand in their gas tanks, letting air out of the trucks’ tires, and chaining people to the trucks. However, the September 1963 NAACP Bulletin had a mysterious notice about “Butler’s raiders” (perhaps a nom de guerre) conducting raids against “Ryan’s Cementers.”83 But the main plan and tactic was a dramatic shutting down of the construction cranes. If they could be immobilized, all the work on the construction site would be halted, at least for the day. But the problems in arranging this were considerable. The construction site was well guarded at night. Anyone caught trying to break in to the site would face arrest, and not the kid-glove arrests that had been typical. However, the group found a piece of fence on New York Boulevard and 137th Avenue that they could work loose and crawl through. Once the action was planned and the date and time were set—the early morning hours of September 6—many of those who had volunteered to participate failed to show. As Ferguson remembered, “Some of the most vocally outspoken people came up with lame-ass excuses why they couldn’t make it to the event.” After some scrambling, a team was assembled. Ferguson was originally not supposed to be among those participating in the action, because it was feared that it might jeopardize his position as an assistant principal. But to encourage others, and to set an example, Ferguson decided to take part. In the end, at two or three o’clock in the morning, five people crept their way onto the construction site. In the darkness, Susan Schwartz chained herself to the base of a crane, and Ferguson and Alexander Passikoff climbed one crane while Franklin Anderson and Andrew Young (not the SCLC leader) climbed another. Those climbing the cranes, in pitch blackness, went as high as sixty feet in the air, as the cranes grew increasingly rickety the higher they reached. Eventually they secured a position and chained themselves there.84 Regarding the participation of whites in the action, Ferguson told me: These were like military actions. We needed soldiers, and we were all fighting for a common cause. As when I was with the NMU, our troops went out on the picket lines and fought with the police; we had many white guys out there with us, so that didn’t create a problem at all—we had a common cause and

The Fight at the Construction Site

Figure 8. Leonard Sykes, “The Man on the Crane: Rochdale Village ’63.” News Bulletin, Jamaica Branch NAACP, vol. 9, no. 8 (October 1963).

enemy, trying to get Rochdale to hire more black workers—the other motivations, oh I don’t know[;] those people who were willing to take this step[,] as far as I was concerned they were quite acceptable to me, I had no problem with them.

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Chained into place, the protesters awaited the coming of dawn and the start of the workday. “I’ll never forget, as the sun rose in the sky it was light enough to actually see us and the buildings, when the workers came in. They didn’t see us at first, but when they started the day’s work—they were at the 7th or 8th floor, and there we were on the cranes—there was a look on astonishment on their faces.” The police were called, the demonstrators refused to budge, and couldn’t even if they wanted to; they had no keys for the chains. A stalemate ensued for several hours. The media was notified, and a large crowd gathered. Eventually the cranes were lowered to a horizontal position, ten feet or so over the ground, large safety nets were opened, police officers carefully sawed open the chains, and the protesters fell into the nets and were arrested. The protesters had stopped all work on the construction site until lunchtime. When they were arraigned later in the day, the presiding judge might well have been the first to make an invidious comparison between the previous week’s March on Washington and the subsequent direction of the civil rights movement: “The demonstrators in Washington were wonderful. You people are accused of flaunting the law daily in your demonstration.”85 The effect of this spectacular act of civil disobedience was electric. The Pittsburgh Courier reported, “Anti-bias demonstrations reached new heights last week” at Rochdale, and claimed that this new tactic was the next step in the civil rights struggle. “Just picketing alone will just tire out the demonstrators. The politicians, newspapers, and ‘white liberal’ elements have always approved of ‘peaceful protests’ that have served to do no more than exhaust the protesting groups without bringing about any change.”86 The Amsterdam News published a photograph of a beaming Herman Ferguson, who referred to himself as a “freedom astronaut.”87 Ferguson and his peers were now local heroes, and the other groups at the Rochdale demonstrations rallied to their aid, providing lawyers and other assistance. The October NAACP Bulletin bore a moving illustration titled “The Man on the Crane, Rochdale Village ’63,” depicting a black man suspended in air, his left arm clutching the crane, his right arm outstretched in protest. Paul Gibson wrote an open letter to Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner: Silhouetted against a grey September sky, suspended high above the trampled earth; clung a human sacrifice, inches from death and but minutes from imprisonment, he fought his silent protest against inequality with [what] he felt was his last effective weapon—his body. . . . We pray that the shadowy figure of this man clinging to a crane and chained to a dream will haunt you every moment as it haunts us. We pray that he will tear at your heart and sear away your very soul. . . . We pray that he will infect you and give you no peace until you climb to those same dizzy heights of sacrifice and fight bigotry in your way as The Man On The Crane fights in his—with courage, bolstered by determination and dedication.

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Ferguson and the others had to make a number of court appearances in connection with the trespass charges brought against them. In early December the Queens County Supreme Court judge Joseph M. Conroy dismissed all charges against the Rochdale defendants, likening them to “the patriots of the Boston Tea Party.” About a week later, the first families moved into Rochdale Village.88 Ferguson was not the only person who interpreted the demonstrations at Rochdale and other sites in 1963 as reflecting an interest in black empowerment and the need for blacks to follow a consciously black agenda, contra the “integrationist” perspective of the mainstream civil rights organizations. After the political establishment came out against the use of employment quotas, the always incendiary Adam Clayton Powell Jr. said the lesson was that “no white man anymore is going to tell me what I should do in the field of civil rights. . . . Follow black leadership. Don’t question it.”89 By the summer of 1963, nationalist calls for black economic empowerment were being widely discussed by mainstream civil rights organizations, including the Jamaica branch of the NAACP.90 In September 1963 a rally of the Rochdale protests was addressed by Louis Lomax, one of the leading black journalists of the era, who was a resident of St. Albans and active in the Jamaica NAACP. Lomax told the crowd that Rochdale Village was being built by Jews, while the construction industry was run by Italians. The “dilemma faced by the city and state executives is whether to alienate the Negro community or the Jewish and Italian communities” and he told the crowd that because blacks lacked political power, they would be ignored, and the Jews and Italians listened to. Blacks needed to organize a strong political organization that would listen to their interests.91 Ferguson’s belief that the NAACP and CORE “were exploiting the civil rights movement to aggrandize themselves, to swell their membership, to get more contributions, but not seriously trying to change things and get jobs for black people” had many supporters. Over the course of the summer and early fall Ferguson’s involvement with black nationalism went beyond the confines of his armchair. He befriended members of the Nation of Islam (NOI), who typically hawked copies of Muhammad Speaks at venues that attracted politically active blacks, such as the Rochdale protests. The NOI members stayed on the sidelines, not allowed to participate in political protests, lamenting that all this black passion was being wasted on the fight for integration. Malcolm X was interested in the Rochdale demonstrations and the demonstrations that were taking place at Brooklyn Downstate. He had previous contacts with the Jamaica NAACP, and according to William Booth, he attended and marched in a demonstration held by the branch at the A&P supermarket on Merrick Boulevard and Linden in early 1963, and told them to “keep up the good work.”92 Malcolm X attended the July rally at Rochdale before the opening day of protests as a spectator, sizing up the crowd. (This was the first time that Ferguson saw Malcolm X, though the two men didn’t speak.) Members of the Nation of Islam reported back to Malcolm X on Ferguson and the Rochdale Movement, and its increasingly fiery nationalist rhetoric.

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By October it was clear the Rochdale demonstrations were drawing to a close. The question among the leaders of the protests was what to do next. Everyone wanted the passion and the energy the demonstrations summoned to continue; everyone was unsatisfied with the results of the protests, in terms of creating new employment opportunities, and everyone also knew that there were many matters that still needed addressing in Jamaica. There were discussions among the various groups, the NAACP, Long Island CORE, and the Coordinated Clergy, about creating a broader and ongoing “Rochdale Movement” that would continue to focus on employment issues, in particular the lack of blacks in other than menial capacities or in insignificant numbers in most of the large stores of Jamaica Avenue, the area’s main shopping district. These demonstrations started on October 7, with the NAACP and other organizations leafleting Jamaica Avenue.93 However the NAACP was uncomfortable with pushing too aggressively for “selective buying” and boycotts, and instead tried to make arrangements with the stores for more minority hires. For Ferguson, now the public leader of the increasingly aggressive faction that had taken the name the Rochdale Movement, this was insufficient, and he and his followers demanded five hundred jobs, immediately, from major Jamaica Avenue employers such as the Gertz and May department stores, and started picketing and urging boycotts with the old 1930s slogan “Don’t buy where you can’t work.” The members of the Rochdale Movement would also assemble in the evening, have candlelight demonstrations, and march silently while handing out literature. But the NAACP felt boycotted stores were unlikely to be accommodating in the area of providing new jobs. Paul Gibson said, “Our purpose is to get the general support for the civil rights fight, and not to cut our throats by a general selective buying campaign.” 94 The NAACP and CORE remained involved in the protests in Jamaica—indeed, William Booth said in an interview that the most important consequence of the demonstrations in Rochdale would be changes in the stores on Jamaica Avenue.95 At times the various factions worked together, as in March 1964, when the Jamaica NAACP held a strategy session with CORE, the Jamaica Coordinating Council, the Urban League, and the Rochdale Movement to discuss the boycott of Jamaica Avenue stores and their dissatisfaction with the pace of school integration.96 But more and more, the NAACP, CORE, and the Rochdale Movement were working separately, and the last, with its aggressive campaigns, garnered considerable press attention.97 The demonstrations on Jamaica Avenue by the Rochdale Movement cemented the alliance between Ferguson and Malcolm X. Members of the Rochdale Committee increasingly emphasized their black nationalist ideology. A member of the Rochdale Movement, Merle Stewart, called the Rochdale Movement in January 1964 “an off-shoot of Garveyism,” and in April 1964 said that the Rochdale Movement was “Queens’s only Black Nationalist Group.” Members of the Nation of Islam served as unofficial bodyguards for the demonstrators, sometimes intervening when bystanders threatened to become violent.98

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Ferguson and his allies started to attend services on Sunday morning at the Mosque No. 7, in Harlem, and Malcolm X agreed to attend a rally for the Rochdale Movement, though as a minister of the Nation of Islam he was forbidden to speak at political events. Nonetheless, the event was advertised for Thanksgiving Day 1963 as “Thanksgiving with Malcolm.” According to Ferguson, “there was an overflow crowd, they had police everywhere, it was a great success, and we introduced black nationalism into southeast Queens.” He told the crowd that the Nation of Islam would support the Rochdale Movement, but saw this as a first and preliminary step. “He cautioned that the boycott was just a start. The next move would be to refrain from buying where you can’t work, followed by a refusal to buy where you don’t own, and blacks need to start their own businesses.”99 In 1963, Thanksgiving Day fell on November 28, five days after the assassination of President Kennedy, and three days before Malcolm X’s famous speech at the Manhattan Center, where, in answer to a question, he said the Kennedy assassination was a matter of “chickens coming home to roost.” His punishment was a ninety-day silencing by Elijah Muhammad, and in March he left the Nation of Islam. The speech on behalf of the Rochdale Movement was one of the very last, if not the penultimate, address he delivered as a minister of the Nation of Islam. According to Herman Ferguson, the subject of the Kennedy assassination did not come up in his talk in Jamaica. After he completed his hajj to Mecca, Malcom X returned to Jamaica sometime in the spring of 1964, to witness the other focus of the Rochdale Movement, the “Billy Banjo” mural at the Jamaica Savings Bank. As part of a tableau of Queens and Long Island history the only African American included was a historical figure from the early nineteenth century, an elderly black man, the very image of the minstrel stage darky, strummin’ on the old banjo for the amusement of some white children sitting at his feet. Malcolm X wanted to see the image, and came to Jamaica one day to inspect it. According to Ferguson he created “pandemonium,” drawing stares and looks from officials in the bank and a crowd that surrounded him and was eventually dispersed by the police. The bank president denied the image was demeaning to blacks, though he did offer to replace the image with one of Booker T. Washington. After a renewed campaign to remove the image in 1967, which included a New York Times editorial attacking the depiction as “silly,” the bank did remove the image, and the entire mural, in 1967 as part of an “over-all change in décor.”100 The Rochdale Movement enjoyed a fair amount of success. By some accounts the boycotts were effective, and by November 1963, Jamaica Avenue merchants formed a committee to augment black hires. Unlike the fight against the building trades unions, the protests would have a great deal of long-term success.101 (Unfortunately, the growth of black employment along Jamaica Avenue in the mid and late 1960s coincided with the strip’s precipitous decline as a major shopping district.) However, for Ferguson and his close followers, no more than five men, the Rochdale Movement seemed too limited in its goals, and Ferguson became interested

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in pursuing a broader nationalist agenda, one ever more closely identified with the nationalism of Malcolm X. Ferguson became one of Malcolm X’s closest associates during the tumultuous last year of his life, and Malcolm X acknowledged the importance of the Rochdale Movement in several of his speeches in 1964.102 Although Malcolm X encouraged Ferguson to keep his involvement a secret, again to avoid jeopardizing his role as an assistant principal, Ferguson became a leader in the organization Malcolm X founded after leaving the Nation of Islam, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, became chairman of its Education Committee, and taught in its liberation school. Ferguson was present at the Audubon Ballroom the day Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965, and became one of the most ardent keepers of the slain nationalist’s flame. Ferguson remained very active in black nationalist circles in Queens and New York City and was active in the Revolutionary Action Movement and later in the separatist Republic of New Afrika. He gathered a group around him to study revolutionary authors such as Franz Fanon and founded the Jamaica Rifle and Pistol Club, which had as its purpose protection against police brutality and preparation for what members believed was a coming revolutionary struggle in America. Like many black revolutionary groups in the era of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, there were government efforts to infiltrate Ferguson’s group by agent provocateurs, and an undercover NYPD police agent became an active member. According to Ferguson, the double agent was a “very responsible person,” and one of the group’s hardest workers, in charge of the youth group and training young people in the use of guns; he also recommended that the group make practical use of their gun training and consider assassinating civil rights leaders, such as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. There was, in Ferguson’s words, “loose talk” to that effect among the other members. This was enough in early 1967 for Ferguson and sixteen others to be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A small arsenal was found in Ferguson’s house.103 Ferguson was suspended from his assistant principal’s position, but he remained active in black nationalist causes, and given his pedagogical background, it is not surprising that he injected himself into the racially charged school decentralization debate. In the fall of 1967 Rhody McCoy, the head of the decentralization experiment in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, asked Ferguson to become a principal in the new district, but the Board of Education balked.104 Ferguson became an adviser to another decentralization pilot program, at IS (Intermediate School) 201 in Harlem, another center for controversy after the local school board forced out a Jewish principal. Ferguson spoke at the school on the third anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, in February 1968, calling for black self-defense against the police and sparking an outrage.105 There was much publicity in the mainstream press given to an article written by Ferguson in a local radical newspaper, in which Ferguson outlined a “black survival curriculum” for local public schools in black neighborhoods: the day would start with a pledge of allegiance to the red, black, and green flag of Africa; there would be classes in Swahili and Yoruba; and the curriculum would

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include gun safety, target practice, and associated classes in the physics, mathematics, and chemistry of ballistics. Loudspeakers would play the recorded works of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and Aretha Franklin, while students were inculcated in the virtues of “self-determination, self-control, and self-defense.”106 By 1968 Herman Ferguson was a hero to black and some white radicals—he would be the Freedom and Peace Party candidate for senator from New York State, on a national ticket headed by Dr. Benjamin Spock—and was a model and inspiration to other radical groups in Jamaica, such as the Black Panthers, who admired him for his remarkable eloquence, his instruction in matters revolutionary (he was a natural pedagogue), and for all he had given up for his radical beliefs.107 For many whites, however, he had become one of the most feared black people in the city, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in the struggle for black equality since 1963. In a September 1968 editorial, the New York Times assailed Ferguson’s ideas about racial separation as “Hitlerian,” and a few weeks later an article in the same paper accused him of exhibiting a “sick and dangerous kind of racism.”108 But that fall Ferguson had more important things to worry about than bad write-ups in the Times. In October he was convicted of conspiracy and later sentenced to three and a half to seven years.109 In 1970, when Ferguson ran out of appeals, he jumped bail and fled to Guyana, where he would remain until 1989, when he returned to the United States. His involvement with Rochdale Village would have an interesting coda, discussed in the book’s final chapter. 110 William Booth, too, had been transformed by the Rochdale protests. When, in February 1966, he became the city’s commissioner for human rights, he said that his first job was to “get after the construction unions” to finish what was started at the Rochdale Village demonstrations.111 A 1967 report Booth commissioned indicated little or no progress since Rochdale, and showed that blacks and Puerto Ricans still made up less than 2 percent of skilled unionized workforce in the building trades.112 If integration was important to Booth and many of the black protesters at Rochdale, it was never understood by its black advocates as simply living or going to school with whites. It was instead a strategy to increase black economic, social, and political power. The debate between integration and nationalism, at Rochdale in the summer of 1963 and thereafter, was largely over means, not ends. Subsequent events, notably the 1968 school strike, rather than further separate the two sides, would bring black liberals like Booth and radicals like Ferguson closer together. When I was growing up in Rochdale in the 1960s I knew nothing about the demonstrations at the Rochdale construction site, and I was not alone. The UHF and the leaders of Rochdale looked on it as an unfortunate episode, external to Rochdale Village itself, and said little or nothing about it. This would change once Rochdale became predominantly black, and it would be celebrated as perhaps the greatest moment in the cooperative’s history.113 But for those who were paying attention, the demonstrations at the Rochdale construction site in the summer of 1963, if nothing else, showed that by the time the first families moved in to Rochdale that December, the clock on integration was already ticking.

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

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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.

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 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

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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

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Map 3. Rochdale Village plan, ca. 1968

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 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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]

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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

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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

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“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

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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,

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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 lifeenhancing 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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 “castiron 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: thirtyfive 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

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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

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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,

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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.

8. Integrated Living

Rochdale Village has established a pattern for integrating ghettoes which can and should be duplicated elsewhere. Harold Ostroff, 1968

In the beginning of 1965, as the final families were moving into Rochdale, Abraham Kazan wrote about what he thought was the most important aspect of the new cooperative. “The most significant achievement of these activities was the bringing about of racial integration at Rochdale Village in a constructive and practical manner. . . . At Rochdale Village, approximately 4,700 white and 1,200 Negro families have jointly built a cooperative-housing development where they intend to live together, and equally enjoy all the benefits that they may expect from this cooperative development.” For Kazan and the UHF, integration in Rochdale wasn’t just highfalutin talk or a parade of good intentions. It was the genuine article, the thing itself. “It is one thing for people to attend political or union meetings or even religious or social functions where there is integration for a few hours and then return to their segregated neighborhoods. It is quite a different thing, however, to achieve an integrated community where white and Negro families live next door to one another.” In Rochdale “children share the same play areas, attend the same schools,” and “adults participate in the same community activities.” Integrate housing, and everything else will follow. “Volumes and volumes of all kinds of theories are being written on how to achieve better human relations. However, if we could concentrate our efforts on one phase—housing—we would be attacking the root of our other

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Figure 11. Two boys fixing a bicycle, 1968, with building 16 in the background. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

problems.”1 (And there, of course, is the rub, since the subsequent half century has demonstrated that America can make racial progress in some areas—even elect a black president—without seriously challenging the prevailing segregation in our neighborhoods and schools, without seriously “attacking the root” of our continuing racial separation.) For the UHF it was also very important that integration in Rochdale be “natural,” by which they primarily meant that it was accomplished without governmental sanctions or mandates. No one was forced to move to Rochdale, no one was bused to make Rochdale’s schools integrated, and no homeowner had to be coerced to rent to minorities. Blacks and whites lived together in Rochdale because they wanted to. “It is a natural result, that by integrating our neighborhoods we will, at

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the same time, create well balanced communities with integrated schools, churches, recreational and social activities.”2 A UHF official told the New York Herald Tribune in 1965 that they made “no conscious effort to ‘integrate’ Rochdale,” and “all Negro applicants who met the income limitations were treated equally with whites.”3 The belief that integration could be natural, requiring simply the decision of people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds to live together, was one of the initial strengths (and in the end, perhaps, one of the underlying weaknesses) of Rochdale’s racial experiment. Harold Ostroff would write in 1968 that Rochdale “is a well integrated community racially and economically. The influx of white families into this neighborhood have naturally integrated the schools and other neighborhood facilities.”4 Rochdale’s residents did view its integration as natural and unforced. The weekly newspaper Inside Rochdale reported in 1966 that while “the residents of Rochdale are no different from people anywhere” in their racial attitudes, “we [at] least gave integrated housing a try.” As a result, the cooperative “may easily become a national name as the advocates of Open Housing may look to Rochdale and say to the nation that integrated housing exists and works!” The article went on to say that “another summer has come and gone and Rochdale Village still exists in a strong and healthy condition. We have weathered our first three years of existence despite all sorts of gloomy predictions that this ‘experiment’ would not work.” Although there were possible storm clouds on the horizon, “our total community must still be a showplace for our city and nation to show that responsible integration can work.”5 No doubt the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society in 1965 had a keener appreciation of the challenge of integration than almost any other organization in Rochdale, but they too agreed that unforced proximity, like ocean waves washing over and eroding pebbles on a beach, would in time rub away the hard edges of prejudice and bias. “Rochdale, because it is a voluntarily integrated community, can become an outstanding example of how this American problem of mutual distrust, fear and distortion can be resolved.”6 By the mid-1960s, “natural” integration, UHF-style, was coming under attack by some civil rights groups as inadequate, though as usual it was Co-op City, rather than Rochdale, that bore the brunt of the attacks. Some civil rights groups complained that the projected percentage of minorities in Co-op City—the same as Rochdale’s at 15 to 20 percent—was too low, and that “natural” integration needed to be augmented by direct governmental intervention to improve the numbers. The UHF demurred, and Harold Ostroff promised in 1968 that “we can have integration without the involvement of the government” and that the UHF preferred the “voluntary” approach to integration.7 It is perhaps too easy in retrospect to criticize “natural integration” for its naivety, for its belief that individual volition can somehow trump the heavy weight of social forces that tend to keep races separate. But in the end, in a democracy, no amount of prodding, official encouragement, or even government sanction, will make people live together unless they want to and think it is in their interests to do so. However it was achieved, Rochdale Village in its early

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years was an integrated community whose residents, white and black, genuinely wanted to live there. • • • Nevertheless, the adjustments to living in Rochdale, for members of all races, were considerable. New arrivals had to adjust to their new neighbors within the cooperative and to living within South Jamaica. Given the predominantly Jewish character of Rochdale, it was the non-Jews, who included almost all the black families, who had the biggest adjustments to make to living within the complex. Faced with the overwhelmingly African American character of the surrounding neighborhood, it was the Jews and other whites who had to make the greatest adjustment to South Jamaica. There were successes and failures in both endeavors. Blacks (and other non-Jews) who moved to Rochdale found themselves living amid a public culture that was overwhelmingly Jewish, both in its demography and its character. As Harold Ostroff said, one reason why whites moved to Rochdale in large numbers was that it was “a large enough community it wasn’t going to be a little isolated co-op in the midst of a black community.”8 A number of families moved to Rochdale because they felt that its environment would be more Jewish than their changing original neighborhoods. One man remembers, “My father had died and my mother didn’t feel up to dealing with a house on her own. We were also one of about two or three Jewish families in a huge Irish Catholic enclave and she wanted us to grow up knowing other Jews.”9 They weren’t disappointed, as Rochdale soon had three synagogues, and early High Holy Day services, jointly conducted by the Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, that filled the 2,000-seat auditorium in the Community Center.10 A 1965 survey found two-thirds of Rochdale’s residents were professing Jews.11 Furthermore, a large number of residents were Jewish by cultural background and considered themselves secular Jews. This was the orientation of the UHF and most of its staff, the product of the secular Jewish culture of the Jewish labor movement in early twentieth century New York. (Harold Ostroff would have a second career after leaving the UHF in 1975 as president of the Forward Association, publisher of the venerable Yiddish paper the Forverts, and was the main creator of its English-language weekly, the Forward.)12 Among older people, Yiddish was still widely spoken, and there were occasional advertisements in Inside Rochdale in Yiddish; the Senior Citizens Club would have occasional Yiddish poetry nights. Libby Kahane, the wife of an Orthodox rabbi, remembered that “a great many residents of Rochdale Village were retired tailors and seamstresses, who had arrived in the United States in their teens and whose mother tongue was Yiddish. Wherever I went in Rochdale Village, I heard people speaking Yiddish, and I thought intolerantly, ‘So many years in the country and they haven’t learned English yet!’ ” If a rebbitzin (rabbi’s wife) felt that Rochdale was in some sense “too Jewish,” non-Jews doubtless had greater difficulties.13

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It was on the level of personal interaction that some of the complexities of integration became most apparent. Elderly blacks felt out of place in the senior citizens’ clubs. Although blacks were welcomed—“we try to urge Negroes to come in but they are shy; maybe they want to keep away,” said one woman—it is easy to why blacks might have been diffident about joining a club that was described as consisting of “dozens of elderly men and two women playing pinochle and gin rummy, many speaking in Yiddish.”14 If, by common consensus, black senior citizens tended to spend nice afternoons indoors, perhaps enjoying the air-conditioning, elderly Jews treated Rochdale as Miami Beach North, and loved to spend their afternoons sunbathing seated on park benches, grouchily complaining about those who disturbed their reveries. They complained about noisy children and speeding bicyclists, and adopted a proprietary attitude toward their perches, and according to some accounts informed those who had the temerity to preempt their accustomed seats, “ ‘You’re sitting on my bench,’ as if they owned it.”15 Some blacks felt submerged in Rochdale’s profoundly Jewish culture, and perhaps experienced some cultural insensitivity, a sense that the openness to blacks was an invitation to join the Jews on their terms. One man recounted his single session at a folk-dance group; he never went back because many of the dances and folk songs were Jewish. One black man told a reporter in 1965 that “we have no anti-Semitic feelings, but we don’t want to be overwhelmed by Jewish culture.” He complained that his seven-year-old son was having “problems about his identity” and wanted to stay home from school on even minor Jewish holidays.16 A black woman said her son’s best friends were some “lovely Jewish boys” but she wished that he would show a greater interest in his black heritage.17 There were more serious complaints. Some blacks were irritated at being referred to by the derogatory Yiddish term for blacks, schwartze. “Do they really think,” one woman told Harvey Swados, “that we’re incapable of learning the one Yiddish word that refers to us?”18 One man, of mixed African American and Jewish parentage, said many years later, with a bit of exaggeration to make a point, “When I first moved in to Rochdale I thought schwartze was my father’s nickname.” (He also complained that the Rochdale Co-operative Supermarket never had a black person behind the deli counter, actually touching the cold cuts and other “appetizing” sold to customers.)19 There were differing opinions on whether “the stare,” that primal form of racial interaction, had been banished from Rochdale. One black man told a reporter in 1965 that in Rochdale “the best feeling is that there is no feeling, no hostility, none of those stares when you get off the elevator.” One black woman said that when she did her laundry in her own building she had no problem, but once, when she had to go to a different laundry room, she was the recipient of “the stare.”20 As was and is generally the case, black teenagers were particularly likely to be targets of suspicious glances, though once again there are differences of opinion as to the pervasiveness of the hostile once-overs. Some blacks who were teenagers in Rochdale remembered little in the way of getting the fish-eye from residents or

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shopkeepers; others did.21 One common means of retaliation was to exploit white fears. Black teenagers walking several abreast on Rochdale’s pathways might enjoy the sight of white teens scattering meekly before them. One man remembers that when he and his friends went to the Co-op Supermarket to purchase a drink and cupcake for a quarter, “we always had a sense of being watched by the supervision, and it soon became a game; three of us would each go down different aisles so they would have to choose to follow only one of us.”22 At times subtle class differences also came into play within the African American families in Rochdale and between whites and blacks. Some blacks in Rochdale complained of the “Sag Harbor crowd,” a reference to the dicty haunt on eastern Long Island for well-to-do blacks. “They have their summer houses and boats and two cars and we don’t see them much.” If the black bourgeoisie lived in Rochdale, the Jewish bourgeoisie lived elsewhere, in places like Great Neck on Long Island or Scarsdale in Westchester. As one reporter wrote in 1965, “Many of Rochdale’s Negroes feel that they are superior to their White neighbors in education and social attainment.”23 Rochdale was home to lower-middle-class Jews and solidly middle-class blacks, reflecting both the difficulties blacks had in finding decent housing and the slipperiness of class distinctions. Blacks who moved to Rochdale often felt that in some sense they had “made it,” while many Jewish families felt they were just getting by. Given the prevalence of civil servants among Rochdale’s black families, including many teachers, it is entirely possible that there was a higher percentage of blacks with college degrees than whites. As Harvey Swados suggested, middle-class blacks found themselves living “in a Jewish community composed substantially of simple working-class people or their children” and often cringed at the perceived cultural differences.24 Not to put too fine a point on it, some blacks found their Jewish neighbors somewhat slovenly. Since many black families had moved to Rochdale from private homes, this perception may in part reflect unease with the greater intimacy of apartment-house living. Cal Jones said a number of black families had “moved from private homes and had sold their homes to move to Rochdale, and some were terribly dissatisfied about it—when you lived in a home you might have kept your lawn manicured and here someone is leaving garbage in the back hall. In your own home, you could lavish special attention on things; now they were just a door on a floor.”25 One black housewife was appalled that Jewish women hung their blankets and bed linen over the balconies. “I didn’t know what to think. Nobody ever did that where we used to live.”26 One black man saw an elderly Jewish man spit on the floor of the building near the entranceway, and told him he thought it was disgusting. “What’s the matter?” the man replied. “The porter will clean it up.”27 Others found Jews overinquisitive and overintrusive, or in common parlance, a bit “pushy.” One woman complained that Jewish women were friendly, but when they visited her apartment they seemed surprised to see that she was a tidy housekeeper. Other Jewish women would ask how much the furnishings cost, and then shake their heads knowingly, telling her that she paid too much, informing

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her where she could have gotten them wholesale. One day a black woman, perhaps in an effort to better understand her neighbors, was in the laundry room reading Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, a popular murder mystery of the day with a pregnant and comely female corpse discovered on the grounds of a synagogue. She was told angrily by another woman not to read the book, because “it’ll give you all the wrong ideas about us.”28 By no means were all the opinions of Jews negative. Indeed, philo-Semitism was one reason many blacks moved to Rochdale, assuming that Jews would make the perfect partners for an experiment in integration, because, according to one person interviewed by Swados, Jews were (in comparison to other whites) “more concerned than most with the quality of their children’s education, but that they are more cultivated, more sensitive, more liberal-minded.”29 Cal Jones, for instance, moved to Rochdale in part because he knew “an overwhelming majority of the community would be Jewish, and I thought the fight for quality education would be somewhat easier having Jewish neighbors who were familiar with the education system.”30 But of course close proximity can disabuse a person of positive as well as negative stereotypes, and what most people discovered was that their neighbors, however committed to integration, were not particularly elevated in either their ideals or actions, and had the same gamut of prejudices to be found elsewhere. Rochdale’s playgrounds and other recreational areas afforded other integration test sites. Because Rochdale’s facilities were in much better shape than comparable local grounds, they were heavily used both by Rochdale residents and by members of the surrounding community. This seems to have worked well, perhaps because sports is a relatively unself-conscious activity, and doesn’t require much in the way of preliminary discussion or friendly overtures. You just choose up sides and play. As one man remembered, “When we needed one more for punchball or stickball it didn’t matter if the kid was black or white, Jewish or gentile.”31 As someone else told me, “If everyone in Rochdale had been a jock, there never would have been any problems.”32 Playing sports was one thing; friendship and greater degrees of intimacy was another. Children generally got along fine. Their elders had more difficulty. Whenever Evlynne Braithwaithe, aged ten or eleven, would visit the home of a white classmate, she remembers that “[the parents] were kind of surprised that so-and-so had a little black friend.” With the onset of puberty and dating racial divisions sometimes created an additional barrier between young people of different ages. The great teenage hangout was the area in front of the Community Center, with its own complex social scene and informal rules. One woman remembered that she would leave her house at seven o’clock and sit on a bench until ten o’clock, just talking. “If you had a boyfriend you snuck off into the bushes and made out, but if you didn’t have a boyfriend you just sat on the bench and gossiped.” Although it was far from the rule, interracial dating (which at least in one instance led to marriage) was not uncommon.33 However, many of the cliques and groups that formed in this

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setting were consciously monoracial. As one white teenager explained to Harvey Swados34 There’s no problem between us [blacks and whites] here at Rochdale. . . . We never even think about it, at least when we see each other individually. It’s only when we get together like here, as a bunch, that we tend to separate—I don’t know why. There must be 15, 20 gangs like ours, and it’s true that they’re mostly separate, Negro and white. But the fact that we [ white teenagers] hang out together doesn’t mean that we don’t get on swell with the Negro kids. As it was with the teenagers, so it was with their parents. Although plenty of interracial adult friendships grew in Rochdale, most residents, white and black, tended to form their closest relationships within their own race. It was no doubt true, as a reporter stated in 1965, that integration in Rochdale “produced neither an easy assimilation of Negroes into the community nor [an] intimate social contact between the races.”35 A black cooperator said in 1969 that most of his friends were black, though he had made a few white friends as well. Rochdale wasn’t all “love thy neighbor, but I get along fine.”36 This is perhaps all that one can or should expect. Jane Jacobs argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that “overcoming residential discrimination comes hard where people have no means of keeping a civilized public life on a basically dignified public footing, and their private lives on a private footing.”37 If she could have overcome her prejudices against cooperative housing, she might have found what she was looking for in Rochdale. However, there were distinct limitations in thinking of integration in Rochdale as a natural and almost casual process. It left many Rochdale residents thinking that integration was simply a matter of getting along with interracial neighbors, a problem to be solved personally and individually. And many Rochdale residents felt that they had already done their bit for the cause, and to ask them to go further or do any more would be unfair. In response to a sense of pressure of this sort, a white resident of Rochdale wrote in 1965 that while many praise the cooperative as a great experiment in integration, “we came to Rochdale, not as fighters for integration, but as people who have accepted integration as a way of life.”38 Integration as “a way of life” basically meant passive integration, integration by a sort of social osmosis, something that happened to you, rather than something you sought out. Now, it is true that all Rochdale cooperators, by the mere act of living in Rochdale, had done more to realize integration as a practical ideal than almost any other group of New Yorkers. But ultimately it would not be enough. To conquer the centrifugal forces that always threaten to pull experiments of this sort apart, especially during the polarizing racial climate of the 1960s, the push for integration had to be on some level deliberate and self-conscious, consciously striving to a predetermined goal. To preserve what had been created in Rochdale it was necessary to strive for more, in order to place integration in Rochdale on a more

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secure and stable basis. Some recognized this early on. The Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society wrote in 1965 that both whites and blacks “live in an unreal world, created out of the distortions and suspicions that usually accompany separation and distance.” To really work, integration had to be “a two-way street with benefits flowing in both directions.”39 This would always be a challenge. The formation of the Negro Cultural Society provides some insight into the dilemmas faced by blacks in Rochdale’s early years. Despite the huge number of Jewish organizations in Rochdale, there was no unanimous support among blacks in Rochdale for forming their own organization. There was some feeling that if they formed a separate organization “we were just segregating ourselves all over again,” and that instead they should join other organizations and participate fully within them. This was the position of the highest-ranking African American UHF official in Rochdale, the assistant manager Leonard Bridges. The UHF exerted subtle pressure against a separate black organization, on the grounds that “whenever blacks organize whites become concerned that we’re coming after them.” (Those who formed the several score Jewish organizations in Rochdale evidently had few fears that they would be seen as separatist and unwelcoming to non-Jews.)40 In any event, the Negro Cultural Society was formed out of a spirit of admiration and emulation of Jewish organizational abilities. Cal Jones for one was impressed by the political skills of Jews and their penchant for forming themselves into an ever-growing array of clubs and associations. He told a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in 1965 that “I guess you have to make it easy for Negroes to join things,” because they were “Johnny-come-latelies to organization.”41 In my discussion with Mr. Jones forty years after the comment, he said that what he meant was that the formation of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society was in part inspired by the plethora of Jewish organizations in Rochdale, and the desire to create a kindred group for blacks. After some discussion, it was decided to form an organization that would not be a branch of an existing group (such as the NAACP or CORE) but would be indigenous to Rochdale, and would not be explicitly political in its character. A poll of the blacks in Rochdale determined that the focus of the new group would be black history and culture. It would go out of its way to proclaim its inclusive character. In its initial announcement it claimed that the purpose of the society was to “promote fellowship and cooperation amongst Negroes and all other cooperators of Rochdale Village,” and that membership would be “open to all cooperators.”42 The Negro Cultural Society addressed the concern among many blacks in Rochdale that their culture was being submerged in a sea of Jewry. One member said in 1965, “Most Negroes are just discovering their past—how can we expect white people to respect us when we are afraid to organize or take pride in ourselves?”43 But the Negro Cultural Society was never meant to be the focus of its members’ associational life in Rochdale, and it encouraged its members to participate fully in other aspects of cultural life at Rochdale, and to join as many organizations as possible.44 Many whites attended meetings and functions of the Negro Cultural

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Society.45 The first dance was totally packed. “We had to save tables for other organizations in the community, because we didn’t want them to think that they weren’t wanted.”46 Looking back, Jones argues that the RVNCS and its successor, the Rochdale Black Society, was at its peak when Rochdale was integrated, and he attributes this to the healthy competition with Jewish organizations. Within the rich organizational stew that was Rochdale in the mid-1960s, everyone wanted to add their own ingredients.47 • • • In many ways integration within Rochdale was easier than the integration of Rochdale into the surrounding community of South Jamaica. The relationship in the mid-1960s between the predominantly white cooperative and the overwhelmingly African American neighborhood was never easy, and there were suspicions on both sides, based not only on race, but on differences in religion, class, and culture. But in the end, Rochdale was indeed a part of South Jamaica physically, politically, and jurisdictionally, and often cooperated and collaborated with its neighbors. As with other aspects of the history of integration in Rochdale, the heyday was all too short and was never without tension; its ultimate failure was perhaps preordained. The problems began very early in Rochdale’s history. One of the things Abraham Kazan most wanted to build in Rochdale Village was a public swimming pool. In a cooperative as large as Rochdale, he hoped, every type of amenity could be provided. Rochdale had enough park space to accommodate not only the usual greensward, but augmented recreational facilities including a pool. Kazan had never built a cooperative in an area that was so relatively ill-served in terms of public recreation—there were no large swimming pools in southeastern Queens. As Kazan said in his memoirs, “I thought that we should have a swimming pool in the development in view of the fact that the area is quite inland, and a good many of the people can’t afford to go to the beach by car.” A swimming pool would benefit the residents of Rochdale, and it would be an overture to the surrounding community, a tangible sign of the benefits accrued from the building of Rochdale.48 Large public swimming pools had long been one of the defining projects of midcentury urban renewal and revitalization. Probably nothing built by Robert Moses was received with as much acclaim, or has retained more of its luster, than the chain of swimming pools he built under the auspices of the WPA in the mid1930s. However, even with Moses’s extensive building program, large areas of the city were without pools; an announced pool in St. Albans Park at Merrick Road and Linden Boulevard was never built, and the two public pools in Queens, in Astoria and Flushing Meadows, were far from South Jamaica.49 The pools were public facilities, tokens and reminders of the ability of government to play a positive role in improving the lives of average citizens. But the swimming pools were also what architectural historian Marta Gutman has called “spaces of public informality,”

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where, within a crowd, people could swim and cavort, mingle or tryst, and carve out a personal space within the anonymity of a large crowd. And it was this informality, this public intimacy, that would account for much of the controversy that so often has surrounded their use.50 The ardor for public swimming pools in New York City had considerably cooled by the early 1960s. No municipal pools had been built in the city in the fifteen years after World War II.51 Nonetheless, by the early 1960s there was some renewed interest in building a new generation of pools in minority neighborhoods, such as the Rochdale pool. These were intended to be much smaller than the grand public WPA monuments. In 1963 the City Planning Commission approved a plan for the UHF to turn over twenty-four acres of the Rochdale site to the City Parks Department—15 percent of the entire complex—for the purpose of building a combination athletic center, swimming pool, and ice-skating rink.52 In 1963 plans were published for the athletic complex, which included an up-to-date field house equipped with a quarter-mile track, basketball courts, tennis courts, and spectator stands, as well as space for relatively exotic field sports that I do not remember seeing on other playing fields of southeastern Queens, such as shot-putting and pole-vaulting. The City Planning Commission approved $107,200 to build the facilities, to be supplemented by $20,000 from the UHF. The recreation facility, it was stressed, would “be open to residents of Rochdale and the surrounding area.”53 But the proposed athletic complex ran into problems almost immediately. In that same month a Jamaica Swimming Pool Committee that had been engaged in a long struggle to build a pool in southeastern Queens was outraged that Jamaica’s pool would be located at Rochdale, and would be built with public funds but located on private property (the latter was not true technically, but it would no doubt have been known to all as “the Rochdale pool”). Above all, the committee was worried about the potential that “Rochdale residents would crowd out those who need the pool more.”54 Evidently little was done to push the proposal forward over the next year. As was its wont, the UHF concentrated its efforts on opening and filling the buildings, leaving all the landscaping projects to a later day. But by the spring of 1964, with the first two sections largely moved in, and a giant sandlot occupying the location of the proposed recreational facility, it was time to make the final decision on whether or not to proceed. Community opposition to a Rochdale pool continued. The Southeast Queens Interfaith Committee, which had a wide representation of Jewish, Protestant, and Roman Catholic congregations in the area, opposed the location of the pool at Rochdale, preferring a location in an undeveloped area of nearby Baisley Pond Park, about four blocks from Rochdale, and in a neighborhood that was almost entirely African American. Herbert Kahn, a representative of the Rochdale Village Jewish Center (the Conservative synagogue), seconded that suggestion, and argued that the Baisley Pond Park location would be a “more appropriate location to serve all of Queens rather than one section.”55

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But if local community groups generally favored locating the pool outside the cooperative, some were willing to let the issue slide, out of fear that if the deal with the UHF and the Parks Department fell through there would be no Jamaica pool at all. Even some of those who favored a Baisley Pond Park site for the pool worried about the avidity with which some Rochdale residents argued for a location outside of the cooperative; and there was indeed a great deal of opposition to the swimming pool from Rochdale’s recently arrived residents.56 The NAACP and its branch president Paul Gibson urged Rochdale Village “to live up to its role as a part of the community at large,” and hoped “no walls—real or invisible—would separate the cooperative from the surrounding areas.” In early May of 1964, a public forum was held to discuss the pool controversy. Five hundred to six hundred persons, primarily from Rochdale Village, crowded into a local church. The Queens borough president, Mario J. Cariello, wrote Newbold Morris (who in 1960 had replaced Robert Moses as city parks commissioner): “The majority of those present were unanimous in their opposition to the swimming pool and ice-skating rink being located at this site. One of their objections was that it could increase tensions among the residents of Rochdale Village and the surrounding community. Also, statements were made that they did not want a Coney Island within the Village.” Rochdale residents subsequently attended other meetings, both in and outside the cooperative, complained to Kazan and the UHF, and wrote letters to politicians, some of which are quoted below.57 There were, in different variations, two main reasons Rochdale residents gave for opposing the pool. The more understandable of the reasons was that a pool would be noisy and messy, a trysting place for the amorous and the boisterous, who would leave the detritus of their adventures behind them. Who indeed would want to live in close proximity to a large public swimming pool? Although the pool would have been at some distance from the residential sections, it was certainly close enough that the calm of a summer’s day in Rochdale would have been frequently pierced by aquatic squeals. This sentiment was perhaps especially keen for the large number of senior citizens at Rochdale: “Since I have left the Boro of the Bronx for a cooperative apartment called Rochdale Village, with the knowledge that the balance of my God-given years will be spent in peace and quiet. Sir, as a citizen and life long Democrat, I urge you, honorable Sir, to veto that decision [for the swimming pool]. Sir, 100% of all the citizens in the development are positively against your decision.”58 The other reason for opposing the pool was more troubling: the best way to maintain peace with the surrounding community was by limiting contact. One Rochdale resident wrote to Mayor Wagner in 1964 that “there are currently many points of friction and resentment on the part of the neighboring community with reference to Rochdale Village. The proposed site [the pool] further aggravates the current situation.” The writer suggested that not building the pool would increase the “harmony” between Rochdale and its environs. “A swimming pool for the public

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would open the entire Rochdale area for everyone, destroying privacy, eliminating the community atmosphere which many of the cooperators found an attractive reason to buy.”59 What residents wanted in Rochdale, perhaps more than anything else, was stability, a sense that they were the masters of their own destiny. The pool, an alien, outside element, could disturb this, and almost everyone moving to Rochdale had experience with the vagaries of sudden neighborhood change. “We are not people of means and felt that Rochdale Village was our answer to our housing problem, but it certainly won’t be the answer to anything if this is allowed to be accomplished. The development has all the earmarks and makings of a wonderful little city and would be the answer for so many of our income levels, but it certainly would put a damper on our moving there with a public pool smack in the center of things.”60 Some were blunter: Rochdale was private. “There will be approximately 22,000 in the cooperative without inviting outsiders on the property.”61 The unspoken perception was that it was not just blacks, but poor blacks who would be the pool’s primary users. Perhaps the great age of the public swimming pool had passed by the early 1960s; they were an easier sell in the 1930s, when fewer people had cars. By the time Rochdale opened, most residents had become accustomed, on hot summer days, to get in their cars and drive to Jones or Rockaway Beach, rather than spend the day at a pool. Some questioned how much Rochdale residents themselves really needed or wanted a place for swimming. As was so often the case where race and housing were concerned, racial fears were redefined as protection of the community from outsiders:62 I was told that integration has come up as an issue of the pool on Rochdale Village property. I want to state that this has nothing to do with my objection to the pool [emphasis in original]. I am for integration and I am objecting to this pool as someone who doesn’t want her home messed up and feels that the people in the development would not get any benefits out of a pool—only the mess. Even though Rochdale residents did not yet have any direct control over cooperative affairs—Kazan and the UHF were calling all the shots, and would be doing so for a number of years—the strong and apparently more or less unanimous opposition to the pool forced Kazan’s hand. As he wrote to Newbold Morris in May, a number of groups opposed the pool: Rochdale residents, African American homeowners in the immediate vicinity, who evidently shared the same fears as many Rochdale residents about the noisy eyesore the pool would create, and community groups that were pushing for a Baisley Pond Park site:63 The opposition comes from cooperators of Rochdale Village who are afraid of disturbances from the large number of people attracted by the pool, as well as from private home owners in the area.

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This opposition is also fostered by the group which has been trying for years to get a pool elsewhere in Jamaica and which now claims that by putting the pool close to Rochdale Village apartments, [it] would be a private pool for that development. In view of the strong opposition, I would suggest that you find another location. Newbold Morris would have none of it, and sounding much like his predecessor as city parks commissioner, he told Kazan that the pool would be built in Rochdale or there would be no swimming pool. The only reason the project had any support, Newbold replied, was that Kazan had convinced the mayor that the project had to be built in Rochdale. Morris was evidently skeptical from the start, and saw the siting controversy as a way to withdraw from the project altogether. “There are a lot of other claims on the city’s borrowing capacity and I don’t believe this would be a top priority.” Sometime over the summer of 1964 the Rochdale Village pool died a quiet bureaucratic death.64 No pool was ever built in Rochdale, and no pool was ever built in Baisley Pond Park or elsewhere in Jamaica, and if this was a victory, there were many people, black and white, who shared the credit. For his part, in his memoirs Abraham Kazan thought those who had opposed a swimming pool complex in Rochdale had made “a grave mistake.”65 The decision not to build a swimming pool was in many ways Rochdale’s first act as a cooperative, charting its own destiny. It marked the first time that the cooperators successfully challenged the leadership of Kazan and the UHF. The swimming pool controversy was concluded before half the families had moved in to Rochdale. It was largely forgotten, and remembered, if at all, as an example of the guarded insularity of Rochdale’s residents toward the surrounding community.66 The episode demonstrates, beyond a doubt, that as the white residents frequently claimed, just because they had moved to Rochdale, that didn’t mean they didn’t share the same biases, prejudices, and misgivings about racial integration as any random group of New Yorkers in the mid-1960s. With the pool controversy as context, it makes the strides that Rochdale would achieve in creating an integrated community all the more remarkable. In the end, the story of the unbuilt Rochdale swimming pool goes beyond the easy identification of heroes and villains. The evidence is clear that community groups in Jamaica were almost as opposed to a Rochdale pool as were the cooperative’s residents. The pool proposal could not overcome the feeling of mutual wariness on all sides. But assigning the greater part of the blame to Rochdale’s residents for the pool fiasco is fair. If Rochdale’s residents had supported the pool, despite the objection of local community groups who favored its location elsewhere, it probably would have been built. The unbuilt pool was an initial act of ungenerosity by Rochdale’s residents. It does not cancel out the genuine efforts made within Rochdale to build an interracial society, but if nothing else the failure to build the pool should have been a warning, a sign that mutual suspicions could doom this experiment

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in integration. No community is an island, especially not one with professions to racial equality. We do not know what would have happened if the pool had been built; we’re left with a sense of lost possibilities. A woman who grew up in Rochdale remembered the controversy and what Rochdale lacked on steamy summer days:67 No swimming pool was built because they said they could not restrict visitors to the pool and therefore outside people and kids from Jamaica could not be turned away. So instead of practicing this chlorine scented form of discrimination they made these useless fountains. On hot days I’d sit outside the fountain with my friends and hope that a breeze would send the spray of water our way. • • • Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the boundaries between Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica occurred on the evening of November 9, 1965, when, commencing at 5:27, the lights began to go out all over New York City. The failure of a substation on the Canadian side of the New York State–Ontario border led to a swift cascade of shortages and outages all across the northeast power grid. Customers of Consolidated Edison, the supplier of electricity to almost everyone and everything in New York City, soon found themselves in the dark and without power. In most places in the city, it did not return until the following morning. But in Rochdale the lights never went out. Abraham Kazan had been an opponent of Con Edison for many decades, viewing it as an overprivileged and overpriced monopoly. Electricity was one thing Kazan was convinced could and should be generated cooperatively, and when the UHF and Con Edison fell into disagreement about rating structures for the new cooperative in Jamaica, Kazan resolved to go it alone and build an independent power plant for Rochdale, a “total energy” plant providing, in addition to electricity, heat in the winter and central air-conditioning in the summer, which would have been impossible without the power plant.68 Con Edison officials accused Kazan of a plot to undermine the capitalist way of life, and with the ingrained arrogance that comes with being the only game in town, folded their hands and waited for Kazan’s folly to fail.69 When he tried to build his power plant, one Con Edison official smirked and said, “He will acquire a bit of an education.”70 But the only education Kazan received was in how to build successful power plants. And November 9, 1965, showed an additional advantage of the new power plant. When the northeast grid crashed, and Con Edison customers lost all power, Rochdale Village’s plant continued to generate electricity. It was the largest residential area in New York City that did not lose power.71 Shortly after the blackout commenced people in Rochdale discovered something had gone terribly wrong elsewhere in the city. Most learned about it from the radio, or by word of mouth, as neighbors knocked on each other’s doors and worried about homeward-bound breadwinners. (My dad didn’t make it home until

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after eleven o’clock, having been caught in a stalled subway train.) Some discovered what was happening just by looking out their windows. “I lived in building 12 and had a great view of Kennedy Airport,” one man remembers. “I can remember standing on the terrace, watching the lights go off, sort of in a wave, not exactly all at once. For a few moments (minutes?) Kennedy was pitch-black too. Then their backup lights came on. And it was Kennedy, darkness all around, and Rochdale, with lights.”72 There were stories—perhaps apocryphal—that JFK used Rochdale as a beacon for flights that were in the air at the time of the blackout.73 As the night wore on and the rest of the city did not get their lights back, the magnitude of the event became clear. In many ways it was a triumphant night in Rochdale, with pride that the cooperative had the know-how and savvy to keep the juice flowing, and pride in somehow being special, being different. One man, who finally made his way back to Rochdale that evening, told the New York Post that it was “shining like a silver lake in a black desert.”74 (As an eleven-year-old, I felt this pride tempered somewhat by feeling deprived in having no “where were you when the lights went out?” stories; I envied my classmates who the next morning in school told tales of a night of candles and flashlights.) For some it was a confirmation that they had been right to move to Rochdale in the first place. One woman wrote the Long Island Press that the first families to move to Rochdale had been “the pioneers, the martyrs” and they had problems (including intermittent power outages), but on that long, cool night when she heard her refrigerator humming, she felt, for the first time, that all those early problems had been worth it, and the basic concept behind Rochdale, of cooperation and community self-help, had been the correct all along. Rochdale Village was “snug and well-lit, a bright island in a sea of darkness.”75 Perhaps never before or afterward were the boundaries between Rochdale and the surrounding community as clear as they were on the night of the blackout. But even in broad daylight, there was no mistaking where the rest of South Jamaica ended, and where Rochdale began, with its twenty fourteen-story new redbrick buildings towering over the surrounding parks and single family homes. And everyone also knew that the boundaries were not merely architectural; when you entered Rochdale, you were leaving an overwhelmingly African American neighborhood for an area that was predominantly white and Jewish. Though the boundaries were primarily social and psychological, for some on both sides, Rochdale’s borders became reified into a racial no-man’s-land. The barriers were real. If the swimming pool controversy was soon forgotten, there were other irritations. During its first few years, the Rochdale Village Day Camp was not open to the outside community, nor was the Rochdale Village Athletic League. (This changed by the late 1960s.) And although this was not a policy of Rochdale Village itself, the Long Island Press did not hire paperboys living outside of Rochdale to deliver its paper to Rochdale residents.76 And there was undoubtedly tension; suspicion of blacks from the surrounding community, especially teenagers, treading on Rochdale turf, along with Rochdale residents’ sense that they were not particularly welcome outside its grounds. This

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was not limited to whites; blacks from Rochdale were sometimes called “oreos” (black outside, white inside) by residents of South Jamaica.77 But this is only part of the story. Though the boundaries between Rochdale Village and South Jamaica were real, they were generally porous and permeable, and easily and frequently crossed. If persons from the surrounding community were not effusively greeted on their arrival, they were never confronted or turned away. Rochdale was never a “turf ” defended by gangs; there were no southeastern Queens equivalents of the Jets or Sharks. And the reverse is true as well. Those who grew up in South Jamaica knew Rochdale, and those who grew up in Rochdale knew South Jamaica. As big as Rochdale was at 170 acres, most people did not spend all their time within its confines. To go anywhere from Rochdale, you had to pass through the rest of South Jamaica. Indeed there were some parts of Rochdale that did not remain within Rochdale. Some key institutions of the cooperative, including all its synagogues and some shopping strips, bordered on Rochdale from adjacent streets. By the time adolescence beckoned, most Rochdale teens were exploring Jamaica and South Jamaica, riding their bicycles through the neighborhood, eating at its fast-food establishments, hanging out in the business district of Jamaica Avenue (depending on one’s taste, shopping in the department stores or sampling the wares in the head shops and record stores), changing buses at Jamaica’s bus terminal, or (like me) spending long afternoons after school exploring the holdings of the marvelously capacious main branch of the Queens Borough Public Library in downtown Jamaica, in their brand-new building. And Rochdale never lacked for visitors. Some came to shop in the cooperative’s market, the first supermarket in South Jamaica (where anyone could become a member) or shop in the other stores in Rochdale’s malls, variously owned by Jews and blacks, with the Soul Brothers barbershop next door to a Jewish delicatessen.78 Rochdale was a magnet. Teenagers came to hang out in front of the community center.79 It was, one man from South Jamaica told me, a great place to meet girls and to party.80 There was a cultural exchange between Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica, in some cases benign (language, slang, and music), and some less so (pot and other drugs). In any event, Rochdale and South Jamaica were linked in countless ways. Still, these connections didn’t preclude contrasting and conflicting perceptions. Rochdale residents were convinced that they were bringing benefits to South Jamaica through their very presence; those already living there were less sure. It was all too easy for each side to accumulate and nurse their separate grievances: overtures and goodwill gestures spurned, subtle condescensions, newcomers brushing off the advice of longtime residents, old-timers obdurately refusing to recognize that things had changed, white folks who were apparently full of themselves and didn’t seem to really listen carefully to what black folks had to say, blacks who seemed not to like Jews very much. Perhaps the worst problem was that there was no single venue in which differences were discussed and problems aired. The self-governance of Rochdale forced

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its residents to meet together regularly, but nothing similar existed for Rochdale and its neighbors, and there was no assumption of common interests. Indeed, many on both sides felt the interests of Rochdale and South Jamaica were inimical. Both the UHF and the city can be faulted for paying relatively little attention as Rochdale was being built to how this interaction would work. Part of the problem was that Rochdale was built in the last days before Jane Jacobs–style protests and other manifestations of 1960s activism made more intensive community involvement and consultation accepted practice. As a onetime resident of Rochdale has noted, drawing on his extensive experience within city government,81 it appears as if it [Rochdale] was just plopped down in the middle of this community without any real efforts at public consultations. The procedures that developers have to follow today (working with Community Boards, environmental impact statements, and so forth) really didn’t exist at the time. In Rochdale’s case, it could have made a difference in establishing a relationship with the surrounding community. . . . Beyond that, Rochdale was built without a community infrastructure in place to support it. The schools weren’t ready, the street system wasn’t ready, and the transportation system wasn’t either. This does not mean that there were no efforts to mitigate this lack of planning; many residents of Rochdale, white and black, tried to make connections. Harlem native Cal Jones, who was on the Community Relations Committee of the Rochdale House Congress, saw defusing tension as one of his roles in meetings between Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica. Initial meetings were often “a little hostile” because “Rochdale knew how to wield its political clout.”82 Each side of the divide had their own perceptions. Juanita Watkins remembered that a typical attitude was that “Rochdale was getting schools, police stations, this, that and the other, they were not only invaders, they had everything but the gates, there was a lot of resentment.” Eddie Abramson, editor and politician, remembers this from resentment on the receiving end: “The envy was there, there were about five or so community organizations, and they were unhappy for one reason, before Rochdale was built they didn’t have the resources within the community, and now here comes the benefits, the shopping center and other benefits. They were envious, some guys are troublemakers, they said we were here, nobody came for us, now all of a sudden here come the ‘Jews’ that was the term that was used, one neighbor would tell another.” One example of Rochdale’s clout that rankled local residents: Rochdale from its opening was connected to the New York City water supply, while the rest of South Jamaica had to make do with what was generally considered inferior quality water from the privately owned Jamaica Water Company.83 For Jones, Rochdale was “like this big elephant sucking the air out. . . . [W]ith the 25,000 people, there generally were a healthy [number of] representatives from Rochdale.” South Jamaicans could easily feel outnumbered and outmaneuvered. That’s why it was particularly important, from Jones’s perspective, that blacks from

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Rochdale attend these meetings, so they didn’t polarize too neatly along racial lines. And according to Jones, in the end, this was generally what happened: “The anger at Rochdale usually resolved itself by joining forces and coming to a way of working together.”84 Indeed, Rochdale and South Jamaica worked together to prevent the city from building low-income housing adjacent to the cooperative. As discussed earlier, in the mid-1950s black community groups had blocked the efforts to build lowincome housing next to Baisley Pond Park, arguing that there was one middle-class black neighborhood in the city, and it needed to stay that way. When similar plans were revived in the mid-1960s, black community groups were now joined by Rochdale. In 1965, the New York City Housing Authority tried to propose a similar fivehundred-unit low-income project at Baisley Boulevard and 167th Street, across from Rochdale’s newly opened PS 30. This proposal, Inside Rochdale reported in April 1965, “had thousands of people upset and thousands more planning mass meetings, demonstrations and protest marches.” A mass meeting, held at the Orthodox synagogue in Rochdale, attracted the participation of at least thirteen organizations from inside and outside Rochdale. The reporter concluded that “Negro community leaders” as well as those in Rochdale “are against a low-rent project in Jamaica.”85 It was difficult to overcome the perception that blacks and whites would naturally align themselves on opposing sides when it came to housing controversies involving low-income projects. An article in the New York Amsterdam News, “Whites Reject Low Rent Housing,” portrayed the episode as a simple black/Jewish dichotomy. “A low rent housing project that would provide 500 apartments for Negroes was opposed Wed night at a predominantly all-white rally at the Rochdale traditional synagogue.” This was not very good reporting: the meeting was hardly all-white, and neither was the PTA of PS 30 (a school that had students from inside and outside Rochdale), the organization that was spearheading much of the opposition. Mary Redic, the president of the PTA, who was quoted in several articles, wrote angrily to the Amsterdam News: “I am very surprised that you did not ascertain before you wrote this article that I, Mary Redic, am a Negro. [And she did not live in Rochdale.] And the decision of our PTA was not reached by the whites of Rochdale but by a very well integrated PTA.”86 The argument could now be made that the additional housing might seriously interfere with the progress of integration in Rochdale. Black and white opponents basically agreed that, with its impact on schools and other resources, the project “would result in an increase of unbalanced integration,” or, in the words of Lenny Vaughan, president of the Baisley Civic Association, it might “create a Negro ghetto.” This opposition was sufficient to make the Queens borough president reverse his previous approval of the project.87 The next year, civic groups in and around Rochdale joined together to kill an extension of the Clearview Expressway through Springfield Gardens.88 When their interests aligned, Rochdale and its

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neighbors could be a powerful political force in advancing the interests of southeastern Queens. Cooperation between Rochdale and South Jamaica was more evident in some areas than others. In the fall of 1968, Inside Rochdale, which was expanding its readership, redubbed itself the South Queens Star and Inside Rochdale, and noted that when it was launched, four years earlier, it had focused on Rochdale because “Rochdale residents were new to the community and weren’t that involved in its civic and cultural affairs,” and because Rochdale was “an almost self-contained community” it “naturally tended to avoid outside involvement.” The paper claimed, somewhat hopefully, that this was changing. “In the ensuing years Rochdale Village has become integrated with South Jamaica. Not entirely, perhaps, but enough so that the welfare and the future of South Queens is of concern to Rochdale residents.”89 Perhaps nowhere was integration more apparent than in local politics, where some form of collaboration was essential. As soon as it opened, Rochdale and its 25,000 residents became, all at once, a very important factor in politics in southeastern Queens, a voting bloc to be courted by politicians. At the same time, there was an unease about the impact of Rochdale’s effect on black politics in Jamaica. Black politics in southeastern Queens was just beginning to spread its wings. By 1960 local politicians had demonstrated an ability to make or break area politicians by bestowing or withholding their favors. In 1960 the Jamaica NAACP claimed credit for defeating a Republican candidate for Congress who opposed integrating the local school, and for starting the Democrat, Joseph Addabbo, on a twelve-term congressional career during which he would always be solicitous of black interests.90 But through the fall of 1964 no blacks from Queens sat on the city council, in the state legislature, or in Congress, though Jamaica and South Jamaica had a number of ambitious black politicians who were trying to change this. The Jamaica branch of the NAACP was a proving ground for aspiring black politicians, and Guy Brewer, the leader of the branch in the early 1950s, was establishing himself as a political leader in South Jamaica.91 If Brewer tolerated Rochdale for the economic benefits it might bring, he was not happy about its potential political impact, and looked at it as an accidental gerrymander, whose predominantly white population would dilute black voting strength in Jamaica at its very core. One consequence of the building of Rochdale was that it was, for a while, part of the most populous assembly district in the state, and was divided into two electoral districts.92 Although Rochdale was in his district, Brewer did not want to integrate his club with Rochdale’s residents. He allowed a separate political organization to be formed in the other half of the district, dominated by Rochdale.93 But Rochdale had its political utility as well: its residents were very active, and voted out of proportion to their numbers in comparison to local blacks, especially in primaries, which made their numbers even more impressive. Local politician

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Juanita Watkins commented, “Our district was different because Rochdale Village, particularly in those [early] days, always had a high voter turnout. We had to work very hard in the one- or two-family-home areas [outside Rochdale] to get them involved.”94 And Rochdale’s voters tended to be very liberal and supportive of civil rights, much more so than whites in other parts of southeastern Queens such as South Ozone Park, Springfield Gardens, or Howard Beach. The electoral alliance bore its first fruits in 1964, when Kenneth Browne, Brewer’s candidate, was running for the State Assembly. Eddie Abramson became the leader of the Democratic party in Rochdale, with Brewer’s blessing, and in Abramson’s words, if Brewer’s attitude originally had been “Oh my gosh [Abramson’s euphemism], it’s an upheaval, the Jewish people could knock out any candidate they opposed,” this changed during the Browne campaign: “Rochdale people didn’t care about color, and they voted for Ken Browne, who defeated a white incumbent.” Browne became the first African American elected to the assembly from Queens County. The presence of an integrated Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, far from dampening black political power in southeastern Queens, strengthened it.95 The need to incorporate Rochdale into the broader fabric of Queens politics helped create several important political careers, of which the most successful and arguably the most unlikely was that of Eddie Abramson, who made the most of his political connections and his visibility as the publisher and editor of Inside Rochdale. It began almost inadvertently. “I didn’t know about politics,” he told me. “I was pushed into it.”96 Abramson was something of a naïf. He was ambitious but not particularly cunning. He had his faults, but abrasiveness and mean-spiritedness were not among them. He was a glad-hander, with a politician’s tendency to promise more than he could deliver (a bad habit that would cause him difficulties at more than one point in his career). But with his urge to be liked came an interest in and skill at creating broad, electable coalitions, both within Rochdale and without. Before he moved to Rochdale Abramson had little political involvement, except as an admirer of the rising star of New York City politics, the Rockefeller Republican John V. Lindsay.97 His work in public relations and printing had led to professional contacts with Moses “Mo” Weinstein, the Queens Democratic county chairman, and he spoke to Weinstein before moving to Rochdale about Democratic politics in the cooperative. (Whether or not he was a nominal Republican before, Abramson knew that the only party worth considering in a liberal-trending cooperative like Rochdale would be the Democrats.) In consultation with Weinstein and Guy Brewer, Abramson was placed in charge of signing up Rochdale residents for the Democrats. The Johnson landslide of 1964 was a good time to get involved in Democratic politics, and Abramson received good marks for his efforts. An indication that fall of the importance the Democrats placed on Rochdale, not yet fully tenanted, was the appearance one brisk October evening, on a field across from the cooperative, of the heir apparent himself, Robert Kennedy, during his senatorial campaign; an event that this ten-year-old never forgot and for whom it remains an

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inspiration.98 (Kennedy had planned a return to Rochdale for Sunday, June 9, 1968; instead the community made this a day of mourning for the senator, after his assassination in California on June 6.)99 Abramson founded the Rochdale Village Regular Democratic Association, and in early 1965, finding local newspapers inadequate, started Inside Rochdale, a weekly free newspaper distributed to Rochdale residents.100 The paper was a success, and soon became Abramson’s full-time employment.101 Although the name would suggest otherwise, the paper soon tried to develop a circulation outside the cooperative, and hired columnists from the surrounding community. Most of the revenue for the paper came from merchants on Jamaica Avenue trying to attract Rochdalers to what was already, by 1965, a troubled business district (even though, supposedly, Rochdale residents had a reputation among Jamaica Avenue retailers as fairly obnoxious hagglers).102 Jamaica Avenue stores were struggling to compete with the suburban shopping malls of western Nassau County, such as Green Acres or Roosevelt Field, two places where most Rochdale residents with cars went for their serious shopping. (As mentioned earlier, in an all-too-typical pattern of black political and economic advancement in the 1960s, the civil rights groups who had campaigned for equal access to jobs on Jamaica Avenue in the early 1960s found their victories largely hollow, as they were granted full access just as the shopping district was in free fall.) Abramson certainly knew the value of publicity. His political opponents, such as the local Reform Democratic club, complained about the conflict of interest inherent in the publisher of Rochdale’s most visible news source constantly promoting his political career in its pages. He shook off such criticism and in 1966 ran for district co-leader, in a new district that included Rochdale.103 It had been the practice for many decades to have male and female district co-leaders, and while Abramson’s Regular Democratic organization was overwhelmingly white—a spring 1965 list of the club’s fourteen officers all had Jewish names—Abramson wanted to run with a black woman, and eventually decided that Juanita Watkins, another protégée of Mo Weinstein and a young woman of growing political stature in southeastern Queens politics, would make an ideal candidate.104 They won, defeating two all-white slates, and Watkins and Abramson became the only integrated pair of district leaders in the city, with Watkins as the first female black district leader in Queens and one of only three in the entire city.105 Abramson’s club became, out of necessity, one of the area’s most important venues for making political contacts and connections. After the election, the club became, in Watkins’s words, “a combination of the people who had been with Eddie [Abramson] before, [and] those people that I had brought into the fold.”106 The Democratic club became a source of power in Rochdale, and many people active in Rochdale affairs were club members. As politicians tend to do, Abramson and Watkins paid visits to other local organizations, and Watkins found herself making the rounds to almost every Jewish group in the cooperative; she told me in 2005 that she meets people “who to this day are shocked that I didn’t live in

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Rochdale.” To seek a broad electoral consensus, Watkins stated, “part of what of our club tried to do was to pull the insiders from Rochdale and the outsiders from the surrounding community together, and like many situations, once you get to know your neighbors, there’s nothing much to fear.”107 Abramson’s grasp on power in the club he founded was not secure. In 1968 Abramson and Watkins faced a tough race for re-election as district leaders, primarily because Abramson had remained a strong supporter of the war in Vietnam long after it had ceased to be popular among Rochdale residents—one Inside Rochdale poll, conducted in June 1968, found that 85 percent wanted an end to the bombing of North Vietnam, and only 12 percent thought a military victory was either wise or possible.108 He and Watkins were defeated by Bernard Berlly, a longtime Springfield Gardens open-housing advocate and leader of the local Roosevelt Reform Democratic Club, and Rita Essex, like Berlly a supporter of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid.109 The Rochdale Village Regular Democrats were soon in turmoil.110 In 1969 Abramson was deposed by the political club he had founded.111 Despite Watkins’s key role in the ouster, this was not a racial changing of the guard. Almost all of Abramson’s Jewish allies in the club had remained active. According to Watkins, while almost all of them had “been brought in by Eddie [Abramson], and all of the lawyers were brought in by Eddie . . . when Eddie was forced out, I have to say 90 percent of those folks, including his next-door neighbors and his cousin, stayed in the club.”112 In 1970, under Watkins and Rochdaler Richard Rubin, the Rochdale Village Regular Democrats regained the district leadership. As an effective and dynamic political organization, the club responded to a shifting set of circumstances, and became of necessity a center of practical integration in Rochdale. By the way, don’t feel sorry for Eddie Abramson, and if Abramson and Watkins went their separate ways, they would both go on to remarkable political careers. Abramson would overcome his reversals, and in 1972 managed to obtain his old club’s endorsement for a seat in the State Assembly, which he won and then held onto for almost twenty years, culminating in service as deputy majority whip. And in the same year Abramson was elected to the assembly, Watkins would become the chair of the Queens County Democratic Committee (the first woman, white or black, to chair a county political committee in the city), replacing Guy Brewer. She would subsequently have a long-time tenure on the City Council for southeastern Queens. And in many ways the lasting significance of the political careers of both Abramson and Watkins is not how they parted and differed, but what they shared. In Rochdale and South Jamaica in the 1960s and early 1970s, local electoral politics was a story of interracial collaboration. When blacks and whites had to work together, they could and they did. At times, even the often grubby parochial tasks of local politics can speak to the broader horizons of democratic possibility. For Juanita Watkins, this is what made working with the Rochdale Democratic club such a unique experience:113

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It was a total mix of black and white, Christian and Jew, small homeowner and high-rise apartment dweller. We had managed to overcome those apparent differences and form a coalition [around] the things we had in common. Those factors included the desire to reside in an integrated community that was attractive and safe with good services. Those things drew us together more than the things that might have kept us apart.

9. Going to School

Not perfection But she tries. As she lies in wait For things to come. Anne Frankel, poem in Grossley ( JHS 8) Highlights 1968

When I was beginning to think about this book, one of the things that convinced me to write it was when a former classmate shared with me our fifth-grade class photo, from my first year in Rochdale, 1964–65. There are twenty-eight of us in the picture. I am the little smiling tyke sitting directly behind the sign that informs the world that we are “Public School 30, Queens, 1965, Class 5-302” (see fig. 14, p. 309). After studying the photograph, and with a little help from some longtime friends, I have been able to identify almost everyone in it. On my right is Howard Weinblatt. Behind me to the left is Karen Abramson, whose father, Eddie Abramson, was the editor of Inside Rochdale. Next to her is a boy whose last name I forget, but whose first name was Lieutenant, which I found very curious. Next to him was a sweet girl from the Caribbean named Susan Emmanuel, and next to her, Steven Watts, who was always talking to me about his involvement in a youth program sponsored by the Civil Air Patrol, which I thought was quite cool. In the next row, the tallest boys in the class and some of my best friends, Craig Katz, Edward Cambridge, and Saul Shorr, make for a distinguished trio. At the right end of the row is Gary Moore, who had to endure endless ribbing about his namesake, a popular television star of the era. Two of the people I have interviewed for this project are, to use their maiden names, Vicki Perlman, at the far right end of the first row, and

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Evlynne Braithwaite, on the far left end of the top row. I could tell you more names, but I won’t bore you. In the class photo, I look surprisingly neat and well turned out, given my subsequent history of sartorial ineptitude. The girls all look elegant. The boys look like a bunch of ten-year-olds. I loved my fifth-grade class. It was a happy and vital time, and in our picture we all look eager. The wonderful Minta Spain (Mrs. Spain to you), my all-time favorite teacher and, I think, the only African American teacher I ever had, from K through 12 and from 13 to PhD, presided over her boisterous class with her enthusiasm, her sassiness and hearty laugh, and above all, her sharp, critical, sympathetic intelligence. When Mrs. Spain encouraged me to write to a publisher after I discovered an error in our textbook—the westernmost state was Alaska, of course, and not, as the book claimed, Hawaii, as any besotted student of the peculiarities of the international date line (which I was) would know—she put me on the road to becoming a historian. (I was a nuclear physicist for a while first.) But the picture has a significance beyond personal nostalgia. Of the twentyeight students in the class, ten of us were black, and eighteen of us were white. The district for our elementary school included children not only from Rochdale, but from the surrounding neighborhood as well, and this meant the percentage of blacks in PS 30’s classrooms was considerably higher than for Rochdale as a whole. Nonetheless, when I think back to fifth grade, what is striking is how oblivious I was to what was distinctive about our class. This was not because of a lack of interest in politics. By the time I entered fifth grade I considered myself a close and savvy student of current events. I remember bitterly complaining to my mother in the fall of 1964 how unfair it was that ten-year-olds like myself were being denied the opportunity to vote for Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. I was already a veteran of several anti–Vietnam War rallies (thanks to my parents), and I cared deeply about the civil rights struggle (also thanks to my parents). I do not remember Mrs. Spain speaking much to us about racial matters, though she must have, during this remarkable school year that spanned the time from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; during which Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and Malcolm X was assassinated. I do remember her making us write reports on Dr. Alex Quaison-Sackey (I loved his name), a Ghanaian and a close associate of Kwame Nkrumah who was elected in the fall of 1964 as the first African president of the UN General Assembly. But for all my precocious political savvy, I really never understood that our class was an experiment in integrated education, as important in its own way as anything taking place at Selma or in Ghana, a critical part of the worldwide quest by persons of color to be treated as full social and political equals, an effort to overcome the centuries-long legacy of racism and imperialism. I certainly do not remember giving any thought to how unusual our classroom situation was, and accepted it as perfectly normal. (Of course, our teachers had a vested interest in trying to make us as unself-conscious as possible about our situation, and largely succeeded.) We had

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the usual divisions and cliques, fights, and spats, and the very immature boys hated the somewhat less immature girls, but I do not remember any racial tension or incidents. (One day, toward the beginning of the term, in an asinine but near universal rite of passage, I was roughed up by a group of boys, white and black, during our lunch break, only afterward to be accepted by my assailants as “one of the gang.”) The battle for integration in Rochdale was first won (and then lost) in the classrooms of PS 30 and Rochdale’s other schools. If schools are perceived as inferior or troubled, integration will not hold. Parents will not sacrifice the future of their children to an ideal, however important it might be. Without good schools, those who can leave will do so, and those who can’t will conclude that integration brings no tangible benefits and is not worth the candle. For different reasons, everyone in the area, inside and outside Rochdale, wanted integrated education to work. In early 1965, during the middle of my year in the fifth grade, the Rochdale Village Public School Committee (RVPSC) initiated a program for improving the local schools. The RVPSC was committed to the “highest scholastic standards in a truly integrated environment at PS 30 and PS 80” [the other elementary school in Rochdale], not just for the benefit of the schools and students involved, but for the city and the nation as a whole, because “for the first time anywhere in New York City, a stable, diverse, ethnic elementary school population is assured for at least a decade, if not longer.”1 From the outset Rochdale was seen, by many of its residents and outside observers, as a test of a question that, as the 1960s unfolded, would come to utterly dominate New York City politics: Was integrated education possible? If, as Harvey Swados wrote, the eyes of the nation were watching Rochdale, the eyes of Rochdale were watching PS 30 and other local schools. Both successes and failures were apt to be exaggerated. If we were largely innocent of the racial histories and animosities of our parents, we also lacked adult means of insulating ourselves against slights or insults. It may be a bit of an exaggeration to argue that the future of integration as a national goal hinged on its outcome in Mrs. Spain’s fifth-grade class, but those of us in Class 5-302 did our part nonetheless. • • • One reason for the interest in integrated education in Rochdale was the knowledge that almost everywhere else in the city, integration was failing. Year by year the city’s schools were losing white students, with ever more minority students attending schools with overwhelmingly or exclusively African American and Puerto Rican student bodies. By the mid-1950s, in contrast to the de jure segregation of the Jim Crow South, and if there is a bit of disingenuousness in the distinction, since “de facto” segregation, as much as the “de jure” variety, was largely rooted in discrimination that was either perfectly legal (or flouted laws that were imperfectly enforced) the distinction remains an important one.2 In New York City by the 1960s, despite the abhorrence of racial discrimination avowed by all politicians and

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civic leaders, the city had what amounted to two school systems, a superior system for whites, and an inferior system for blacks and other minorities. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City schools had been formally integrated—one of the last important fights for ending legally separate colored schools was waged in Jamaica in the 1890s, just prior to consolidation.3 In the first decades of the twentieth century, clusters of minority population were in racially mixed neighborhoods, and the local schools reflected this mixture. But as the housing patterns changed, and minority areas grew larger and became more or less monoracial, so did the local schools that served them. Complaints about this trend arose by the 1930s, but de facto segregation steadily increased after World War II.4 The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 primarily dealt with de jure segregation in the South, but it also sparked a sustained fight by civil rights activists to address the problem of segregation in New York City’s schools, spearheaded by the psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark, a professor at City College whose work had been a major buttress to the plaintiffs in Brown. De facto segregation was the subject of numerous reports, petitions, and demonstrations, which maintained that it was in its own way as serious a problem as Jim Crow education in the South, and because of its sub rosa character, even more difficult to root out.5 The New York City Board of Education and its supporters were sympathetic to these complaints (though generally they rejected the term “segregation”), but they tended to argue that the cause of the problem was housing discrimination, which led to the concentrations of minority population (true enough); lamentable as that was, it was a complex problem outside of their jurisdiction (which was also true enough, but since no one was adequately addressing housing discrimination in the city, this amounted to bureaucratic buck passing).6 The only methods the Board of Education had to balance the racial makeup of the city’s schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s were highly unpopular politically. Schools in adjacent white and minority communities could be paired; minority students could be bused to predominantly white schools (almost never the reverse; this was simply outside the realm of political possibility); and minority students could voluntarily transfer to white schools. The Board of Education was acutely aware of countervailing forces against integration; from politicians, from community groups, and to some extent from teachers.7 The late 1950s and early 1960s for the Board of Education was a time of caution; efforts to end segregation resulted in a handful of small-scale remedies that affected only a tiny number of the million students in the city’s schools, and even these programs met with public anger.8 By 1959, the New York Times was reporting that some blacks in the city, admittedly no more than a handful, were sending their children to schools in the South, arguing that they were attending segregated schools anyway, and schools that were overcrowded and on double sessions, so rather than de facto segregation they would take their chances with old-fashioned Jim Crow.9 And probably nowhere in the city was the fight against integrating the schools as pronounced as it was in Queens, despite

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that, save Staten Island, it had the lowest percentage of minority residents of any of the boroughs, at less than 5 percent.10 In 1964 a report prepared under the direction of New York State’s education commissioner, James Allen (commonly known as the Allen Report, though it was prepared by three educators, among them Kenneth Clark), lambasted the efforts of the board for their lack of commitment to ending segregation. The report found that almost a quarter of the elementary schools in the city had a minority student body of over 90 percent, and concluded that “nothing undertaken by the New York City Board of Education since 1954, and nothing proposed since 1963 has contributed or will contribute in any meaningful way to desegregating the public schools of the city.”11 And all the while, as the Board of Education tentatively nibbled at the problem, the changing racial balance of the city was making the underlying problem worse, year by year. On the other hand, while it is easy to criticize the Board of Education for their pusillanimity and their glacial rate of progress toward integration, one should not minimize the difficulty of the task they faced. Subsequent history strongly suggests that if the Board of Education had pushed harder for integration, they would have faced more than an equal and opposite reaction. And those who argue that the tough left-wing radicalism of the immediate postwar years had been red-baited into a 1950s Cold War timorousness fail to explain how things would have turned out very differently if the Communist and progressive left had retained its strength. It would have faced the same obduracy on the part of the opponents of integration, and the same limited arsenal of remedies to effect their changes. Whatever the political configuration and ideology on the progressive side, their opponents would have been politically powerful, numerous, and tenacious, and would have been in a position to retard or thwart efforts at integrated housing and education. Support for integration was wide but shallow and lukewarm. Opposition to integration was almost always heated and vociferous.12 In any event, the Board of Education’s efforts on behalf of integration were weak-willed, halfhearted, poorly defended, easily defeated, and completely ineffective, with the upshot that, as the historian Jerald Podair writes, “New York’s schools were more segregated in 1966 than they had been in 1954.”13 But the timidity of the Board of Education in pushing for integration availed them little. By 1964 they were increasingly assailed by the opposite poles of the debate: those pushing for the immediate implementation of integration, and those adamantly opposed to any integration effort at all. In the early 1960s, the Reverend Milton Galamison, who had been a leader of the protests at the construction site of Brooklyn Downstate Hospital in the summer of 1963 and worked with community groups in Bedford-Stuyvesant and white liberals and radicals for improved integrated education, became known throughout the city as the leader of the movement for integration as the head of a new group, the New York Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools. When the Board of Education balked at implementing any plans for integration, he called for a one-day boycott by students and teachers for the immediate integration of the city’s schools, which took place on February 3,

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1964 (about two months after the first families moved in to Rochdale). Planned by the veteran organizer Bayard Rustin, it was one of the most massive protests in the history of the civil rights movement, with about 464,000, or about 45 percent, of the city’s students participating. The boycott had a remarkably wide spectrum of support, ranging from Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the then liberal, Jewishoriented magazine Commentary, to Malcolm X, in a never-to-be reassembled coalition.14 (In a sign of the rocky road ahead for school integration, the boycott was not supported by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and the superintendent of schools later called it a “nihilistic weapon.”)15 It is worth stressing (because it has been all too often forgotten and misunderstood) that for its proponents, the cause of integration was never simply better racial balances in the classrooms, but a general end to the inferior status of minorities in the New York City school system. Because minority areas tended to be poorer and, at least through the 1960s, less well connected politically than their white counterparts, the schools in minority areas were generally reckoned to be inferior, ill-serving their population. Fewer schools were built in black neighborhoods, and existing school buildings were generally older and more crowded than schools elsewhere. Schools in minority neighborhoods tended to be shortchanged in other resources such as gyms and libraries, had larger class sizes and also usually had underqualified and inexperienced teachers.16 Very few of the teachers in the New York City school system, and fewer of the supervisory personnel, were of minority background. (In 1955, of the 50,000 teachers in the system, approximately 500, or 1 percent, were black.)17 Antisegregationists argued that all this was connected to, and contributed to, the systematic underestimation of black intellectual abilities by the New York City school system. Segregation, said Kenneth Clark as early as 1954, was not just “gerrymandering” by skewing district lines to produce all-black schools, but denying students in minority schools facilities and pedagogical excellence equal to those at white schools.18 A decade later, in the Allen report, Clark and his colleagues coauthored the 1964 attack on the Board of Education for its foot-dragging on integration, which nonetheless concluded that “total desegregation of all schools, for example, is simply not attainable in the foreseeable future and neither planning nor pressure can change that fact.”19 A progressive integration advocate in the Kenneth Clark mode, Charles Silberman in the widely read 1964 study Crisis in Black and White wrote that “integration is a moral imperative—the greatest moral imperative of our time. But integration should not be confused with the mere mixing of Negroes and whites in the same classroom, or in the same school, or in the same neighborhood.”20 If interracial classrooms were a sign of progress, and a token of good faith by the Board of Education, they were not an end in themselves. Integration meant genuine and full inclusion of minorities in the structures of society, and not mere race mixing. Rochdale came to South Jamaica bearing gifts in the form of desperately needed schools: two elementary schools and an intermediate school. For all the reservations

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South Jamaica residents had about the cooperative, the new schools went a long way to allaying their doubts. The local schools were notoriously substandard; no new schools had been built in the vicinity of the Jamaica Racetrack for half a century.21 Two of the last five wooden schoolhouses left in New York City, PS 110 and 161, overcrowded and on double sessions, with inferior facilities, would be closed with the opening of Rochdale’s elementary schools.22 Harold Ostroff said that when the UHF started to have discussions on the cooperative with local groups in South Jamaica, one request came up again and again: “to pay particular attention to the need for schools.” The UHF’s promise that Rochdale would have new schools, shared by Rochdale and the existing population of South Jamaica, “really crossed the roads into the surrounding community.”23 The usual resentments on this regard— improvements were coming to South Jamaica because the whites were moving in— seemed like a small price to pay for what parents desperately wanted, better schools and better education for their children.24 South Jamaica’s schools suffered the typical educational problems faced by black New Yorkers. By the 1930s several schools in South Jamaica had steadily rising black enrollment, and PS 40, near Merrick Boulevard, was among the first to be seen as a “Negro school.” Black parents complained that plans were afoot to remake it as a “Jim Crow school,” that is, to steer whites away from it.25 Although in 1935 PS 40 became the first public school in Queens, and perhaps in all of New York City, to offer adult education courses in Negro history, it soon developed the reputation as a troubled school, plagued with gang violence.26 In 1945 the Jamaica branch of the NAACP and the Queens CIO complained that students at PS 40 and 48 had been forced to eat lunch in the rain, sit beside broken windows, and sit two to a desk; had been struck by teachers; and had been humiliated by teachers for not being dressed properly.27 By the early 1950s, when schools in minority neighborhoods were on average ten to twenty years older than those in predominantly white neighborhoods, Jamaica had the largest collection of old wooden-frame schoolhouses left in the city, and black parents in Queens were demanding access to newer and better schools.28 Ramshackle schools were often placed on insalubrious, poorly drained, and dangerous grounds, near grade crossings (that is, active railroad tracks). At one South Jamaica elementary school in 1963, according to a complaint, “water linger[ed] for days after a rain and [got] deep enough for a child to drown.”29 By the end of the 1950s at least four elementary schools in the vicinity of Rochdale were at least 90 percent African American, with many others also seriously racially unbalanced.30 The fight for integrated education by blacks south of Hillside Avenue was paralleled by the fight of many whites north of the avenue, the so-called Mason-Dixon Line of southeastern Queens, to prevent it. The Queens Chamber of Commerce announced its opposition to “forced integration” in 1957.31 A few months before the first families moved in to Rochdale, the organization that came to epitomize “white backlash” (a brand-new term in the fall of 1963), Parents and Taxpayers (PAT), was formed in Jackson Heights and Rego Park, with one of its goals to keep black

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students on their side of the borough.32 It was PAT that made the preservation of the “neighborhood school” (a term in little use before the 1950s) a central theme in the city’s political debates.33 PAT soon gained considerable clout, and a number of politicians—such as William F. Buckley Jr. during his 1965 campaign for mayor on the Conservative line— jumped on their bandwagon.34 Jerald Podair has suggested that by 1966 PAT had largely stymied efforts to further school integration in New York City.35 What made the white neighborhoods of eastern Queens likely sites for integrated education— their adjacency to black neighborhoods—was the very reason most local residents were so adamantly against any such experimentation. In early 1960, in the same issue of the UHF house organ that announced plans to build Rochdale Village, Co-op Contact opined: “The policy of discrimination in housing and in everything else is a national problem in the north as in the south. The actions of some parents picketing a school in Queens a few months ago was as disgraceful as the situation in Little Rock.”36 Those Queens parents, the black students they were picketing, and the newly arrived residents of Rochdale, would soon have to find ways to share the schools of southeastern Queens. Though Rochdale was an ideal place to see if integrated education could work, it was hardly free of the underlying problems and tensions that had stymied integration elsewhere in the city. • • • Rochdale’s first school crisis occurred before any family moved in to the cooperative. Integrated education (and perhaps, even the cooperative itself ) came close to failing before it started. Powerful forces, either through deliberation or indifference, almost allowed this to happen, but they were prevented from doing so by Rochdale’s prospective residents, who knew about the importance of education to the future of the cooperative. In the annals of grassroots activism of the early 1960s, of people banding together to take on City Hall (and even more impressively, the hydra-headed bureaucracy known as the Board of Education), this is an untold story. As noted above, central to the efforts of the UHF to convince community groups that Rochdale would be a boon for South Jamaica was the promise of new schools. But although the UHF did the promising, the responsibility for building the schools fell to the Board of Education. The UHF and the Board of Education made for a poor team. The UHF was typically very fast and efficient in building their cooperatives, and Rochdale was no exception. The first families moved in to Rochdale a mere three and a half years after groundbreaking. The Board of Education had no similar incentive in building its schools, and they were typically unhurried in fulfilling their construction commitments, especially in African American neighborhoods. The UHF for its part was rather nonchalant in keeping track of the progress of the Board of Education, and narrowly concentrated on what they saw as

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their bailiwick, the building of housing. So by the spring of 1962, when the Rochdale construction site was abuzz with construction and construction workers, no work had been done on the buildings for Rochdale’s schools. According to information from the Board of Education, PS 30 was not included in the 1962–63 school budget, and was not expected to be completed until “1966–67 or later.” As a prospective Rochdale resident wrote to Harold Ostroff in March 1963, the “Board of Education does not feel it necessary to keep pace with a new community’s needs.”37 Inquiries to the UHF on the school building from those planning to move to Rochdale were met, according to one of the inquirers, with “vague and unsatisfactory answers.”38 One of those who heard the rumors was Herbert Plever, a lawyer then living in Crown Heights near Bedford-Stuyvesant. A visit to the construction site confirmed his suspicions. Plever did further searching. When his inquiries to the Board of Education proved fruitless, Plever contacted the City Planning Commission. He was told no progress had been made on the Rochdale school buildings because no funds had been allocated for that purpose.39 Plever, a man of the left, had a long history of activism in a number of progressive causes.40 But the political climate in 1962 was very different from what it had been ten or fifteen years earlier. The Old Left, the Communist and near-Communist Left, was largely moribund. But many who had been involved in the movement remained vitally interested in politics, had excellent organizing skills, and above all, as the issue came front and center in local and national debates, they cared about civil rights. (One of the finest legacies of the Communist Party in its death throes were legions of admirable ex-Communists, now freed from its ideological rigidities.) In New York City during the 1940s and 1950s the struggle for civil rights, had been carried out sometimes in tandem and sometimes along parallel lines by left and liberal organizations. Although the red scare dampened this natural civil rights alliance, it did not altogether kill it, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the decline of the institutional left and the muting of the fierce Communist/ anti-Communist fights among liberals and leftists, there was room for a new sort of progressive organization.41 This sort of new type of grass roots, neighborhood-based organization coalesced around the cause of Rochdale’s public schools. Plever was the guiding force in the formation, in March 1962, of the Rochdale Village Public School Committee (RVPSC) and one of its major leaders. It had a left tinge, but without any sectarian baggage, and committed to pragmatic and nonideological goals. As Plever said, “Probably the majority of those in the Rochdale Village school committee were not from left-wing backgrounds. We met people we didn’t know and who were never left politically, and we didn’t have a political agenda in the school committee; we were probably less politically active than ever in our lives because we were involved 24/7 in the school committee.”42 Central Brooklyn, where most of the founders of the RVPSC lived before moving to Rochdale, was a hotbed of grassroots agitation for educational reform, and an area where, not coincidentally, there had been a model for the RVPSC: the Parents’

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Workshop, a broad interracial and nonideological coalition, though significant elements of the leadership had been active in the Old Left. Founded in 1960, the bulk of Parents’ Workshop members came from local parent-teacher associations. They were led by the charismatic African American minister Milton A. Galamison, whose visibility in the organization would soon catapult him to citywide leadership in the struggle for integrated schools. The other leader of Parents’ Workshop was Annie Stein, a former labor organizer, a passionate advocate for school integration, and a longtime member of the Communist Party.43 (Stein would have a tangential role in the fight for integrated schools in Rochdale.) Commitment and activism on behalf of better schools in Central Brooklyn translated easily to South Jamaica, whose aging, overcrowded, racially segregated schools had many of the same problems. Plever said, “When we realized that we were being snowed, . . . a bunch of us who were active in the schools in Brooklyn decided to organize ourselves and figure out if we wanted to pull out of Rochdale or do something to improve the situation.”44 Plever and some of the other leaders of the RVPSC contacted the UHF with the information about the lack of work on the schools. The first impulse of some UHF officials was to pass the buck and respond in a narrowly bureaucratized way, arguing it was someone else’s problem. Sue Raskin, one of the leaders of the RVPSC, spoke to Arnold Merritt, the first manager of Rochdale Village, urging him to help speed school construction. She remembers being told “We are in the housing business, not a social agency.”45 This was not the response of Harold Ostroff, who was sympathetic to the concerns of the protesters, and had been in the dark about the Board of Education’s inaction. But his instinct was to keep things quiet, speak to the right people, and get things moving. The instincts of the RVPSC leadership, honed in innumerable street boycotts and rallies, was precisely the opposite: to bring attention and publicity to the problem, and develop a mass base for future protests.46 The RVPSC threatened to tell the press that the families of RVPSC were pulling out of Rochdale because the cooperative was a fraud and had made no adequate provisions for education. The RVPSC demanded, and eventually were given, a list of all the families intending to move to Rochdale, and they sent out a notice about the situation. Ostroff agreed to let the RVPSC hold a general meeting at UHF headquarters in Lower Manhattan, to which several hundred people came. The RVPSC also contacted politicians about the situation. All this accomplished little. The Board of Education remained largely unresponsive, trying to brush off the protesters with empty promises and platitudes.47 (One person who learned something from this was Harold Ostroff. After his experience with the Board of Education at Rochdale, for Co-op City he and the UHF insisted on building the cooperative’s three elementary schools, two intermediate schools, and one high school themselves, becoming the first private developers to build public schools in New York City.)48 Disenchanted with conventional protests, the experienced activists at the RVPSC opted for polite guerrilla tactics. Bernard Donovan, the superintendent of the Board of Education, received this alert on April 2, 1963: “Attached three

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postcards and eighteen letters from persons who expect to move to Rochdale Village, Jamaica this summer, expressing concern about the lack of adequate schools in the area. This looks like the beginning of a real campaign.”49 Donovan wrote Harold Ostroff later in the month, “We have received numerous letters of concern from your prospective tenants,” so many that, according to another letter from Donovan, “it is quite impossible to answer all the individuals who have written in.”50 When letters did not obtain the desired results, the protesters organized a phone chain, and every few minutes another member would call the Board of Education, utterly tying up the switchboard at 110 Livingston Street. In Herb Plever’s words, “After two or three days of that, I actually got a telephone call, and someone said, ‘Come down, we will talk.’ ” But as another member of the committee stated, the Board of Education couldn’t be trusted in any of their promises. One activist remembered, “We were never certain up to the last minute, and we felt that we had to always keep up the pressure.”51 In the spring of 1963, the board revised their building schedule and placed Rochdale’s schools at the front of the queue.52 However, the damage done by the board’s neglectful inaction could not be undone all at once, since even with an accelerated schedule, the school buildings would not be ready in time. Portable classrooms were needed for the first students. PS 30, from December 1963 through January 1965, when the new building finally opened, made use of twenty-four quonset huts in a temporary area (on which IS 72 would eventually be built) and also made use of community rooms in the Rochdale buildings.53 The RVPSC helped lay the foundations for close working relationships with the black families surrounding Rochdale. With the tardy pace of school building, there were local worries, as a newspaper headline put it in November 1963, that Rochdale would “swamp local schools.”54 While almost all the leaders of the RVPSC were white, they worked closely with local PTAs in South Jamaica, especially those at schools slated for replacement by Rochdale’s schools, and tried to bring pressure on the Board of Education and local politicians to accelerate the construction of Rochdale’s new schools. The building of Rochdale’s schools was a striking instance of what Rochdale could potentially bring to South Jamaica. It set the stage for future collaboration. For Plever, getting the Board of Education to turn around so quickly was “absolutely unique in all of the annals of New York City.”55 Without the change of policy by the board, many of the families in the RVPSC (and doubtless many others) would not have moved to Rochdale, and unless Rochdale’s schools had been built in a timely fashion, Rochdale Village itself would have been at least crippled, if not fatally wounded. There have been allegations, notably by David Rogers in his classic study of Board of Education ineffectuality, 110 Livingston Street, that the tardiness of the board was part of a deliberate effort to undermine integration in Rochdale and South Jamaica, by delaying the building of PS 30 until the other new school, PS 80, could be readied as a replacement for the old wooden schools in South Jamaica, reserving PS 30 primarily for Rochdale’s students, thereby leaving one elementary

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predominantly black, the other predominantly white. There certainly were rumors to this effect current in 1963. A member of the RVPSC wrote the Board of Education in March 1963 that he had learned that “PS 80 is to be a replacement for substandard and wooden schools in the area. How many of those seats will be available to us living in Rochdale Village has not been determined.”56 The extent of the duplicity of the Board of Education is in the end difficult to determine, and several former members of the RVPSC were adamant that they knew of no plan to use PS 80 solely for students from outside Rochdale.57 In any event, such a plan was never implemented, and the RVPSC’s stalwart defense of integrated schools made a huge difference in challenging the almost malign slothfulness of the Board of Education. As they wrote the district superintendent in 1963, “In a district as ours where so much of our school population comes from Negro homes—we cannot have a predominantly Negro or a predominantly white school.”58 The RVPSC was not alone in its belief that Rochdale could become a test for integrated education. A number of people involved in the movement for improvement of racial conditions in the city’s schools, among them, Annie Stein, the leader of Parents’ Workshop in Brooklyn, and educators Max Woolf and Doxey Wilkerson thought Rochdale Village was “the best place in the city for integration.”59 In Rochdale, the Public School Committee argued that “in this advantageous setting, our failure to obtain quality integrated education at PS 30 and PS 80 may have profound implications for the future of public education in NYC.” And while the possibility existed for “long range educational programs and innovations” in which Negro and white pupils “have the potential for dramatic scholastic achievement in a democratic environment which can develop truly integrated, creative education,” the “mere existence of a balanced ethnic population, by itself, will guarantee neither integrated nor quality education.” They wanted an innovative program, carefully tailored to Rochdale’s elementary schools, to nurture the fragile flower of integration.60 The RVPSC took the initiative and approached Yeshiva University and Bank Street College to fund a special program in the development of “quality-integrated schools” through “curricular patterns and methods designed to achieve maximum educational value from the multi-cultural character of the student body,” and received a $5,000 grant from the New York State Education Department for this purpose.61 This led, in the summer and fall of 1965, to a “Teacher Institute on Individualizing Instruction for Classroom Integration at PS 30 and PS 80.”62 The institute was supervised by Doxey Wilkerson and Edmund Gordon, both professors of education at Yeshiva University, and both leaders in the field of what was being called “compensatory education”—the study of ways to equalize educational attainment among white and black students. The institute was taught by Wilkerson and Rachel Weddington, of Queens College. Twenty-four teachers from Rochdale’s two elementary schools volunteered to participate, a commitment that involved a once-a-week meeting during the school year, visits to the homes of students, and a summer institute. One of the goals of the

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institute was to introduce teachers to the notion of the “homogeneous classroom” in which students of different ability levels were placed together, with individualized attention and instruction to students who were either somewhat faster or somewhat slower than the group as a whole. This was seen as a way of ameliorating one of the most challenging problems associated with integrated education, grouping students by ability, commonly called tracking. If, as was usually the case, black students underperformed their white counterparts in their grades and on standardized tests, one might create an integrated school, only to see the practical impact largely nullified by classroom assignments made on the basis of test scores, that would largely separate classes along racial lines.63 The RVPSC wanted Rochdale’s schools to explore “every known educational methodology old and new to prevent the creation of segregated classrooms.”64 This included an emphasis on teaching black history and cultural diversity, and exploring alternatives to tracking. The RVPSC wished to overcome the “unhealthy competitiveness” they argued characterized most educational settings. They wished to develop “human relations workshops and other programs to promote communication between parents, the schools, and the community.” They also proposed an “educational park,” with plans drawn up by Annie Stein and Max Woolf, that would have moved several local elementary and junior high schools to Rochdale (from both white and blacks areas) to make Rochdale the center of efforts at integration for all of southeastern Queens.65 But these proposed educational innovations ran into determined opposition. Far from agreeing to “homogeneous classrooms” most Rochdale parents wanted tracking strengthened, and Rochdale’s elementary schools were strongly tracked. The local UFT chapters, already cautious in 1965 about school programs that involved a large degree of parental involvement, were very cool about the plan, and tried to discourage teacher participation, as did the principal of one of Rochdale’s two elementary schools. Some teachers tried to convince black parents, appearances aside, that the new ways of organizing class assignments would not help black students but make them guinea pigs in a new-fangled experiment thought up by white bureaucrats.66 There was some red-baiting, primarily directed at Doxey Wilkerson. Wilkerson, before becoming a professor of education at Yeshiva, had been, in the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most prominent African Americans in the Communist Party. He left the party in the late 1950s, before joining the faculty at Yeshiva.67 In the end, few if any of these recommendations for reforming Rochdale’s elementary schools were ever implemented. Herb Plever remains convinced that “had the teachers participated in the programs without tracking maybe we would have won over the parents who were opposed” and Rochdale’s schools could have really pioneered innovative integrated education, and just might have provided an alternative path to the immovable objects and irresistible forces that collided so loudly in New York City’s educational politics later in the decade.68 But I wouldn’t want the story of integration in Rochdale’s elementary schools to end on a note of defeat. The final result was a compromise, one that went too far for

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some, and not far enough for others. Rochdale’s schools remained integrated, and tracking was sometimes modified to preserve integrated classes.69 One last comment on Doxey Wilkerson. At some point during my time in fifth grade, or so my mother later informed me (I have no recollection of it) I had a meeting with him, and he recommended to my mom and the school principal that I skip the next grade. I thank him for the vote of confidence, but my mother was probably correct in thinking that I was already, in comparison with my classmates, sufficiently immature, and skipping a grade would make things worse. Doxey Wilkerson was representative of a generation of committed believers in integration who genuinely thought that racial progress was possible, because all parents wanted schools that were safe, inspiring places for creative learning, staffed with attentive and committed teachers that helped every student to realize his or her potential. He told the New Pittsburgh Courier in 1965 that his study of Rochdale’s elementary schools convinced him that “contrary to common belief . . . white and Negro parents have strikingly similar attitudes and educational objectives for their children.” It was a belief that, by the end of the decade, in Rochdale and elsewhere, would be in tragically short supply.70 • • • The question of Rochdale’s junior high school students presented even greater challenges than did its elementary schools. Junior high involved a broader area of South Jamaica and southeastern Queens, and therefore involved black-majority schools. Once again the problem predated the opening of Rochdale. When the Board of Education in the late 1950s decided that South Jamaica needed a new junior high school, there was considerable community consternation that its location was slated for Merrick Boulevard, in the heart of one of the poorer sections of South Jamaica, where it was feared it would attract no white students.71 When, in 1960, the Jamaica NAACP went along with the Merrick Boulevard site, it was widely excoriated in the black press, with an article in the New York Amsterdam News headlined “NAACP Bows to Segregated Site.” Further, an Amsterdam News editorial called their decision “a slap in the face to the Southern sit-down strikes, the wholesale slaying of Negroes in South Africa, and the struggle for freedom and civil rights here and throughout the world.” William Booth, a rising star in the Jamaica NAACP, defended the branch’s decision, arguing that wherever the school was located, its student body would be almost entirely black, and the building process would be more expeditious on Merrick Boulevard. In the end, the school was built on the Merrick Boulevard site, and the whole episode showed that black parents in South Jamaica who wanted integrated education for their children had very few options. The new school opened as Richard S. Grossley JHS 8 in 1963,72 and those who thought the school would not be able to attract any white students were both right and wrong. When the school opened there were almost no whites, but, starting in the fall of 1964, white and black students from Rochdale attended JHS 8.73

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The Board of Education had promised a new intermediate school for Rochdale, but once again, it was not ready in time. Since the new junior high school was to be built on the site of the Quonset huts of the temporary elementary school, construction could not begin until 1965, and the new school would not be ready until the fall of 1967. Where would Rochdale’s junior–high-school-aged pupils go in the interim? Predominantly white schools within busing distance (in Springfield Gardens or Briarwood) warned that they were overcrowded and couldn’t or wouldn’t take Rochdale students.74 The obvious choice was JHS 8, which was underutilized and only a short, fifteen-minute bus ride away. Many of the problems that had been anticipated about JHS 8, because of its location, had indeed occurred, with a black enrollment close to 100 percent, and with a reputation that made middle-class black families reluctant to send their children there.75 When a pairing was announced in the spring of 1964 with a school serving the white neighborhoods of Briarwood and Jamaica Estates, parents in those neighborhoods engaged in a successful boycott of JHS 8.76 As usually happened in these circumstances, the Board of Education acquiesced to the refusal of white parents to have their children attend school with black children. JHS 8 was underutilized because white students and their parents wanted nothing to do with it.77 The proposal that Rochdale students be bused to JHS 8 caused much “fear and apprehension” among Rochdale parents.78 A teacher at the school remembered that “parents in Rochdale were really, really worried about sending their kids to JHS 8, and there was a lot of anxiety.”79 Even the RVPSC was at first skeptical of the Board of Education and the local school district’s proposal, saw it as a cynical effort to get Rochdale parents to shoulder the burden of integration in southeastern Queens, and called for a rezoning for all the district’s junior high schools.80 Because of this unified opposition the first group of Rochdale’s junior high school students, in the 1963–64 school year (approximately forty whites and ten blacks) were sent to JHS 231 in Springfield Gardens, with Rochdale’s students going to JHS 8 only in the fall of 1964, when they would represent a considerably larger body of students.81 There was a division among white parents of junior high school students in Rochdale over tracking, similar to the related conflict in Rochdale’s elementary schools. As Harvey Swados noted in 1966, “Within the white, predominantly Jewish membership of the JHS 8 PTA there had been a split between those eager to press for the establishment of classes for Intellectually Gifted Children and those who warned that because of educational deficiencies on the part of the ghetto children tested, the result would be segregated classrooms.”82 The principal of JHS 8, George Korot, heard these complaints and made concessions to Rochdale’s parents. The ninth grade was transferred out of the JHS to lessen the pupil load and to get the students into the more integrated student populations in the senior high schools sooner, and students were given a choice of high schools to attend.83 Rochdale parents strongly wished to have a heavy use of tracking and “special programs” (or SP) in the school, which did result in a large degree of racial separation for classes

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within a single grade. Indeed, there had to be an adjustment within each grade to correct for the racial imbalance.84 The SP classes were at least 70 percent white, and because JHS was 75 percent black, the lower classes in the grades were almost entirely African American.85 Most of the black students in the SP classes were from Rochdale; on the whole the blacks in special programs did not fare as well as the whites.86 The heavy tracking led some black observers to complain that in JHS 8 “classrooms have been skillfully segregated—Caucasians and Negroes together in the same building but separated in the classrooms.”87 This is to some extent true, but without the SPs and tracking, it is unlikely that Korot would have convinced Rochdale parents to accept assignment to JHS 8. Integration in JHS 8 (and elsewhere) was the art of the possible, balancing the conflicting fears and desires of whites and blacks, liberals and moderates, teachers and parents. With special funding the school was able to reduce class sizes, obtained enrichment programs, remedial experts, and new guidance counselors.88 In the end Rochdale parents accepted the placement of their children in JHS 8. By the spring of 1965, about a quarter of the student body was white.89 It was one of the very few times in the 1960s that children in New York City were bused to a predominantly black school for purposes of racial integration. A teacher remembers that the teaching staff “was aware how unique” JHS 8’s situation was.90 The responsibility for overseeing the integration of JHS 8 fell to its principal, George Korot, who, like so many administrative personnel in the New York City school system in the 1960s, was of Jewish background. Korot organized numerous meetings with parent groups from Rochdale and from South Jamaica, trying to deal with the concerns of both groups.91 He tried to be attentive to white and black parents’ questions about security, classroom problems, and any other parental issue.92 Korot realized that security was key to keeping the school calm, and promised to use his guidance staff to identify and if necessary weed out persistent discipline problems.93 They avoided major flare-ups and confrontations. “Good leadership,” said a teacher at JHS 8 during these years, “is not noticed, when it is smooth and well-lubricated, it is not noticed. That is what happened at JHS 8.”94 A white parent from Rochdale said that “whenever you heard of any problem, parents would run down to George Korot at 8.”95 He worked equally well with black parents, and as a president of the school’s PTA commented a few years later (when it had reverted to an all-black school), “We have our differences [with Korot], but they’re not black and white differences. We are one of the few schools that has bridged the bitterness.”96 Korot’s combination of solicitousness and firmness worked. He created an environment where black and white parents could work together effectively. For example, at one point when the school had a majority black enrollment, a white Rochdale parent—Susan Raskin, who had been leader of the RVPSC—was president of the PTA. In the words of Harvey Swados, writing in 1966, the parents of Rochdale students sent to JHS 8, “within the space, not of a lifetime, but of two years . . . were converted by their own children not merely to passive acceptance but

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to enthusiastic support of their children being educated in a school which is still 75 percent Negro.”97 Many Rochdale parents said the same thing, such as one parent, once very worried about sending her son to JHS 8, who wrote late in 1965, After 9 months many of my fears are gone. Scholastically I find the school superior. . . . The transportation is easy by the Bedell St Bus. My son, a very average student, achieved the Effort Roll, and is striving for the honor roll. . . . To say there haven’t been incidents in JHS 8, as in the city, would be to deceive you. I would say the incidents have been minor. The Staff, including the Dean of Behavior and the Guidance Counselor have been most anxious to accommodate the children and the parents of Rochdale.98 One shouldn’t paint this story in too-glowing colors, and there are dissenting opinions. There were discipline problems at JHS 8. The area around the school was dangerous. One woman, who called the school a “zoo,” remembered getting out of school “too late for the bus and walking those scary few blocks to Rochdale, knitting needles on the ready for the inevitable attack.” (However, the same woman also remembered with fondness getting out of school and walking, on many of the same streets, to Jamaica Avenue at lunch.)99 For some white students, negative memories crowded out all else. “As you know we were the first set of kids sent to ‘integrate’ Grossley [ JHS 8]. The daily bus trips were filled with apprehension. The first year I discovered we had to pay for protection or our pens and pencils would be stolen and other physical damage would follow.”100 Blacks from Rochdale sometimes had similar complaints.101 All I can say is that those weren’t my memories. I attended JHS 8 from 1966 to 1968, part of the last class from Rochdale to attend the school before Rochdale’s own intermediate school opened. There were always racial undercurrents, and there were occasional menacing incidents, but with one very important exception—the disturbances that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to be discussed in chapter 11—I do not remember spending my days in fear, looking around the corner to avoid the next assailant. Many of my classmates concur.102 If I had a regret, it was that the SP class I was in provided a cocoon, primarily consisting of fellow Rochdale students, that largely insulated me from the 75 percent of the students who were not white. I remember less interracial friendship in JHS 8, on my part at least, than in elementary school. But I also remember a school that was intellectually vital. Because it was difficult to get teachers to come to South Jamaica, Korot had more freedom than usual in hiring teachers, and hired a young and committed staff.103 My charismatic social studies teacher, Kenneth Tewel, who went on to a career as a principal and top administrator in the city’s high schools, was one of the people who developed my love of history, and helped kindle a lifelong interest in African American history. (I remember doing a long report for him on the history of slavery in New York State, in which I tried to work in my new vocabulary

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find, “manumission,” in every sentence.) James Klurfeld, later the editorial page editor of Newsday, was a popular English teacher who, teaching at JHS 8 as part of a student deferment, introduced contemporary literature into popular classes.104 I had the best math teachers I ever had at JHS 8. A memorial program we had in the assembly after the death of Langston Hughes left a big impression. My formal musical career consisted of a stint playing third clarinet in the school band, which was a lot of fun, despite, as one member later recalled, playing tunes like “Fly Me to the Moon” at a tempo appropriate for a funeral dirge.105 JHS 8 could have been a better school, and integration there could have been more thoroughgoing and more carefully thought out. With time and hindsight came a deeper knowledge of how difficult the process was, of opportunities missed, and of the limitations of good intentions. In retrospect, Kenneth Tewel feels that his thinking about the possibility of integration at JHS 8 was somewhat “simplistic”; it had been a protective naivety, shielding him from the pervasive pessimism that overtook thought about integration later in the decade:106 We never really understood the deeper dynamics of integration or the real feelings of the black community; it was like an age of innocence. . . . I should have paid better attention to some of the learning problems of some of the black kids in this situation. For a lot of the black kids this was their first interaction with white students. But this was a happy time for us, the school was working, there was no great tension or strain. Integration in JHS 8, as in Rochdale’s elementary schools, and in the cooperative itself, was built on partial victories and compromises. Some at the time (like the RVPSC), and many in hindsight, could see how partial a victory it was, and what might have been done differently. But no one had a free hand to shape it as they chose. Some wanted to push faster, some wanted to slow down, and many were happy just as they were. What is perhaps most important is to remember that integration in Rochdale followed no blueprint, and it was created, almost entirely, not by outsiders, but by the people who lived in the cooperative, and the people who lived near it. In the words of David Rogers,107 Rochdale offered the board [of education] an opportunity with built-in answers to the problems they claim to face in bringing about integration. There was a naturally integrated school population formed by whites buying into the area—quite the opposite from the typical unstable, transitional area. . . . [But despite the ambivalence of the Board of Education,] it was the parents who saw the opportunities for desegregation . . . it was the community leaders who began and carried through the community relations work in both communities, seeking out fears and intelligently answering them.

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But it would not last. Successful integration in Rochdale, and in Rochdale’s schools, was, as Larry Lapka, a former Rochdale resident said, “a shooting star,” burning bright for its moment, then going dark and falling to earth, its downward trajectory determined by the racial gravitation of the times, “something we had no control over.”108

10. The Great Fear and the High-Crime Era

We all came to Rochdale to live, not to die. Rochdale mugging victim, July 1969, quoted in Inside Rochdale

A few months after Rochdale Village opened in December 1963, a new and not particularly proud era in the history of New York City had its defining and emblematic event. On March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, just a few subway stops from Rochdale, Kitty Genovese, coming home late from work, was stabbed by an assailant in a random, remorseless, brutal sex crime and murder. What gave the case instant and lasting notoriety were the news reports that thirty-eight people had heard her screams for help, heard her death throes, and no one came to her aid. (There have been, in recent years, revisionist accounts that argue that the residents of Kew Gardens were not nearly the massively indifferent bad Samaritans of legend, but whatever the truth of this, it is irrelevant to the contemporary meaning of the Kitty Genovese case.) The crime (with the archetypal black male murderer and rapist and white female victim) was for many a sign of the changing times; a merciless and friendless city, where neighbors flee and lock themselves away at the sign of trouble, a city whose new motto was “better you than me.”1 The high crime era had come to New York City. It had come to the city suddenly, and largely unexpectedly, like, as it were, a thief in the night. As late as 1958 the murder rates in New York City were lower than the national average.2 The following

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year, in a survey of important issues in New York City politics compiled for Mayor Wagner by a Harris Poll, juvenile delinquency, the highest-ranking crime-related problem, ranked eighth out of fourteen issues.3 (By 1965 public safety was polling as the most important issue for white New Yorkers, across all class and ethnic lines.)4 The high crime era would last for three decades. Between 1955 and 1965 the number of murders in the city increased from 306 to 681, and the rates would double again in the next half decade, reaching 1,201 by 1970, then topping out at 2,245 in 1990. During the decade 1955 to 1965, other forms of crime underwent similar surges, with robberies and car thefts nearly tripling, and assaults and thefts doubling.5 If the lack of civic virtue displayed in the Kitty Genovese case was seen as very troubling, of even greater significance was the apparent inability of the police and other authorities to deal with the rise in crime. It would become central to the era’s political agenda, making and breaking numerous political careers. Many people had solutions; for those on the right, being “soft on crime” was the 1960s successor to “soft on Communism.” (The rejection in 1966 of Mayor John Lindsay’s Civilian Review Board was one of the first indications of this trend.)6 Liberals typically saw the crime wave as American society reaping what it had sown in terms of racial inequality and the creation of new urban ghettos in northern metropolitan areas. They had the satisfaction of knowing that their analysis of the historical roots of the crime problem was probably correct, and the mortification of seeing crime rates continue to escalate despite their best efforts to control them. The crime wave defeated all. Politicians proposed; the crime wave disposed. In 1966 the successful Democratic candidate for Queens district attorney, Thomas Mackell, had advertised in Inside Rochdale under the slogan “Elect Mackell DA, Drive fear from our streets.”7 The debate over crime was inextricably tied to race. For many, crime simply followed demography, with the causality too clear and apparent to have to be elaborated any further; minorities move in; crime goes up; whites move out. Crime was indeed higher in predominantly minority areas (with minorities the predominant victims). But if one side tended to simply blame minorities (and their liberal enablers) for the high rates of crime, the other side in the debate blamed whites for creating the social conditions that led to the increase of crime, isolating minorities in the worst neighborhoods in the city, leaving them prey to a host of social disorders and to the tender mercies of both criminals and a racist police force, and then washing their hands of their profound complicity in the genesis of the situation by reducing crime to a “black problem.” The middle ground in this debate proved remarkably elusive. It had a poisonous effect on race relations, and greatly complicated the cause of integration; whites were increasingly afraid of blacks as neighbors or even fellow citizens, and blacks were increasingly convinced that white fear about crime revealed the true heart of white racism. It was one of the misfortunes of integration in Rochdale Village that it opened just as the era of high crime was getting under way.

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• • • South Jamaica was no exception to the general rule that predominantly minority areas of the city had high rates of crime. Worries about run-down structures attracting a criminal element were aired as early as the 1920s. Gang violence in South Jamaica (with the occasional organized-crime shootout or rub out) made headlines in the 1930s. By the end of the decade the New York Amsterdam News was running stories that South Jamaicans were afraid to leave their houses at night, were demanding more police protection, and claiming that their neighborhood was deliberately underserved. In 1944 the Jamaica branch of the NAACP complained of police indifference to the “gangs of young Negro ruffians roaming the streets nightly.” But for a black community such as South Jamaica, calls for police protection cut two ways. They felt that the police at once ignored their neighborhoods, and then when they paid attention, were indiscriminate in their actions, harassing people, especially young men, who had done nothing wrong. By the late 1940s, the Jamaica NAACP was making an issue of local police brutality.8 These problems continued into the 1950s and beyond. Rates of juvenile delinquency more than doubled in South Jamaica between 1953 and 1962. By the latter year it was twice the rate for the borough of Queens as a whole.9 By the time Rochdale was taking applications, in 1961 and 1962, crime in South Jamaica factored into the decision making of many families. Abraham Kazan and other labor leaders were worried from the outset that fear of crime would keep whites from exploring the housing possibilities at the new cooperative.10 According to Harvey Swados, fear of crime entered into the decisions of many families who decided not to move to Rochdale.11 Some people who knew they would be coming home from work late at night decided that there were safer places to live.12 Crime shaped Rochdale from the outset. Rochdale was planned before crime emerged as the predominant political and social concern, and it opened during crime’s ascendance. Rochdale’s design reflected this relative unconcern. The doors to the buildings were permanently unlocked and did not require keys or cards to enter. It was not until 1968 that Rochdale began to seriously consider installing a locked-door and intercom system for the main entrances.13 Rochdale had many of the design features that contemporary critics pointed to as exacerbating crime rates: long corridors in buildings and lonely passageways between sections.14 And to leave Rochdale by public transportation one had to wait at bus stops, across the street from the cooperative proper, that at night tended to be dark and deserted. One woman who worked as a nurse on an evening shift remembers one of her neighbors watching out for her from their windows as she made her way to the bus stop.15 The parking lots were on the open streets, easily accessible by thieves. In many ways Rochdale was ill-designed to secure itself against the surge in criminal activity. Crime in Rochdale had its own specific dimensions and shape. For all that people read or watched television reports about crime elsewhere in the city, knowledge

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about crime is local knowledge, generally passed by word of mouth, or through local newspapers. The crime that most worries you is that taking place outside your door or down the street. Crime was a concern at Rochdale from the time the first families moved in, and was brought up in the first cooperative meetings, in early 1964. In the summer of 1964 delays in installing street lighting by Con Edison raised questions about nighttime safety.16 In April 1965 an article in Inside Rochdale decried “the large number of idle persons who frequent certain areas of our community” and reported that local merchants wanted stricter enforcement of loitering laws.17 In October of 1965, 450 people came to a membership meeting on “Security in and Around Rochdale Village.”18 A month later Rochdale residents sent a petition to Mayor Wagner, telling him, “We believe that there is now an insufficient number of police to control crime in the area.”19 Complaining about the litter of empty wine bottles in the shopping mall, a writer in Inside Rochdale claimed in 1966 that the “shopping center is now an annex of the Bowery,” and Rochdale was on its way to becoming the “world’s first air-conditioned slum.”20 In spring 1966 a meeting of the Rochdale Village Democratic Organization called (unsuccessfully) for the hiring of elevator operators between the hours of 9 PM and 6 AM, along with improved street lighting and increased police patrols.21 That year car thefts, purse snatchings, and physical molestation at knifepoint made many Rochdale residents “scared stiff,” convinced that management was ineffectual and turned a blind eye to the growing problem, and the Long Island Press was writing about Rochdale’s “march of crime.”22 In 1967 the local paper observed that the cooperative “is quite susceptible to various forms of criminal activities, such as vandalism, mugging, car stealing, and a host of other crimes.”23 In a straw poll in Rochdale in the fall of 1968, two-thirds of the more than eight hundred who responded thought the “greatest need in the community was ‘law and order.’ ”24 By 1969 a contributor to Inside Rochdale could write, “Fear seems to reign in Rochdale; women coming home from friends’ homes at night are terrified at the thought of walking to their elevators unaccompanied; the theft of automobiles from the parking lots is steadily increasing; children wanting to go out after dark are discouraged by their parents. Rochdale Village, the utopian cooperative, is steeped in fear.”25 A somewhat hyperbolic letter writer in 1972 summed up the situation thus:26 In the past 8 years the crime rate has boomed. Have you ever been riding on the elevator and all of a sudden it stops between floors and in climbs a thief? He takes your money and ring and you thank God you’re still alive. Perhaps a thief has come through your door or climbed over your terrace. Women have been raped, men mugged, and children molested. Women are afraid to take out their garbage for fear that someone is wanting to do them harm. “Crime” is a capacious term, a portmanteau into which all manner of acts, from childhood pranks to serious felonies are regularly stuffed. Certainly the greatest fear,

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in Rochdale and elsewhere in New York City at the turn of the 1970s, was attached to random assaults, muggings, and physical attacks. In late 1966 a Kitty Genovese– type incident occurred: A boy delivering circulars was accosted and stabbed in the arm in the hall of a building and when, bleeding, he rang bells to ask for assistance, people who didn’t want to be involved slammed their doors in his face.27 By the end of 1967 a teenager pronounced that “it is unsafe . . . to walk around Rochdale after about 10:30 at night.”28 Fears about rapes in Rochdale were of long standing, and these fears took a more sinister turn when John D. Hill, the so-called “Rochdale rapist,” committed eight rapes in Rochdale between February and May of 1970. (He actually lived outside the cooperative proper, on nearby Farmers Boulevard.)29 This incident became so identified with Rochdale that in 1972 the Board of Directors requested that the Long Island Press stop mentioning the “Rochdale rapist” every time a story appeared on Rochdale Village.30 In 1969 Rochdale had its first murder, when that July, Barry Epstein, a twenty-five-year-old Vietnam veteran, was stabbed on the way home from a reserve meeting.31 Another class of crime that was extremely troubling to Rochdale residents was the high incidence of car theft. In Inside Rochdale in December 1966, under the title “When Will the Madness End?” Helen Katz related an account of how her family’s car had been stolen twice in three months and wrecked.32 (This was a month after the newspaper included a helpful article on how to “Protect Your Car From Thieves.”)33 Although car theft was generally a nocturnal pursuit, I well remember the afternoon when my mother’s sister was reduced to hysterics when her vehicle was swiped while she paid us a visit. (From then on, we did all the visiting.) Of course, not many Rochdale residents drove, as did my aunt, a brand-new top-ofthe-line Cadillac. One typical response to living in a high crime area is to make oneself a less attractive target by dowdying down, and many Rochdale families, including my parents, combined prudence and parsimony by holding on to older and less desired cars as long as possible. (Our late-1950s Buick was probably, by the early 1970s, one of the last cars in Rochdale with extravagant tail fins.) Car theft was facilitated by the location of the parking spaces in huge open-air lots. Of the 3,000 parking spaces in Rochdale, one-third were located across Bedell Street, technically part of the cooperative, but separated from the housing and therefore rather deserted at night. It was in this area, according to a 1971 management memo, “that there have been many incidents of crime. Because of this there has been a reluctance of the part of many car owners to use these lots.”34 Although the lots were patrolled by Rochdale security forces, enterprising thieves had little problem gaining access to the lots, and could select from a wide array of late-model used cars to pilfer. The relatively lightly patrolled lots were also dangerous for other reasons—those leaving their cars at night were often accosted, and it was in a Rochdale parking lot that Barry Epstein was stabbed and murdered. Contributing to the prevalence of car theft was Rochdale’s proximity to Kennedy Airport, then a swarming den of organized crime activity, and Rochdale soon became a favored destination for rings of car thieves.35 Although there were various proposals made

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to build enclosed parking lots, these were abandoned because of their expense.36 However, the UHF learned from Rochdale, and included interior parking garages in the plans for Co-Op City from the outset.37 Thefts and burglaries were also a serious problem. Sometimes thieves entered apartments by means of the terrace balconies, which required only breaking a plateglass door. As early as 1968 there were advertisements for means of burglar-proofing terraces, and in 1972 the Rochdale Board of Directors discussed the rather alarming fact that for the past several weeks police had been surveilling Rochdale buildings by helicopter to discourage “fire hose climbers” from dropping down from the rooftops to thirteenth-floor terraces.38 However, probably the bigger concern with burglaries were thefts in the stores in Rochdale’s malls and adjacent commercial strips. High levels of theft led many merchants to shutter their shops, and further exacerbated the late-1960s trend of residents’ shopping in suburban malls rather than in Jamaica and Rochdale. The shuttered stores’ contribution to a general sense of desolation was self-fulfilling. (Few want to shop, let alone open up a new store, in a half-empty mall.) Under the headline “Crime Plagues Local Stores,” Inside Rochdale in January 1970 wrote, “The merchants in Rochdale Village are getting restless.”39 Three stores had been robbed in the past two weeks. One merchant who came to his store to find his windows pockmarked with bullet holes complained that the Rochdale security patrols were “not worth a damn.”40 “Let’s face it,” said the owner of a small clothing store that same year on nearby Merrrick Boulevard, with a sociological fatalism typical of New York City during this era, “once a neighborhood starts to go, there isn’t anything one can do about it. I’m just holding on to this place until I decide to retire. I’m 61 years old now. I’ve got a few years left.”41 Another merchant complained that he had been robbed four times in the past two years, and if he “could find someone to take it off my hands, I’d be out in a minute.” He told Inside Rochdale: “You want to know the truth? I wouldn’t want to shop here either, especially after dark.”42 Although Rochdale’s main mall was designed by Victor Gruen, the dominant figure in postwar mall design, by 1970 the mall had a “run down” look and was the subject of unflattering comparisons to Green Acres, the large suburban mall over the city line and just a few minutes away by car.43 Louis Jordan, the president of the Rochdale Village Merchants Association complained in September 1970 that he had been robbed three times in the past year, and as a result (and this was the biggest fear of merchants), his theft insurance had been canceled, and he predicted that the mall, without stores, “may soon be more like a tomb.”44 By 1972 Jordan was putting a better face on the situation: “Reports of widescale robbery [are] exaggerated. It’s no worse here than anyplace else in the city.” This was seconded by Jules Weinstein, Rochdale’s manager, who argued that “the vacancies in the mall were due solely to economic factors, and not crime.”45 Perhaps. But by 1972, for small merchants in many parts of the city, including Rochdale, economic viability could not be separated from fears of crime, on the part of both merchants and customers.

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Vandalism was another class of criminal activity that had a profound impact on life in Rochdale. By the early 1970s the rash of vandalism ranged from the annoying (graffiti in the hallways, or burning the plastic elevator buttons into dripping organic blobs reminiscent of early Salvador Dalí), to the distressing (turning on fire hoses in the stairwells, leaving water to cascade down the steps) to the disgusting (urinating in elevators). By 1971 the number of incidents of vandalism in Rochdale was impressive. For the first three months of the year the Security Department reported the following acts of criminal defacement: eleven acts of arson (four in incinerator rooms, three in carriage rooms, three in laundry rooms, one in an elevator shaft), and twenty-five acts of vandalism (eighteen broken windows, two jammed elevators, two fire hoses turned on, three rooms in the community center ransacked).46 The same report indicated that over the same three months, repairs and replacements due to acts of vandalism cost Rochdale Village $20, 598.95, including nineteen glass panels in lobbies, 1,036 panes of building glass in apartments, and assorted elevator mirrors, ceiling grills, alarm bells, building doors, door checks and locks, and sixty cases of lightbulbs stolen or broken.47 Perhaps even more than physical violence, vandalism has a direct and more general impact on the quality of life. Every puddle of urine stepped into in an elevator, every shattered pane of plate-glass window, was a reminder that things were changing in Rochdale, and not for the better. There was, and is, no agreement on the reasons for fluctuations in crime rates, but one factor that surely influenced crime in Rochdale in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a surge of drug use. There was a great concern about the prevalence of drug use in Rochdale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ranging from the recreational use of marijuana to harder stuff.48 By all accounts there was an epidemic of heroin use in South Jamaica in the late 1960s.49 The Rochdale Village Bulletin had articles detailing the cost to the whole community of heroin use and drug addiction.50 According to one report from 1972, 80 percent of criminal activity in Rochdale was the result of narcotics use.51 One letter writer to Inside Rochdale in February 1972 complained of drug users in the stairways and the litter of narcotics bags.52 Relying on victims’ accounts of crimes has its limitations as a way to understand the scope of the crime problem. Crime statistics have the promise of greater objectivity. As early as October 1965, the Rochdale Village Civic Association was endeavoring to separate “fact from fiction” in gathering statistics on car thefts, vandalism, purse snatchings, and muggings.53 Crime statistics bring their own difficulties, with their mutable and unreliable categories, and the myriad possibilities for biased reporting. Still, crime statistics have their utility, and the few extant statistical analyses of crime in Rochdale from this time certainly depict high levels of crime. A report covering the first three months of 1971, issued by the Rochdale security forces, presents a very troubled situation in Rochdale, with 21 burglaries and robberies, 23 incidents of auto theft and break-ins, 7 incidents of criminal mischief, and 4 incidents of narcotics possession.54 An even more dire picture can be found in statistics released by the NYPD. In 1968 Rochdale and its immediate vicinity there were reports of 6 rapes, 109 robberies,

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25 assaults, 285 auto thefts, 72 incidents of malicious mischief, and 85 burglaries. This amounted to 480 serious crimes committed in or near Rochdale, and this already alarming high figure nearly doubled a mere four years later to 850. If we assume one crime victim per family, this would work out to about one family in ten in the area of Rochdale in 1972.55 But as alarming as these statistics are, they bolster the frequently heard contention at the time that, in fact, the incidence of crime was not notably higher in Rochdale than elsewhere in the city, a contention favored by those responsible in some way for security in Rochdale. A security guard, defending his work and that of his peers, said in 1968, “Rochdale has a lower crime rate than most other parts of the city.”56 In 1972 the captain of the local precinct maintained that Rochdale had one of the lowest rates of crime in the area.57 Rochdale manager Jules Weinstein said in November 1971 that “our security is being maintained at acceptable levels,” and that “as a matter of fact, the statistics of crime elsewhere in major housing developments and general residential areas in comparison to Rochdale Village make us look like a beautiful rose.” A few months later he repeated his claim: crime was “no worse here than anyplace else in the city. All you have to do is read the newspapers. We have a fairly well-controlled area. No one can guarantee there will be no crime, but we are providing protection in the best manner we can.”58 Even if Rochdale’s crime levels were lower than those of the city as a whole— and a cursory examination of the citywide statistics makes this seem plausible— this knowledge would have been cold comfort to Rochdale’s crime victims.59 Many Rochdale residents were unconvinced by management’s explanations. A mugging victim who had been to court three times in connection with violent crimes committed against her family wrote irately to Inside Rochdale in March 1972, complaining of the management’s “Pollyanna attitude” about crime and attacking their statement to the Long Island Press that Rochdale’s main crime problem consisted of “petty crimes, malicious mischief, and vandalism.” After offering a catalogue of recent rapes, attempted rapes, murders, and other felonies, she called management’s attitude toward crime “a smokescreen.”60 High crime could serve as a catalyst to bring people together to participate in a common struggle, or it could denature the bonds that held a community, making neighbor fear and distrust neighbor, and dissolve and atomize complex social structures into isolated individuals. One could see both forces at work in Rochdale. • • • One of the peculiarities of Rochdale Village was that, as a private community, it had its own private security force. This was a matter of much consternation to most Rochdale residents, who frequently made invidious comparisons between Rochdale’s finest, a force 60-men strong in 1972, and the NYPD.61 Rochdale’s security force did not have a good reputation. As early as 1965, the captain of the local precinct was questioned sharply on the effectiveness of the Rochdale security team.62

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There were reasons for this disparagement. They were unarmed, could not make arrests (though they could hold suspects for the NYPD), and because they were paid less and had less status than regular police officers, the general suspicion was that Rochdale’s security force was composed of persons (all men in the beginning) who were presumably not smart enough, or whose backgrounds were not clean enough, to make it as police officers. There was continuous pressure by Rochdale residents to expand the scope of the patrols of the NYPD. By 1966 the local precinct was providing three radio and foot patrols around Rochdale’s perimeter as well as into the five culs-de-sac that provided road access to the cooperative’s twenty buildings.63 A law passed that year by the New York State legislature permitted NYPD patrols one hundred feet into the property of Rochdale Village, and motor-scooter patrols of the parking lots and pathways.64 But the main, day-to-day task of protecting Rochdale was performed by the security force. Much of the criticism of the Rochdale security force was quite scathing. A writer in Inside Rochdale in 1967, representing the “teen perspective,” complained that “the chief concern of most of these officers” was “(1) making sure that no one walks on the grass and (2) systematically harassing the teenagers of Rochdale.”65 The same author, using a commonly used term among local teens, excoriated them as the “Rochdale Gestapo.” In a similar vein, in answers to a September 1968 feature that asked “What would you do to increase security at Rochdale?,” there were complaints of “so-called security guards” who employed “strong-armed Gestapo tactics.”66 In 1970, a merchant who had been robbed dismissed Rochdale’s security force as “not worth a damn.”67 For their part, the security guards complained about lack of support and lack of respect from the cooperators. Needless to say, the Nazi comparisons were not appreciated. One guard said in 1968, “I feel that security could be increased through increased cooperation on the part of Rochdale citizens. Instead they call us the ‘Gestapo’ when we try to perform our duty of protecting them.”68 They claimed they were expected to do the job of the NYPD, but without the same tools or salaries. Moreover they had inadequate equipment; walkie-talkies that didn’t talk, vehicles (commonly known as “Roach coaches”) that constantly broke down as they patrolled the interstitial pathways.69 In 1971 the head of Rochdale’s security department wrote the security guards were “policemen in the true sense of the word with all the dangers and problems inherent with such employment within the inner city without the tools, manpower, and legal powers of governmental police agencies.”70 They were spread thin—generally no more than six men were on patrol at any one time, and to some extent they agreed with the teen gripes that their responsibilities for investigating dog harboring, walking on the grass, and nuisance complaints took them away from more serious crime prevention duties.71 In 1974 the head of the security department was quoted in the Rochdale Village newsletter saying that “we are mobile and flexible, making every effort to give you the best protection possible. However, there are those of you who criticize us unjustly. . . . Our men face grave

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danger with no weapons other than pure courage and a night stick.” He added that over the previous ten months the Rochdale Village security department had answered “7,060 telephone complaints, made 42 arrests [with the help of the NYPD] for robbery, criminal trespass, grand larceny, criminal mischief and harassment, stickered 6,204 illegally parked automobiles, responded to 258 roof alarms, aided 88 sick and injured cooperators, and investigated 637 complaints for dogs, sub-tenants, washing machines, noise, and other nuisances.”72 But the steady rise in crime did lead to a steady increase in the size of the Rochdale security force, which hired retired city police officers to serve as supervisory personnel, and made numerous attempts to improve their professionalism and esprit de corps. But the relations between Rochdale’s residents and its security forces would remain contentious. One thing that came naturally to Rochdale residents was to call for civic activism and enhanced cooperator involvement as a means of dealing with the crime problem. As a man who caught several bicycle thieves said in 1965, “Rochdale is a big place, and everyone who lives here must share the responsibility for keeping it safe.”73 A writer in Inside Rochdale avowed in early 1968, “The most urgent subject in our village is security. The blame for the situation rests on our shoulders.”74 Organizations were created to attend to possible causes of the crime wave. Some called for enhanced recreational activities for teenagers, more basketball courts, and more activities in the community center, to wean them from more destructive pursuits.75 Several organizations were set up to address drug use by Rochdale residents and drug sales on cooperative property. The Committee Against Drug Abuse in Rochdale and Southeastern Queens, as the name suggests, tried with some success to establish links between Rochdale and South Jamaica on drug-related issues.76 The Rochdale Black Society set up “rap sessions” with teenagers living inside and outside Rochdale, to gauge their levels of disaffection, and to suggest constructive ways to channel anger.77 There were also more direct methods of crime prevention. There was an attempt in 1967 to establish “Operation Blinker,” a group of people who would meet buses and trains arriving from the hours of eight to midnight and escort people home. Because of a lack of volunteers, this effort proved short-lived.78 There were several attempts to establish an auxiliary police force consisting of Rochdale volunteers. An attempt in 1967 evidently petered out, and was restarted, more effectively, in 1972.79 But in the end most of the efforts at civic involvement in crime prevention were ineffective. The Board of Directors in May 1971 noted that in previous years Rochdale Village had “started or tried to start such anti-crime programs as Auxiliary Police, Operation Blinker, and Building Hall Patrols. Except for a few buildings still maintaining hall patrols, all have gone by the wayside.” This, the board opined, was because of “cooperator apathy and a willingness to surrender our grounds, lobbies, and buildings to the lawless elements of society.”80 This assessment was not entirely fair, and whether a fully engaged citizenry would have done much to stanch the growing rates of crime is perhaps doubtful; but desperate times bring

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forth preachers of jeremiads. In any event, whatever expedient was tried, whatever remedy was suggested, the one inescapable reality of New York City during the Great Crime Wave from the late 1960s through the early 1990s was that however bad things were, they would soon be worse. The rising rates of crime tended to increase a sense of isolation, to slam shut the psychological portcullis between Castle Rochdale and the rest of South Jamaica. For many in Rochdale the lens through which they glimpsed crime was the distinction between “insiders,” those who lived in Rochdale, and “outsiders,” those who did not, the latter term being, by 1966, as Harvey Swados noted, the preferred local designation for those who lived in the surrounding areas.81 The notion of “outsiders” runs through discussions of crime in Rochdale in the 1960s and 1970s. Three boys caught in 1965 stealing bicycles, as reported in Inside Rochdale, “said they were Rochdale residents, but later admitted that they lived on Linden Blvd.”82 The next year a local police captain, when speaking to a community meeting in Rochdale, denied the reports of a number of rapes in the cooperative, though he did allow that one rape had occurred in Rochdale, but neither the victim nor assailant had been residents of Rochdale. (This was thought to be encouraging news.)83 Harvey Swados interviewed a group of white teenagers, writing that “these kids were being harassed and so in fact were some of their Negro friends by ‘outsider’ adolescents demanding dimes, stealing lunches, taking their bicycles. Incidents have increased to the point where these teenagers are uneasy about going to school during the day and fearful of going beyond the village grounds at night.”84 In 1967 a writer in Inside Rochdale complained that “on some nights gangs of roving ‘outsiders’ gang-up on groups of teenagers—and nary a cop in sight.”85 A storekeeper in the larger Rochdale mall complained in 1970 that the “troublemakers aren’t from Rochdale. They’re generally not from the area. They come in packs.”86 Eddie Abramson thought that the problem of outsider teenagers became worse after the beginnings of the population shift: “All of a sudden there were a lot of black youngsters around, and they might not have been all bad kids, don’t misunderstand me, but you couldn’t tell the difference between a tough black or a decent black. And because a lot of blacks had friends on the outside, they would invite them over here, so before you know it there were loads of black kids here, some belonged here, some didn’t, and it became easy to commit crimes, and this led to people running away.”87 There were some drastic suggestions for separating outsiders from insiders by creating a cordon sanitaire of some sort. One suggestion for dealing with crime in 1971 was that a large fence be built separating Rochdale from the rest of South Jamaica.88 One man in 1966 recommended that all bicycles be given a Rochdale Village identification sticker so “we would be sure which bikes belong and which do not.”89 Understandably, blacks inside the cooperative sometimes resented the unstated implication that all whites were insiders by definition, and blacks were outsiders until proven otherwise, or that, as Eddie Abramson’s comments indicate, they were somehow more responsible than whites for crime committed in Rochdale by nonresidents.

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However, while “outsiders” was a racialized category—everyone living outside the cooperative was black—“insiders” included both whites and blacks, and the terms were asymmetrical. Many Rochdale residents tried to resist the racial implications of the insider/outsider distinction. An article in Inside Rochdale in 1969 about crime tried to make the point that because there was a fair amount of blackon-black crime, it was wrong to think that the crime surge was racially motivated. “While most of it [the crime] seemed to be committed by Negroes . . . many felt that these crimes were not racially motivated, and that any person, black or white, was a potential victim.”90 Many argued that the basic distinction was one of class, rather than race, pitting middle-class Rochdale against those outside from more impoverished backgrounds. Blacks who lived in Rochdale, as well as whites, sometimes complained about crime committed by outsiders, and the inclination to argue that much of the crime problem was imported into the cooperative survived the departure of Rochdale’s whites, and on into the 1980s, when the cooperative had become more or less exclusively black.91 As with many stereotypes, there was truth in the underlying insider/outsider distinction, but its truth was exaggerated and distorted. It is impossible to know how much crime in Rochdale was committed by outsiders; there was probably more in some categories than others. But if much of the crime in Rochdale was committed by black “outsiders” by no means all of it was. Probably the biggest class of criminal activity in Rochdale, vandalism, was probably largely committed by residents. In 1971 the Board of Directors warned Rochdale residents that “it has become increasingly evident in recent months that cooperators themselves, and/ or their children, are destroying our property at a rate faster than maintenance can repair.”92 This admonishment was echoed three years later by Rochdale’s manager when he wrote that “it has been established by the police department and our security force that most of the damage [the vandalism] is caused by youngsters who live here. The building inspection sweeps can never be effective unless parents will seriously accept the responsibility for disciplining their children.”93 And crime not only tended to separate Rochdale residents from those outside the cooperative. It also pulled apart the sense of community within Rochdale, and the cooperative ideal that animated it. Crime placed great pressure on Rochdale’s political and civic institutions. A few months later a letter writer stated management wasn’t “doing anything about making it safer here. They don’t care.” He had complained to an assistant manager after a mugging that had put him in a hospital, only to be supposedly told, “What do you want? A cop in every house?” (On his way to work one morning, getting off the elevator, he was grabbed by “a young, husky Negro” who put a knife to his throat and told him, “Give me your money or I will kill you.”)94 Crime would become a major issue in Rochdale’s increasingly factious and fractious politics. In July 1969 one political faction, the Tenants Council, organized a demonstration against cutbacks in the security staff, and demanded guards in every building during night hours, more patrols in the parking lot, a more effective

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lighting system, and the locking of side doors at night.95 The Tenants Council won a majority on the Board of Directors that fall, and when they came up for reelection the next year, the main issue was crime. The Tenants Council spokeswoman, Barbara Rabinowitz, allowed that the “security issue was a legitimate one,” but argued that her figures showed that crime had declined in Rochdale over the past year, and that Rochdale guards might soon have the power to make arrests and carry weapons. (This didn’t happen.) Rabinowitz argued that “things are improving around here. We are no longer an open hunting ground.”96 Perhaps, but the Tenants Council lost their majority on the Board of Directors that fall. Their replacement, the Concerned Cooperators, who had complained bitterly about their predecessors’ handling of the crime situation, had their chance, but were no more effective in dealing with the rising rates of crime.97 Given the seriousness of the crime problem in Rochdale and its racial overtones, what is perhaps most striking is the extent to which it did not become a divisive racial issue. If there were complaints against current management (and claims by those wishing to replace them that they could do a better job in terms of crime prevention), they were not defined in racial terms. Most of the discourse on crime remained within a recognizable liberal context. Those who called for better security also called for better understanding, and invoked the power of cooperation to address the problem. The Rochdale Black Society was as vigorous as any organization in calling for community involvement with the crime problem, and made this clear in almost every issue of their newsletter, along with their complaints about crime, the apathy of most Rochdalers, and suggestions that black people in Rochdale could play a special role in linking Rochdale to the rest of South Jamaica.98 The African American commander of the Rochdale Auxiliary Police wrote in early 1973 that in its first year of operations they had helped cut crime in Rochdale by 60 percent, thereby “making Rochdale Village one of the safest communities in New York City.” The commander urged his fellow society members to join in order to “help develop a means of communication between our Police Department and the Black Citizens in this Precinct.” But the main reason to get involved in the auxiliary force was that “we, as Black People Must Be Involved in Every Aspect of Community Life. . . . When the opportunity of self-policing is offered, don’t you think it’s Power to the People? [emphasis in original]”99 In Rochdale, the primary response to crime remained broadly congruent for blacks and whites. It was a cooperative problem, and required a cooperative solution. But if crime was a crisis that spurred calls for greater community involvement and cooperation, crime cut the other way as well, and engendered a sense that the civic institutions, in Rochdale and without, couldn’t or wouldn’t deal adequately with the problems, and for many there was a turning inward, as people looked to their own resources and abilities. The Rochdale security forces regularly complained that when they held people for various criminal activities, the victims were afraid to press charges, out of fear of retaliation.100

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The fear engendered by crime sparked a rise in illegal dog ownership in Rochdale. Pets were banned by Rochdale Village management, though one could sometimes sneak in a cat or a parakeet. A dog was another matter; management thought them noisy and messy, and the sort of dog one obtained to intimidate potential muggers was likely to scare dog-phobic neighbors as well. In the UHF’s opinion, giving up the right to own a dog was one of those limitations of personal choice necessary to build a cooperative community—like dishwashers and laundry equipment in apartments, likewise proscribed—a sacrifice for the common good. Still a number of cooperators obtained large dogs for their protection. A typical account is provided by a cooperator who was mugged at knifepoint on entering an elevator: “[I] now have a dog and my wife doesn’t go down unless my dog goes with her.”101 A letter to the Rochdale Village Board of Directors in the summer of 1972 spoke of hundreds of dog owners in Rochdale and said the “tremendous exodus” from Rochdale might have been prevented if dog ownership had been allowed.102 Leaflets were distributed with the heading, “Fight Crime! Not Dogs!”103 Dog fanciers pointed out that, somewhat hypocritically, the Co-op Supermarket did a thriving business selling dog food.104 An anonymous dog lover wrote in early 1972, summarizing the crime problem in Rochdale: “Everyone in Rochdale Village has heard or read ‘dogs must go.’ Yet no realistic reason for this ‘law’ has ever been given.” After going through a litany of crimes, including the litter of narcotics bags in the stairways, he argued, that “if we were allowed to have dogs not only would we be provided protected but thefts and rapes would be dramatically reduced. If the urine in the elevator and halls were tested, I am sure that it would be found to be a human source, so let’s not blame ‘man’s best friend.’ . . . Don’t let the lack of protection in Rochdale Village cost your life. Remember to obtain a dog.”105 Rochdale’s management was unmoved, and remained adamant in their opposition to dogs, as did many cooperators. It argued in 1971 that “roving packs of dogs in Rochdale . . . have been attracted by the sight and spoor odor of dogs that have been walking on paths and grass areas.”106 (Perhaps, but I don’t remember packs of roving dogs—and “outsider” dogs at that—menacing Rochdale in 1971.) And of course if one failed to clean up after one’s pet there was the usual problem, as someone wrote in 1972. “Suddenly there are dogs all over the place. One does not walk on our paths, in playgrounds, or parking lots looking skyward. We must keep our eyes peeled to the ground because we don’t know who has been walked before us.”107 (There was no “pooper scooper” law in New York City until 1978, and modern dog walking etiquette was in its infancy.) The Security Guard force complained that much of their time was taken up with investigating reports of dog harboring, and this complaint had merit.108 A report from October 1974 reported 442 complaints about dog harboring, with eighty-six dogs removed, and thirty apartments vacated because of dog ownership through legal actions.109 The prevalence of dogs, and the extent to which dog owners were willing to retain their pets, even at the expense of losing their apartment, was a sign of how serious the crime problem was in Rochdale.

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In the end the crime in Rochdale made it seem less attractive, its problems less tractable, and its future far less certain. Crime moved, in a few short years, from being one of those things that could be rationalized as the price of living in the big city (a certain residuum of insecurity amid all the city’s pleasures and advantages), to a metaphorical plague, a matter of personal and social life and death, a clear and present threat to the possibility of an ordered and rational existence. A fairly typical progress on this pilgrimage of fear was charted by Eddie Abramson, the editor of Inside Rochdale and aspiring politician. In 1966, writing about an incident in Rochdale, he waxed philosophical, and argued that a certain level of unease about personal safety was the price to pay for living in Rochdale. “I wish we all had the right answers. The world at large seems to be unsafe . . . [We must] ensure greater security within Rochdale, however, we must not let our alarms reach panic. . . . It may be a very difficult thing to follow, but we should weigh the advantage of living in Rochdale against accidental hazard.”110 But by 1969 the problems of “accidental hazard” were looming larger, and Abramson was panicking. “If the management won’t provide the necessary protection and police won’t, then perhaps the residents of Rochdale Village should do it themselves. ‘Vigilante’ may be a dirty word to the liberals of the world, but if that’s the only way to make Rochdale safe, then that’s the way it should be done. The Rochdale management had better wake up to what’s happening, before the moving vans clog up the streets.”111 Not surprisingly given this rhetoric, that fall Abramson headed the Rochdalers for Procaccino committee, supporting the bid of Mario Procaccino, the very conservative Bronx Democrat in that year’s mayoral contest, who ran largely on a get-tough-on-crime platform. Abramson argued that “Procaccino stands for the kind of law and order that strengthens the bonds of a united people.”112 But vigilantism never became common in Rochdale. Rochdale Village was not Canarsie; people formed committees, not mobs. (The one partial exception to this, the Jewish Defense League, will be discussed in chapter 11.) And Rochdale’s politics remained proudly liberal; they strongly supported McGovern in 1972, the same year that the Board of Directors voted nearly unanimously to bar U.S. military recruiters from setting up tables in Rochdale’s malls.113 But if most Rochdale residents continued to support liberal causes, it was a sober, chastened liberalism. For some, this involved a political conversion, the famous phenomenon of erstwhile liberals “mugged by reality” and turning conservative, which many have seen as indicative of the shift in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. There was some of this, to be sure, but the more dramatic conversions occluded a wider, more subtle shift in attitudes, a new type of liberalism, wary and cautious. Consider my mother, the ex-Communist, who arranged playdates for us with black children from our earliest years, and who remained in the same decidedly left-of-center ideological ambit her entire political life, reliably anticapitalist and anti-imperialist. But she was very worried about crime, and first praised and then eventually voted for politicians such as Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani, for

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their tough stance on crime. And while she never called attention to this, after living in two Mitchell-Lama cooperatives, in the Bronx and in Queens, she wanted to move to a predominantly white neighborhood, one in which the level of crime was low, and was in little danger of undergoing a change in its racial composition. She didn’t become conservative, but her left-liberalism had changed, and she became far more aware of the costs, as well as the benefits, of social transformation. The lesson of crime in Rochdale would reverberate elsewhere, and for many it seemed a commentary on the prospects of integrated living in New York City in general. Rochdale had been a model for the future, and those contemplating new projects elsewhere in the city would occasionally glance at Rochdale to see how the future was working. In the early 1970s no housing scheme was more at the center of the city’s attention than the effort to build apartments for low-income people in Forest Hills. In 1972, Nathan Glazer, writing about Forest Hills in the New York Times Magazine, argued that crime was the major reason for the white exodus from the city. “If one had to give the predominant cause of the movement away from the older areas of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan, one would have to say it was the search for safety. . . . Many forces come together to make ever stronger in the minds of the whites of Forest Hills the equation, black equals crime.” Glazer opposed scatter site housing in Forest Hills but suggested that there were viable alternatives:114 The economic improvement we have seen in the black community in the 1960s, if it could be maintained through the seventies, would raise a larger proportion of blacks out of poverty and increase the black middle class, thus permitting more of the relatively trouble free integration of black and white middle classes that is so common in New York City—in middle income coops (for example, Rochdale Village) and in other middle-income neighborhoods. In the long run one hopes that the high level of crime and violence in New York and other cities will be reduced, in part through higher income and better living conditions. That was one view, that so long as crime could be kept low, middle income cooperatives like Rochdale would pave the way for the “relatively trouble free integration of black and white middle classes” in New York City. But of course there were other lessons to be learned from Rochdale. Mario Cuomo, whose efforts to negotiate a settlement to the Forest Hills controversy catapulted him to political stardom, noted in his book Forest Hills Diary, “I spoke with Congressman Joe Addabbo on the phone. He said the Rochdale Project in his area of Queens was a mess with a serious crime problem, so serious that they have their own auxiliary police. He says the project at Forest Hills must be scaled down.”115 Those in the 1970s who pondered the chances for genuine racial integration in New York City, from Nathan Glazer and Mario Cuomo, to Eddie Abramson and my mother, had discovered, in the growing problem with crime, Rochdale Village’s soft underbelly.

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A short postscript. In telling the above story, I have felt something of a conflict between my roles as a historian of Rochdale and as a memoirist, one who lived there during almost all the events described above. As a historian, I stand by the above account. Crime was a frightening specter in Rochdale, and one that grew worse over time, and I have constructed my narrative by amassing the appropriate quotations, trying to tell that story as effectively as I can. But I think that this was only part of the story. Certainly this was only part of my story. I really do not remember my life in Rochdale as one dominated by crime or the fear of it. And in fact, though Inside Rochdale certainly had its share of articles about crime, it was hardly its main feature, in large part because I don’t think that most people, most of the time, let crime prevent them from going about their business. I know I didn’t. Perhaps this was in part due to the foolishness and presumed invulnerability of youth, and no doubt teenagers are the most likely age cohort to ignore prudential advice about what to do and where and when to do it. I don’t think that we were natural risk takers. (I certainly wasn’t.) I had internalized a geography of safe and less-safe places, and generally took appropriate precautions to avoid being caught in dangerous situations. And for the most part, I succeeded. I remember a certain residual level of fear, and the natural wariness that all New Yorkers develop about potential menaces. There was a mugging or two along the way, probably the most distressing during my second year in Rochdale, on Halloween, when a friend and I were not so gently relieved of our accumulated goodies. But in the nine years I lived in Rochdale, I did not live my life in fear, or retreat to a cocoon. There was a life to be lived outside of the fear of crime. A classmate of mine remembers her Rochdale years as a time of personal growth and exploration, in Rochdale and South Jamaica, with both white and black friends. “When we kids got older and had a hand in it, we just naturally of our own inclination and based on our own experiences there as kids broke down a lot of the doors and walls in the neighborhood as well as the world.”116 That is how I would like to remember my years in Rochdale as well. Teenagers are probably not representative of attitudes to crime as a whole. But neither are senior citizens, of whom there were many in Rochdale, and who on the average were more frightened about crime than the teenagers, and were more likely to write letters to local newspapers than any other age group. Attitudes to crime vary greatly with individual circumstances. Crime victims (and their relatives and close friends) are likely to respond to crime in a very direct and visceral way. For those left relatively untouched, the problem is more abstract. In the end, crime comes down to a matter of probabilities. And generally, the odds are pretty good. On any given day, even in high crime areas, in any given week, month, or year, most people are not going to be crime victims. For most people crime was not an immediate problem. You were aware of it, you acted appropriately, you went about your business, and you took your chances. In this, crime’s relative abstractness, it was unlike another serious problem in Rochdale, its increasingly troubled schools. Schools were, by contrast, a

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five-day-a-week reality. School-age children and their parents were regularly reminded of inferior or inadequate schools; students felt trapped, and parents felt they were failing their children in one of the most important ways imaginable. When it came to seeking the best possible education for their child, no one wanted to compromise. And if crime had a racial component in Rochdale, it was easy (or relatively easy) to depict it in nonracial terms, by emphasizing a shared victimhood across racial lines, and a commitment to an interracial effort to fight it. For various reasons, the educational problems of the late 1960s and early 1970s were far more stark in their racial polarization. As serious a problem as crime was in Rochdale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the crisis in Rochdale’s schools proved far more explosive.

11. The 1968 Teachers’ Strike and the Implosion of Integration

What are we coming to? Are we a stone on the ground To be kicked and trampled Without uttering a sound Should we let things come as they are And carry on blindly? Denise Brewer, “No,” Grossley (  JHS 8) Highlights, 1968

Late in the summer of 1968, a group of civic leaders from Rochdale Village sat down with Albert Shanker, the powerful president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Since May of 1968, the UFT had been threatening a citywide strike over teacher transfers in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community school district, one of three experimental districts in the city that gave the local school boards increased powers to organize and administer their local schools. The sniping between the UFT, whose membership was largely white and predominantly Jewish, and the overwhelmingly African American leadership of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district had grown increasingly mean-spirited. Positions had hardened, and a teacher’s strike in the fall seemed inevitable.1 As the new school year approached, there already were portents of how unpleasant and racially charged the strike might be. Civic leaders in Rochdale thought their community, with integrated schools in a microcosm of the forces at play in the city at large—blacks, Jews, liberals, radicals, conservatives, union members, and union foes—was particularly vulnerable to tensions the strike might unleash. The Rochdale civic leaders knew it was something of a long shot, but asked for a meeting with Shanker and begged for a dispensation: let UFT teachers continue to report to the schools in Rochdale, regardless of events elsewhere. This would show the city, they

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argued, that the UFT supported integrated education, and would also protect integration in Rochdale. Shanker was a member of the board of directors of the UHF, was familiar with and supportive of Rochdale’s experiment in integration.2 But he was an imperious man. (It is obligatory, when writing of the 1968 teachers’ strike, to quote Woody Allen’s line in Sleeper (1973) to the effect that the world was destroyed when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead,” and let me get it out of the way quickly.) Shanker was loath to make exceptions for what he thought was a very just cause. He rejected the group’s suggestion. Cal Jones, who attended the meeting, said that Shanker’s response had been so negative that the meeting turned uncivil, and Jones’s own riposte to Shanker didn’t improve things. In the end, Shanker didn’t budge. No exceptions for Rochdale.3 Those who had spoken to Shanker proved prescient. Jerald Podair gave his superb account of the 1968 teachers’ strike the apt title The Strike That Changed New York. In the broad impact of the strike, perhaps no part of New York City was as radically transformed as Rochdale Village. Rochdale was the perfect test case for integration, an integrated community with integrated schools, achieved (as many moderate organizations demanded) without busing, and where (as some progressive and African American organizations insisted) black and white teachers lived and sent their children to school in the same community in which they taught.4 But if Rochdale was the perfect test case for integration, it was also the ideal example of what happens to an integrated community when the supporters of integration fall out, quarreling and feuding. After the teachers’ strike, integration was more or less stopped in its tracks in Rochdale. Within a few years, white families started to leave in large numbers. A broad consensus exists, across a wide ideological spectrum, that the watershed in the history of integration in Rochdale was the strike. For Eddie Abramson, a moderate Democrat and a strike supporter, “The teachers’ strike was the turning point, it was never the same after that.”5 Another strike supporter, Harold Ostroff, said that problems with the schools, starting with the 1968 strike, doomed integration in Rochdale.6 Strike opponent Herbert Plever said of the strike that “it precipitated the flight from Rochdale.”7 Another strike opponent, Anita Starr, said it “killed the community,” and for Cal Jones, one of the leaders of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, after the strike, “a lot of the togetherness of Rochdale started going downhill. . . . That’s when all of the ill feelings started surfacing.”8 The strike rent the fabric of the integrated community that Rochdale had created. It would not be repaired. •  •  • The chain of the events that led to the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy began inconspicuously. In April 1967 the Board of Education disclosed plans to create three experimental school districts in which the communities would elect an administrator who would “share in the full administration of the district” and provide for “greater community involvement.” The Brooklyn district was something

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of an afterthought, and received much less attention in the press than the two districts in Manhattan, which had already been sites of controversy.9 But between the summer of 1967 and November 1968 the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Community School Board, as it came to be known, tangled repeatedly with the UFT, and the two organizations would be at the heart of the most bitter educational dispute in the history of the city. The push for decentralization or community control—two different but overlapping programs—had been gathering for several years.10 There had long been complaints that, in the words of Jerald Podair, “the culture of centralization may have been more entrenched in New York’s education system” than in any other arena of governance in the city.11 The local school boards, once largely vestigial, had been strengthened in the 1962–63 academic year, with the end of enhancing citizen participation in school affairs.12 Mayor Lindsay and his budget experts thought that by disaggregating the gargantuan million-pupil school district they could squeeze additional funding from Albany.13 White groups calling for control of “neighborhood schools,” such as Parents and Taxpayers (PAT), wanted more localism, and this call was increasingly echoed by minority groups who wanted the same in their neighborhoods.14 By 1966 it was clear to Lindsay that something dramatic had to be done about the public schools; minority performance continued to languish, minority anger at the status quo was mounting, and integration as a strategy was failing.15 In this, Lindsay was joined by large segments of the business community and prominent civic organizations like the New York Urban Coalition and the Ford Foundation, who would become major supporters of New York City’s experiment in community control.16 The standard cliché is that Lindsay and his elite supporters of community control were “limousine liberals,” who formed a cynical misalliance of “wealthy whites and angry blacks” against the middle classes.17 But even absent Lindsay’s frequent tactical maladroitness, it is not clear what realistic alternatives to community control existed, since neither poor, nor middling, nor wealthy whites really wanted to make sacrifices to end the segregation of New York City’s public schools. Empowering minorities in their own neighborhoods was one of the few available options.18 And in the beginning at least, Lindsay and the Board of Education’s efforts at community control had the support (or at least the nonopposition) of the major groups that mattered in school policy. The UFT gave the policy qualified support, because they thought they could use it to get more teachers and teachers aides in the demonstration districts.19 It had the strong support of the minority community, and the initial indifference of even conservative whites, who thought it a salutary retreat from a policy of “coerced integration.” But for all that, community control was controversial from the beginning. Shanker and the UFT were at best lukewarm, in part because they worried that hard-fought and newly won protections against what they saw as the arbitrary prerogative of supervisors to promote or transfer teachers would be eroded, and community control might open the possibility of hiring or promoting teachers who

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weren’t on the regular civil service lists (which usually required competitive examinations for promotion); they also wondered about the consequences of the balkanization of the city’s schools, now that the UFT was on its way to becoming as centralized and as powerful a bureaucracy as the Board of Education itself.20 And the experience at East Harlem’s IS 201, in the first experimental school district, where from its opening in the fall of 1966 local parent and neighborhood groups demanded the firing of the new white, Jewish principal, and made his life sufficiently miserable that he asked for a transfer before the end of the school year, was for many a tocsin.21 However, turmoil in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville experimental school district would soon dwarf that of IS 201. By the summer of 1967 the planning council for the Ocean Hill–Brownsville School Board had selected as unit administrator Rhody McCoy (previously an acting principal at a school in Manhattan), and had held elections for the local school. When McCoy went off existing eligibility lists (on which 99 percent of the candidates were white) to find principals for five schools with vacancies, the UFT sued to challenge the validity of McCoy’s own position as well as his appointments. (By far McCoy’s most controversial selection was the former assistant principal Herman Ferguson, the hero of the 1963 Rochdale demonstrations, by this time under indictment for conspiracy to assassinate Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.) This was the first of many increasingly pitched and rancorous conflicts during the 1967–68 school year, which culminated on May 19, 1968, when nineteen teachers (including seven assistant principals), all members and supporters of the UFT, received letters from McCoy stating they had been terminated.22 The UFT pulled almost all its 350 members from the district almost immediately. The issue was not resolved by the end of the school year, and Shanker threatened a citywide teacher’s strike (the second in two years) if the fired teachers were not reinstated. Despite extensive negotiations (though generally through third parties) the two sides hardened their positions over the summer, and when school was scheduled to start on Sept 9, 1968, the strike was on.23 What became known as the teachers’ strike was actually three separate strikes. The first lasted only two days (September 9 and 10) but the settlement fell apart almost immediately, and it resumed on September 11, lasting until September 30. After a tense two-week interregnum, the third, longest, and bitterest of the strikes commenced on October 11, and lasted until November 17. In all, the three strikes covered ten weeks and thirty-seven instructional days. By its end, with mounting charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism, it became the rawest confrontation over race in twentieth-century New York City.24 •  •  • The teachers’ strike in the end was not limited to the particulars of the dispute in Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district, nor, when it became a citywide strike,

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was it confined to central Brooklyn. The witches’ brew that became the Ocean Hill– Brownsville controversy overflowed its cauldron onto almost every neighborhood in the city. And the consequences of the strike in the Rochdale Village microcosm were much the same as those in the macrocosm of New York City: bitterness, divisiveness, and debilitation. The issues of the strike were formidable in their complexity, and many could see merit and find fault with the stances of both sides. But as Cal Jones, president of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, remarked, there was no place for nuance or neutrality: “You had to choose sides, you could not be in the middle.”25 In many ways, the success of integration in Rochdale had been predicated on creating a broad middle position in favor of integration, blending the ideas of moderates, liberals, and radicals, a willingness to compromise, the presumption of good intentions, and in the African American theologian Howard Thurman’s phrase, “the search for common ground.” For many, during and after the strike, this became impossible.26 Severing the sinews of community like a butcher’s knife, the teachers’ strike was a brutal dichotomizer. What gave the 1968 teachers’ strike its terrible significance was its ability to magnify real, but in the end relatively small, differences into unbridgeable chasms. It has been tempting for commentators to reduce the strike to a battle between eternally warring opposites: liberalism versus radicalism, integration versus separatism, “white values” versus “black values,” or what have you, in ways that make the issues that led to the strike seem far too clear and obvious.27 To be sure, all these polarities were present during the strike. There were radicals and extremists (on both sides), but in the broader scope of things, their influence, if noisy and newsworthy, was ultimately rather ephemeral. There certainly were organizations and individuals involved in the opposition to the strike who actively argued that white teachers basically had no business in classrooms with black students, and this perspective would become more popular as a result of the strike (and spawn a ferocious white backlash against minority parental involvement in the public schools).28 I remember my mom telling me during the strike, with a laugh, that the mother of a school chum of mine had called to tell her that the Communists were behind the strike opponents. But it is easy to give these positions too much weight as factors that led to the strike and caused so many, on both sides, to take the issues so seriously and emotionally. Certainly in Rochdale few blacks and no whites who opposed the strike did so in the name of black separatism. The strike was waged between two sides that passionately believed in the continuing importance of integration, and who both legitimately felt, by their own lights, that they were fighting to realize the promise of genuine integration in the city’s schools. The 1967–68 school year was in many ways a harbinger of the problems in the year to come. In September of 1967, the New York City public schools opened with a two-week teachers’ strike, that paled in comparison with the Sturm und Drang of the 1968 strike, but nonetheless served as its precursor. At the newly opened IS 72 in Rochdale, the strike was very effective, with only three of seventy-six teachers

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reporting for work. As IS 72’s new principal, Stanley H. Bloch, acknowledged, the new school had “gotten off to a bad start.”29 Things would remain off balance, at IS 72 and Rochdale’s other schools, for the remainder of the school year. The 1967 strike, like the 1968 strike, revolved around race, especially the demand by the UFT that the Board of Education make it easier for teachers to expel the so-called “disruptive child” from their classrooms, which was seen by some as an effort to unfairly target black students as discipline risks, an attempt to blame the victims of the school system for its failures.30 The arrayed forces resembled those that later emerged during the 1968 strike. William H. Booth, the former head of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, now the city’s commissioner of human rights, complained that the UFT had used “schoolchildren as pawns” in the walkout, and that in general the union had not “supported the Negro Community in trying to get better education for their children.” This led to a call by Al Shanker for Lindsay to remove Booth from his office “since he is obviously anti-labor.” The Workman’s Circle, a Jewish organization of moderate socialist politics and a sponsor of the UHF, complained that “there has been an injection of Anti-Semitism against a trade union with an exemplary record of fighting for human rights.”31 Those who were surprised by the way the school strike of 1968 detonated racial and ethnic tensions had not been paying attention to the city’s school politics. And then, on April 4, 1968, came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Everyone who was in Rochdale at the time remembers just where they were when they heard about it (I was at home, in the evening, reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood ) and what happened in the days that followed. School was foolishly not canceled the next day, and in IS 72 and JHS 8, there was a near complete breakdown of discipline; white students were assaulted in the halls, set upon by gangs of black children. At IS 72 students were assaulted and stuck with pins. (Students from Rochdale, like myself, who has started at JHS 8, finished their intermediate school education at JHS 8 in 1967–68.) At JHS 8 chairs, basketballs, chains, and fists were flung at students, white students huddled together in the cafeteria, frightened and cowering. After a few periods of mayhem in the classrooms and hallways, classes were canceled, and special buses were sent to take Rochdale students home from JHS 8. (Students were attacked on the way to the buses.) As someone who was at JHS 8 has said, “I don’t think anyone who wasn’t there could ever believe or conceive of what it was like to be there for that one day.”32 However, there was not a complete breakdown of the interracial cooperation and friendship that integration at JHS 8 had fostered and created, and one person argued that “there was an undercurrent of Martin Luther King’s dream going on amid the chaos.”33 One woman remembers that as a student at JHS 8 she was “good friends with Denise Brewer [niece of Guy Brewer, the powerful Democratic district leader] and Stephanie Conway. They were wonderful people who just happened to be rough, tough, and tall, and the right skin color at the time. They insisted on being my bodyguards that morning and didn’t let me go anywhere without them. They hooked arms with mine as we walked down the hall. At one point in the

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stairwell this little punk jumped up and hit me hard on the head and Denise picked him up by the collar and threatened to throw him down the stairs if he ever looked cross-eyed at me again.” Another woman remembers “sitting around in homeroom (sometime between when they canceled classes and when the buses came to get us) with everyone, black and white, talking about how stupid this all was, and how no one who had been paying attention to King’s message could do such things in his name.”34 But everyone, black and white, got a glimpse of the simmering racial rage, just below the surface, that was part of going to school or living in New York City in the late 1960s, ready to explode through any open fissure, and many students and their parents questioned whether integrated education could work, or was really worth the effort. To punctuate this sense of hopelessness, two months later Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was murdered. The Rochdale Village Democratic Club had been among the earliest New York supporters of his controversial presidential bid, and to show his thanks, he had planned to speak at IS 72 during his June 8 visit to Rochdale. As it happened, June 8 was the day before his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.35 The longer-lasting problem caused by the opening of IS 72 had already roiled southeastern Queens for several years. All of Rochdale’s students were slated for the new school, which would result in JHS 8 reverting to its former all-black status.36 Most parents in Rochdale were delighted with the prospect of an intermediate school opening in the cooperative, and if they felt somewhat badly about the end of integration at JHS 8, most felt it was out of their hands. After all, the new school would also be integrated. Many felt that it was the turn of the white neighborhoods north of Hillside Avenue to do their bit for integration in South Jamaica. Eddie Abramson wrote in September 1966 that the Board of Education “should stand up to the Jamaica communities [and force their children to go to JHS 8] the way it stood up to Rochdale [when it forced our children to go to JHS 8].”37 However, a coalition of PTAs in South Jamaica, Parents for Educational Progress (PEP), with many supporters in Rochdale, proposed new feeder patterns that would have kept JHS 8 integrated. (The proposal would have reserved IS 72 exclusively for the fifth and sixth grades, with Rochdale students continuing to be bused to JHS 8 for seventh and eighth grades.) Juliette Burnett, a leader of PEP, in the spring of 1967 scored the Board of Education for their “lack of courage, foresight, and sound planning” and that “if there is any place in the City of New York where integration can succeed, it is here in Queens. It is here that the good faith, the courage, the honor of the educational system of the great city of New York will stand or fail.”38 Rochdale was divided by the proposals to pair IS 72 and JHS 8. At a large meeting of parent and civic groups at a local high school in February 1967 the pairing patterns were supported by, in addition to PTAs from South Jamaica, the Rochdale Village Civic Association and the Rochdale Village chapter of the American Jewish Congress.39 PEP argued that “contrary to popular belief, PS 30 and 80, which are located in Rochdale Village, are not Rochdale schools, they are community schools” and they needed to be used “for the good of the entire community.” However there

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were many in Rochdale not pleased by the pairing proposal; at a meeting of the local school board in January 1966, Inside Rochdale reported that most of the white parents in attendance were opposed.40 This was the position of Inside Rochdale itself. In February 1967 Abramson wrote against an “enforced integrated school policy,” and offered the opinion that “if I were a black parent, I would feel resentment in my heart at forced integration,” which would lead to a “wall of angry silence in a classroom of mixed emotions.” Against forced integration, Abramson argued that “integration must be natural” as it was in Rochdale, where living in an integrated community with integrated schools was a matter of choice. (However, “natural integration” could be used by both sides, and the African American head of the PTA at PS 30, Mary Redic, supported the idea, arguing that “natural integration,” an idea beloved by many in Rochdale, required that students living in Rochdale and in the adjacent surrounding area attend the same intermediate school.)41  Abramson argued that “families in Rochdale have a perfect right to protest about sending their children to any public or intermediate school” other than those in Rochdale, and that the “utter frustration” of many Rochdale parents over possible busing “could lead to real bitterness.”42 In the end the pairing proposal was shelved, and an attempt to get students from white neighborhoods north of Hillside Avenue to attend JHS 8 was ended by a threat of a boycott, and by the fall of 1968, JHS 8 had lost almost all its white students. The two sides, with many white parents on one side, and the Rochdale Village chapter of the American Jewish Congress, the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, and the office of Mayor Lindsay on the other, would reemerge a few months later, as the events of the 1968 teachers’ strike unfolded.43 •  •  • In the months before the strike, in Rochdale, as elsewhere in the city, there was a slow, deliberate choosing up of sides. Moderate democrats, like Eddie Abramson, were on the fence about school decentralization. Writing in Inside Rochdale in April 1968, he on the one hand recognized “the need to decentralize the power of the Board of Education,” but had “some reservations” about giving too much power on matters such as curriculum to “non-professionals.”44 Abramson, his co–district leader, Juanita Watkins, and most of the Rochdale Village Regular Democrats supported the union during the strike. New York City’s unions were nearly unanimous in their support of the strike, and many trade union members and officials began from a presumption of support for the UFT’s position. This included many black trade unionists, who made up a large part of Rochdale’s black population.45 The most prominent black union official living in Rochdale, Stanley Hill, who would later become president of the powerful municipal employees union, DC 37, was either neutral or supported the strike.46 However, the bulk of Rochdale’s black residents opposed the strike. The Rochdale Negro Cultural Society (and the American Jewish Congress), shortly before the strike commenced, sponsored a forum at the Rochdale Village Community Center,

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drawing a near capacity crowd to hear the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver, the chair of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Community School Board, and its administrator Rhody McCoy. According to Cal Jones, they faced tough questions from an interracial audience, and explained, to Jones’s satisfaction, that they were opposing the UFT to uphold the right of black parents and children to chart their own destinies, not out of an unthinking hostility to whites or opposition to unions.47 And if most whites in Rochdale supported the UFT, there were many whites in Rochdale who took the other side, and felt that decentralization needed to be given a chance, and that if it was having a difficult birth, it ought not to be strangled in the crib. Among them were many like Sue Raskin, who had her criticisms of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district for its actions toward UFT teachers, but felt the problems should have been resolved within Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and did not require a citywide teachers’ strike.48 The liberals who opposed and supported the strike were torn by two conflicting imperatives; support of unions, and support of blacks and their struggle for civil rights. For many it was easier to raise the argument from the knotty and contested facts of the actual dispute into statements of general principle. For liberals who supported the strike, the main issue was one of job security and the right not to be fired arbitrarily. For liberals on the other side, the labor issues were irrelevant or being misconstrued, and the real issue was the struggle, as an advertisement in the New York Times claimed at the height of the strike, between black and minority parents and “the vested interests which fought attempts to integrate the schools [and which] are now fighting community control.”49 The same sides contended among liberals in Rochdale, often warring within the breasts of those undecided and uncertain. Rochdale was of course a bastion of union sentiment, built by a union-backed organization, and with many residents who were union members. For those raised in the labor movement, there was nothing more sacrosanct than a picket line, and no surer or faster road to perdition than to cross one. But many liberals found themselves committing this ultimate transgression (including, for teachers, crossing a picket line set up by their own union). Anita Starr, a teacher at IS 72, stayed out of the school for the first two days, but when she realized that “white people were outside and black people were inside, this would not work, and I got back in again.” Her husband remained ambivalent, and told her, “So now I am sleeping with a scab.”50 Many blacks in Rochdale were closely watching the actions of their white allies in integration struggles past. During the strike Cal Jones asked for an audience with teachers from PS 80, many of whom lived in Rochdale, asking them to cross the picket lines, arguing “Here’s a chance for us to do something good. It’s a community you live in and teach in. Don’t allow the strike to put you against your own community.” This attitude, either you’re with us or against us, was, Jones felt, “how those in the black community saw it.”51 Herb Plever, with a long history as a union activist, after some agonizing opposed the strike; he felt that “the school strike wound up with the entire black community being totally opposed to the closing of the schools, and it wasn’t an anti-union

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sentiment as much as a racial sentiment, and we were in a bind, pro-union and union organizers, and we didn’t know how to handle it.” He concluded that to keep the strike from pulling apart Rochdale, the UFT “had to maintain some contact and rapport with the black community,” but when this didn’t happen, Plever felt he had to make some sort of gesture, and with an interracial group of activists, “We went into the schools and re-opened them . . . to give support to a sense of frustration of the black community.”52 As far as can be determined, the teacher’s strike divided Rochdale more or less in half, with blacks and left-liberal whites on one side, and more moderate whites on the other. In a poll in Inside Rochdale in November 1968, of 1,002 responses, 530 supported decentralization, while 472 opposed it.53 One of the aspects that made the strike so contentious in Rochdale was that the cooperative’s two elementary schools and intermediate school remained open throughout the strike, so every day the schools had both pickets and strike breakers, glaring at each other. Whether or not a school opened depended on parental involvement, whether there were students in sufficient numbers to warrant an opening, and sufficient teachers and supervisory personnel. Not surprisingly, schools tended to stay open only in areas with large minority enrollments. (In southeastern and southern Queens, forty schools stayed open, while in northern Queens, only a single school opened.)54 Both sides of the strike tried to hold classes, strike opponents in the school buildings, strike supporters in “freedom schools” held elsewhere. In the three schools in Rochdale about fifty teachers, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the teachers, crossed the picket lines, to serve a combined enrollment of about 1,000 irregularly attending students.55 Cal Jones went around the city, trying to get teachers to staff the temporary school at PS 80, and claimed that “education was better than it ever had been; we had volunteers teaching second graders Spanish and French.” Almost all the teachers in the regular schools were black, and although a few white teachers did cross the picket lines, they were exceptions, and at most, as Cal Jones remembers it, there were “one or two white teachers.”56 The UFT’s alternative schools were held in local synagogues and churches, and though there were black teachers, most of the teachers and students were white. These makeshift classrooms were not free of racial tensions. Anita Starr, a teacher who had crossed the picket lines, sent her children to PS 80, but “they were not treated nicely by the black teachers who were there, so they went to a freedom school, and [PS 80] became entirely black kids.” She remembers that, when she crossed the picket line, not every black teacher was happy to see her.57 Herb Plever recalls that “there were rumors about black teachers not being very nice to white students” in some of the antistrike classrooms, and rumors that white parents were sometimes not at all happy to see black teachers in UFT freedom schools. At best the temporary schools were for both sides of the strike a stopgap.58 Opening a school during the strike, and keeping it open, involved a good deal of work. Because the custodians’ union supported the strike, the entrances were shuttered at most schools. At PS 80 strike opponents found a locksmith to open

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the doors, and Cal Jones persuaded a retired administrator (one of his old teachers from Harlem) to come to Rochdale, and PS 80 remained open for the duration of the strike. But because of the possibility that administrators supporting the strike would try to reclose the school, parents stayed in some schools twenty-four hours a day.59 The parents of Francesca Spero stayed in PS 30 during the strike. She told me, “My parents were strong union people, but they were sleeping in the schools to keep the schools open. I remember a tremendous sense of camaraderie in the school and the ability to keep the school open—we ran back and forth with our little wagons, bringing meals to people camping out in the schools.”60 But memories and feelings of solidarity with colleagues were balanced with anger and fear toward those on the other side. Strike opponent Cal Jones said, “We were going into the schools, and some of my neighbors who I had worked with on the House Congress were on the picket line blocking kids from getting into school.” In an effort to clear out the parents who were staying overnight, some right-wing groups made bomb threats to the Rochdale school buildings. Uninvited but tolerated by those in the buildings, on some occasions the Black Panthers and the Five Percenters (a Nation of Islam offshoot with a reputation for violence) patrolled the school grounds at night.61 Kenneth Tewel, who was UFT chapter chairman at Springfield Gardens High School, the high school the majority of Rochdale students attended, remembers the sort of racial bitterness the strike engendered. “We were upset that forty teachers [out of two hundred] went in, primarily minority, but some very liberal whites. They were led by Robert Couche, a guidance counselor and president of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP. They were upset that with forty teachers coming into the school, no kids showed up; they kept pushing for students to come in, we kept pushing for the teachers to get out of the school.” Tewel and the strikers tried to get to teachers crossing the picket line (almost all of whom were UFT members) by appealing to their history as union members, and there were numerous private meetings and efforts at moral suasion. When this failed, tactics got nastier. Strike opponents picketed Tewel’s house in a racially mixed part of Laurelton, and his neighbors received letters informing them he was an enemy of the black community. In turn, white teachers (almost all of them Jewish) who crossed the picket lines found their houses picketed, and letters were sent to their synagogues. As Tewel said, “I never realized how fragile Black-Jewish relations were, how much hostility lay underneath, and how quickly they could be torn apart. The passion of the dispute just amazed me.”62 For Cal Jones, the teachers’ strike in Rochdale was simply “a state of war.”63 •  •  • Finally, in mid-November, the strike stumbled to its equivocal end, with nothing really resolved, and the long hot autumn, the summer vacation that almost lasted to Thanksgiving, was over. The final solution to the strike was thrashed out at Gracie

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Mansion, with most observers reckoning Al Shanker and the UFT as the sullen victors. (Shanker and his allies in Albany later saw to it that community control would survive only in a much-weakened form.) Thereafter, students and teachers trudged back to the classrooms, and people who had spent the better part of three months demonstrating, plotting, and screaming against one another, now were faced with the prospects of picking up the pieces and trying to get along. This task was obviously most difficult in interracial neighborhoods like Rochdale, split in two by the strike. Herb Plever was not the only person who found that “it was so split after the strike, there was such anger, there were friends of ours who wouldn’t speak to us.”64 The unpleasantness and acrimony left by the strike could be dealt with in two ways. One was to try to minimize the damage, to argue that integration in Rochdale was basically healthy, to let, as much as possible, bygones be bygones, and accentuate the positive in Rochdale as an integrated community. If this was sometimes accompanied by varying degrees of wishful thinking, it also was a positive way forward, and in truth, race did not trump all other concerns in Rochdale. The internal politics in the cooperative had not been fundamentally changed by the strike, and one would see in Rochdale, for many years after the 1968 strike, broad interracial coalitions tackling the major issues of local concern such as carrying-charge increases. The other approach was to take the strike settlement as a temporary truce, and find new ways and venues of continuing to fight out the issues, particularly the racial issues that had dominated the strike, and there were many who “forgot nothing and learned nothing” from the strike other than how to intensify their sense of grievance. Both approaches could be found in Rochdale. In some ways the immediate poststrike impact was not that palpable, and events at the cooperative continued much as before. But the real impact of the strike on the cooperative was gradual and slowly cumulative. It would take several years before Rochdale residents understood just how profound the divisions created by the strike really were. Most Rochdale residents remained unswervingly and unapologetically liberal in their politics. That November in the presidential election, held as the strike was ending, Rochdale’s election district went 8 to 1 for Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon, which was probably more a repudiation of Nixon than an enthusiastic endorsement of Humphrey.65 In the fall of 1969 Mayor Lindsay, in his successful reelection campaign, found a far warmer reception in Rochdale than in many other heavily Jewish areas of Queens, and an account of his campaign visit to Rochdale notes “He was frequently interrupted during his brief remarks by enthusiastic applause.”66 Just as the strike was ending, in November 1968, a new organization was founded in Rochdale, Neighbors for Understanding, which had as its purpose trying “to cut down on anti-Semitism and anti-Negro feeling.” The organization, largely based in Rochdale, saw the strike as a warning, that Rochdale had to “overcome the isolationist attitude which prevails in the co-op and the resulting suspicion and resentment of the surrounding areas.” One of the founders said that it was necessary, “for the

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cooperative and neighborhood to work together if we’re going to survive.” At the organization’s first meeting, some of the tensions of the strike were apparent, as some of the blacks doubted the sincerity of the whites, but the organization’s founders insisted that interracial cooperation was not an effort at feel-good hand-holding, and that “the white people weren’t there for altruistic reasons or because they felt guilty,” but because whites and blacks “need each other if our community is to remain livable.” In February of 1969 Inside Rochdale ran a story that challenged “newspaper and television accounts of the deterioration between black and Jewish communities.” A black resident of Rochdale said, “I don’t think there’s any hate around here. I don’t mean it’s all Love thy Neighbor but I get along fine. . . . There’s very little of that ‘burn, baby, burn’ feeling around here.”67 But against this was a new sense of racial solidarity and an effort to identify what might be called “race traitors” or appeasers. As we have seen in Kenneth Tewel’s description of the strike at Springfield Gardens High School, one of the most distressing aspects of the strike was both sides targeting apparent racial outliers; strike supporters living in racially mixed neighborhoods, or Jewish teachers who crossed the picket lines. White liberals who opposed the strike found themselves questioned on both sides. Sue Raskin comments that in the strike aftermath, “strike supporters in Rochdale Village didn’t go after black parents, it was white parents and teachers who had opposed the strike who they never forgave.” For some in Rochdale synagogues, Raskin would forever be the woman who “cared more about black children than white children.”68 When Anita Starr became the first white teacher to cross the picket line at IS 72, she received a visit at home from the principal, Stanley Bloch, who advised her to “look in the mirror” before deciding what to do. (That is, remember she was white and not black.) On the other hand, Starr found in the aftermath of the strike, despite her strike-breaking, that she was distrusted by many black parents and colleagues.69 The white left-liberals, squeezed on both sides, found themselves increasingly unable to influence educational policy. It was not merely white liberals who were casualties of the strike, as can be seen in the changing fortunes in the career of William Booth, the city’s human rights commissioner and the former chairman of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, an epitome of the black liberal. Booth’s support of decentralization brought him into increasing conflict with Jewish groups, who claimed Booth had a “singular insensitivity to anti-Semitic incidents.” He would write bitterly of going to meetings in predominantly white and Jewish areas of Queens during the 1968 strike, for instance in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Bayside, and see people offering him Nazi salutes, calling him “Black Hitler” and his associates on the Human Rights Commission “Nigger Lovers.”70 The next year Lindsay kicked Booth upstairs by naming him a criminal court judge, saying (in a charge Booth strenuously disputed) that Booth could have done a “better job” in dealing with the anti-Semitism that surfaced during the school strike.71 For many black and Jewish groups, the late 1960s was a time of pulling away from interracial coalitions. Perhaps this was because, as Jerald Podair has suggested,

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for many whites, the strike represented a defense of their own “middle class values,” against those who would traduce them. For many blacks, the fight against the UFT became connected with the need to define and defend a sense of “authentic blackness” against those who would deny its uniqueness, and for middle class blacks this often involved affirming a sense of solidarity with poorer and less advantaged blacks.72 But in many ways the dichotomous identity politics Podair describes was more a consequence of the tension provoked by the strike, rather than its cause, filling the vacuum created by the collapse of the ideals of integration. This was certainly the case for most of the middle class blacks and whites who lived in Rochdale. Nonetheless, in South Jamaica even before the strike there was a growing impatience with white teachers and administrators. In the summer of 1967, in PS 40 in South Jamaica (near JHS 8) some black parents and the local chair of Queens CORE complained that “it’s a poorly run school. . . . Many white parents are complaining that some white teachers in the school are not interested in the children. Pupils have complained that teachers have called them ‘black monkeys’ and ‘black apes’ and used other racial epithets,” and she demanded the dismissal of the white, Jewish principal. The Jamaica branch of the NAACP defended the principal, but the outcry was a harbinger of things to come after the strike, when the value of integration and the white presence in the classroom was increasingly questioned.73 With this came a new political militancy. The Black Panthers had a strong chapter in South Jamaica, with many members from Rochdale, including white fellow travelers. By 1968 the Panthers were beginning to rival the NAACP as the most visible African American organization in southeastern Queens, selling their newspapers, setting up free breakfast programs and other community services, and engaging in paramilitary training. (In a sign of generational shift, the daughter of William Booth, longtime leader of the Jamaica NAACP branch, was an active member of the South Jamaica Panther chapter.) Herman Ferguson, the hero of the Rochdale demonstrations in 1963, and an assistant principal at PS 40 in South Jamaica, was a leader of the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Republic of New Afrika and functioned as a sort of senior advisor on revolutionary strategy for South Jamaican groups like the Panthers.74 Cal Jones argued it was less black politics in Rochdale itself than in South Jamaica that frightened some of Rochdale’s whites, a view seconded by Herb Plever: “The black power movement was accentuating the fear of whites in Rochdale, surrounded by a black community.”75 Sue Raskin claims that interracial meetings on educational topics became more difficult after the strike; provocateurs made deliberately inflammatory statements, and some tried to persuade white Rochdalers to butt out of South Jamaican educational affairs.76 This worked the other way as well. For Cal Jones, the strike shattered “the dream that having the sort of place we had when we moved there. It became clearer that it wouldn’t be that kind of community, and the strike brought out the worst. We saw that people in Rochdale supported a union that dissed us rather than supported us.”77

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The respective worries of blacks and Jews about the other community of course long predated the 1968 teachers’ strike. Jewish concerns about black anti-Semitism were of long standing, and Jews were increasingly worried about black power and other manifestations of black radicalism from the mid-1960s on.78 In March 1966, a thousand people attended a meeting cosponsored by the local chapter of the American Jewish Congress and the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, on “The Myths That Surround Us: The Three R’s: Race, Religion, and Reason,” at the Rochdale Village Community Center, as a means of “confronting the crisis in NegroJewish relations.” One of the main speakers, James Farmer, who had just resigned as national leader of CORE, acknowledged that antiwhite sentiment was on the rise among blacks, and Farmer was prepared to concede that the same was true for anti-Semitism, but cautioned that the perception of black anti-Semitism was often sensationalized, the result of “press misinterpretation of the alleged excesses of the Negro Revolution.” He argued for the continuing importance and relevance of the black-Jewish alliance, but cautioned that self-assertion can be awkward; he wanted his listeners to try to have “a sympathetic understanding of Negro efforts to end self-rejection and self-repudiation,” concluding his talk with Rabbi Hillel’s famous statement from the Pirkei Avot (the Mishnah tractate known as “The Ethics of the Fathers”): “If I am not for myself, then who am I for? And if not now, when?”79 However, most of those in the audience, which was three-quarters white, were in­terested in querying the black speakers, demanding to know, “if Negro leaders countenanced the storing of dynamite by advocates of black power,” and whether they would “condemn the racist incitements of inflammatory black supremacists.” Despite a large reservoir of goodwill, as in so many places in the late 1960s where similar discussions were held, blacks and Jews tended to talk past each other, blacks not wanting to be confined by what the civil rights movement had been, and Jews very worried about what the civil rights movement was becoming.80 By 1967 white Rochdale measured successful integration by how many black radicals they could keep out of the mix. Typical was the comment by Bernard Seeman in Inside Rochdale in September 1967, that Rochdale was still “a showplace for our city and nation to show that responsible integration can work.” But this would only continue if the “host of new extremist ‘leaders’ ” were kept from influencing the debate in Rochdale.81 At the same time the dominant white ethnic group in Rochdale, the Jews, were riding a crest of ethnic pride. On June 3, 1967, when I was bar mitzvahed at Rochdale’s Reform Temple Beth Am, Israel was spending one last, tense day under the 1949 armistice lines. The next day the Six-Day War broke out. If the run-up to the war was an occasion for great nervousness on the part of Rochdale’s Jews, its conclusion brought immense pride, celebrated in a standing room only meeting held in Rochdale’s community center. The speakers included a veteran of Israel’s War of Independence, the father of one of my classmates, whose words, according to Inside Rochdale, reduced the great audience to silence. He spoke “in a voice mixed with anguish and fear of the sufferings, the hopes and the determinations of the

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Jewish people for a homeland.” For many the Six-Day War created a new image of Jewish pride and demonstrated a new image of Jewish toughness; they refused to be pushed around and would defend what was rightfully theirs. There were many who thought that Jews in southeastern Queens, as much as those in the Middle East, needed to know how to identify and define opponents, and much like Israel, learn to preemptively defend themselves, and send them running.82 In October 1968, during the ongoing teachers’ strike, the Traditional Synagogue of Rochdale (Orthodox) hired a new rabbi, Meir Kahane, a person who would come to personify the new cult of Jewish toughness (and eventually become the Pied Piper of Jewish reaction on two continents). To some extent the role he would play in Israeli politics in the 1970s and 1980s was learned on the picket lines of Rochdale Village, though to be sure, he was far from a political innocent before coming to Rochdale; he had a long history of involvement in right-wing politics, and had published extensively on the need for Jews to support the war in Vietnam, and his reputation, as Eddie Abramson said, “of being to the right of George Wallace,” preceded him.83 (A forum in February 1969 at the Rochdale Community Center, sponsored by the left-liberal American Jewish Congress on “Responses to the Current Expressions of Anti-Semitism,” which included Kahane, was doubtless quite lively.)84 When he was appointed rabbi to the Rochdale congregation, Kahane was living in Laurelton, a community near Rochdale in southeastern Queens, predominantly Jewish, but by the mid-1960s, already beginning the rapid change that within a few years would make it an all-black neighborhood. He had founded his signature organization, the Jewish Defense League (JDL), in the spring of 1968, without much fanfare. But aided by the hurly-burly of the teachers’ strike, the JDL began to capture ever greater media attention. Finding it inconvenient to live in Laurelton and being an Orthodox rabbi at a three-mile remove from his congregation (and having to walk the distance twice on Shabbat) he moved with his family to Rochdale in the fall of 1968.85 Rochdale became a fertile recruiting ground for the JDL, and young Jewish teenagers were the ideal candidates. Most of us heard the pitch: Aren’t you tired of being beaten up or intimidated by blacks? Don’t you want to learn how to fight back? Political issues, though real enough, lurked in the background; the basic appeal was to join the Jets, before the next rumble with the Sharks.86 Most of us rejected the call of the JDL; but even those who (like me) had strong ideological objections to Kahane’s right-wing politics, understood the appeal of its rejection of the Diaspora tradition of Jewish pusillanimity. At the time, the JDL was not centrally concerned with trying to expel Palestinians from the West Bank, or even the defense of Soviet Jewry. It was about Jews defending themselves, individually and collectively, from blacks, whom JDL members thought were trying to take over their neighborhoods, and take over their schools. It is not clear how active the JDL was in confrontations at Rochdale’s schools during the strike, but they would emerge in the public consciousness shortly thereafter, largely because of unfinished business the strike left behind. One of the first

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demonstrations that brought the JDL major media attention took place in Rochdale, on January 14, 1969, when Leslie Campbell, one of the leaders of the African Teachers’ Association in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, was among several people invited to speak at PS 30 in Rochdale, probably by the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society. Campbell (who later adopted the name Jitu Weusi) had in December 1968 achieved considerable notoriety by reading a vilely anti-Semitic poem by a student at an Ocean Hill–Brownsville school on a left-wing radio program.87 At a demonstration against the event at PS 30, which made the front page of the Long Island Press, the JDL appeared with placards bearing slogans such as “Schwerner and Goodman Didn’t Die for This” (as the JDL would evolve, they would leave behind tributes to Jewish civil rights martyrs) and “Afro-American Racist Teachers Must Go!” JDL members heckled the speakers, and by some accounts, prevented them from speaking.88 Kahane did not stay in Rochdale very long—only a year. He and the Traditional Synagogue were not a very good fit. Some members wearied of the controversy that trailed him wherever he went, and the unwanted attention he brought the congregation. Because of threats, razor wire soon wreathed the shul, making it look more like an auto parts store in a bad neighborhood than a house of worship. (An elderly and devoutly Orthodox member of the congregation who lived on our floor complained that Kahane had brought “too much monkey business” to the shul, and left for the Conservative synagogue.) By the fall of 1969, as the JDL became more and more of a full-time job, the Traditional Synagogue grew tired of having a rabbi who was increasingly occupied elsewhere. And as Kahane became more controversial, particularly on racial matters, he became worried about living in an interracial cooperative, and he moved out and onto bigger stages.89 But if the JDL and the views they represented were never a dominant perspective in Rochdale, they were not without their adherents. It is true an article in Inside Rochdale in August 1970, “Jewish Defense League Finds Few Backers,” found “scant sympathy for the JDL.” One black teenager interviewed for the article lumped the JDL together with all the other indignities he had suffered at the hands of white America, including the questions of the interviewer: “[The JDL] are just one more problem you people have created for me. I’ll face them like I’m facing you.” A white teenager sympathized with the problems whites faced living in a black neighborhood, and the problems that blacks faced in white America, “But as for the JDL, man, they’re sick.” The reporter also interviewed a Jewish shopkeeper in Rochdale who said, “It’s about time! Anyone who protects merchants from harassment from militants will get all the support I can give. It’s the natural instinct of man to fight back.” The JDL and the Black Panthers may not have been major forces in Rochdale, but they certainly shaped an environment that was more skeptical toward integration. If Rochdale residents, in 1969 and 1970, were still generally optimistic about interracial cooperative living, they were increasingly doubtful that integration in education was viable. How could integrated schools survive in Rochdale amid a general

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political climate in which integration was no longer a priority, and instead was for many an obstacle to their educational goals? Both whites and blacks in southeastern Queens turned away from integration after the teachers’ strike. By the beginning of 1969 the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, which for many years had been so stalwart in support of interracial education, was calling for an all-black school district, with an end to plans for busing for racial balance, and an end to years of effort to achieve racial integration in South Jamaica’s schools.90 In this they were seconded by the whites in the district, and the last glimmer of integration in South Jamaica (outside of Rochdale) was extinguished when the pairing between JHS 8 and JHS 217 in Briarwood was ended in April 1969 when District 28 voted to end the project. Dr. Hugh McDougall, the new district superintendent, said that many parents and some members of the board felt “that the kids bused in were not benefiting” at JHS 8. Its enrollment would be 98 percent black by the fall. A suit, brought in 1970 to challenge the situation, went nowhere.91 Integration soon ceased to be a central concern to either black or white parents in the district.92 In 1970, nineteen candidates for election to School Board 28, which included Rochdale, parts of South Jamaica, and a large swath of predominantly white neighborhoods in southern Queens told the Public Education Association their highest priority if elected would be “better teachers,” “better curriculum material,” and “maintaining discipline.” None of them suggested (though it was one of the options offered) that “achieving racial integration” should be the highest priority. Elsewhere in the survey a majority of the candidates said that “integration was desirable but not a high priority.”93 Improvement of schools without attempting major changes in their racial balances was now the preferred method of both whites and blacks. In 1972 the Education Committee of the Rochdale Village Black Society (the new name for the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society) endorsed the recommendations of Robert Couche, chairman of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, saying, “We question, at this time, whether integration should be the primary goal of parents and/or educators. We feel that it would be so much more beneficial to our children if the efforts of those concerned with integrated schools were re-directed into making our schools places of learning instead of educational wastelands.”94 Part of the rationale for decentralization was that the attempt to institute integration had become too divisive, and that by enhancing local control of schools, in both white and minority neighborhoods, racial fires could be slaked. This is not how it worked out in Rochdale and South Jamaica. Decentralization proceeded, but under the watchful eyes of the UFT, it often operated to minimize and marginalize minority input. Fairly typical in this regard was School District 28, a product of the after-strike settlement and a strangely shaped district in the classic serpentine and elongated shape of a gerrymander, stretching from Rochdale to LeFrak City in Rego Park to Forest Hills; Jimmy Breslin described it with his usual hyperbole in 1971, writing that it “appears to have been drawn by somebody who has palsy. Instead of placing the South Jamaica neighborhood in one school district, the lines

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in Queens were drawn to break the black area into three districts. Attaching each to a white district, thus assuring Albert Shanker’s teachers of never having to work directly under the Mau Maus they see in their sleep every night.” It worked as planned, keeping racial tensions simmering, with the whites firmly in charge.95 Out of the spotlight and without much in the way of media attention, School Board 28 seemed determined to become a reverse Ocean Hill–Brownsville, exercising community control for the express purpose of squashing the aspirations of black students and parents, and firing a black principal of a South Jamaica intermediate school on flimsy grounds (eventually reversed by the central board), which led to a boycott. The school board refused to negotiate with the parents, a decision backed by the UFT representative in Queens, because to do so “would be to go back to the dark ages.”96 The principal, Desiree Greenidge, was eventually reinstated; she was hailed by the Rochdale Village Black Society, which strongly supported her side in the dispute, and was a featured speaker at one of their meetings.97 The following year, the school board refused, on the most unconvincing of rationales, to allow students in the district to participate in an essay contest sponsored by the New York Chamber of Commerce on the topic “How Can Relations Between Ethnic Groups in the City Be Improved?”98 Schools in Rochdale and southeastern Queens were increasingly dominated by a starkly divisive politics of skin color. Within Rochdale, the school that was most directly and adversely affected by the teachers’ strike was IS 72, which first opened, with a teachers’ strike, in the fall of 1967. As we have seen, the plans for its opening led to a prolonged debate on integration in South Jamaica. It was an attractive school, but it proved to be something of a Trojan horse, a gift that once opened, burnt Rochdale’s topmost towers. The initial impressions, at least to judge from external appearances, were very favorable. Sleek and modern, Inside Rochdale called it “the perfect new school.” The UFT chapter chairman said of the school, “It’s a fantastic plant; a well designed building and it has the most modern equipment you can get.”99 It was a neighborhood school, with all its students in walking distance.100 It was integrated, and was perhaps the very last school opened in New York City in the 1960s as a showcase for integration.101 Its precise racial balance when it opened was roughly equal, or perhaps 60 percent black and 40 percent white, with its teaching staff about twothirds white and one-third black.102 But as Sue Raskin observed, “IS 72 opened as a disaster and was never anything but a disaster.”103 Although many of the problems of IS 72 were not of its own making (such as two teachers’ strikes in its first two years), many felt the difficulties of IS 72 were a result of a lack of leadership, and many people criticized the school’s principal, Stanley Bloch, as in Kenneth Tewel’s words, “a bit of a putz.” Anita Starr, a teacher at IS 72 from the time in opened, complained that “he only remained principal for three or four years; after a few years he ruined us and left.” He played favorites on the staff, and made too many individual deals—“I don’t think he could deal with teachers who said, you gave so and so a better program, why not me?”104 He had problems with black teachers, and according to Sue Raskin, “did not know how to

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cope with integration.” To quote Kenneth Tewel once again: “Middle school kids are squirmy, it’s just their nature. Middle schools are the hardest places to teach; they require an administrator who loves teachers and kids, but needs to be highly structured. Stan Bloch couldn’t do that. He invariably reflected the opinion of the last person he had been with, so that for some reason that place was turbulent. It never came together, it never got a reputation for being safe and secure, parents always worried about it, there was always a crisis of one sort or another.”105 The faculty was profoundly divided by the strike along racial lines, and in the words of Anita Starr, “The faculty wouldn’t talk to each other for years; everybody remembered who was in, and who was out, and who said what.”106 For another teacher at the school, staff meetings became “agitprop theater.”107 While some local school principals, like Ursula Day at PS 30, managed to work with the staff to overcome the bitterness caused by the strike, Bloch, who was closely associated with support of the UFT, was unable to do this.108 Some parents’ groups urged that Bloch look to George Korot’s success at JHS 8 in dealing with an integrated school population. But he did not, and what worked at JHS 8—quick response and solicitude toward parental concerns, a concern with educational excellence and innovative programs, and above all, keeping control of discipline inside and outside the classroom—did not happen at IS 72. Sue Raskin has suggested that JHS 8 worked in part because the administration knew that if things didn’t work out Rochdale parents would have demanded a rezoning, and this kept the administration on its toes. For IS 72, the administration knew that Rochdale parents had nowhere else to go, and became complacent.109 This had at least two consequences. First there was an increasing divide between black and white parents, teachers, and students. Black teachers began to feel that whites were not competent to teach minorities, or in the words of Anita Starr “a lot of the black teachers decided that white teachers shouldn’t be teaching black children; a lot of the white teachers were suspect after the strike, a lot of people said they were only there to collect a paycheck.”110 As a black teacher in IS 72 stated, the general attitude of black parents was, “What was being taught to my black child? . . . How was my black child being greeted? Was the homework meaningful? Is this teacher going to teach my black child?”111 And some teachers, black and white, felt that some bright black students were not being encouraged to take academic tracks in high school, and that the guidance counselors were biased against black students.112 Even white teachers who had opposed the strike, such as Anita Starr, ran into problems. A social studies teacher, during a section on the Civil War, assigned an excerpt from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which some black parents felt to be a reading only appropriate for “Uncle Toms.” “There was a furor, they went to the principal, and wanted me to be dismissed. I met with the parents and they had never read the book, but [later] someone sat in the class and acknowledged that I was okay.”113 In general, said Starr, “if you were a white teacher and you wanted to have a positive impact on the teachers and the students, you had to keep proving yourself,

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and that was as a result of the strike.” There were separate white and black parent and teacher groups, with the result that “nobody spoke to anybody, and the administration was ineffectual in dealing with this situation. They didn’t know what the hell to do.” “A tighter administration,” suggests Starr, “would have gotten rid of teachers who shouldn’t be there. There were a lot of teachers who in effect said to the kids, ‘Given all the problems in this school, you’re lucky that I came here.’ The students said, ‘Don’t do us any favors, and don’t come.’ ” One consequence of this turmoil was that “the children, even those who were brighter and better behaved, they heard a lot at home, and there was greater challenge to the authority of the teachers.” This led to the other great problem, the breakdown of discipline.114 By 1969 and 1970 IS 72 had developed, as one black student remembered, “a ferocious reputation” as a dangerous place to go to school.115 I remember my two brothers telling me stories of regularly being stuck with pins by black girls and being pushed down the stairs by black boys.116 It is easy to assemble a collective horror story from former IS 72 students of regular fights in the cafeteria, with aides and teachers looking the other way, and the “violent bedlam in the halls during passing time.”117 One woman remembers her long hair being set on fire in the ladies room by girls using cigarette lighters. Thereafter she “never used a restroom at school. I don’t know how I held on from the time I left my apartment until I returned home after school.”118 Others reported smoke bombs exploding in the hallways, sexual assaults (primarily the fondling of posteriors), having their faces written on with markers, being punched, sometimes hard enough to be knocked out cold, and students coming to school with loaded rifles.119 One former student remembers “getting mugged most days for lunch money, which we eventually kept in our shoes—they got smart, and stole our shoes too.”120 Anita Starr remembers that “one day eleven students came to me on a Friday afternoon, and someone held a chair over my head, and said ‘Are you afraid, Mrs. Starr?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m scared,’ and the student said, ‘That’s good, because if you said you weren’t I would have thrown the chair on you.’ ”121 Another teacher remembers being robbed in the classroom by the relative of a student, and being menaced by a student who was later convicted of rape and murder, standing outside her classroom for ten minutes, wanting to steal her leather jacket. She refused to teach without a guard in the room.122 Francesca Spero remembers that after she graduated from PS 30 and entered IS 72, “my black friends from 30 and the area disowned me. They could not hold onto the friendship because they would be ostracized.” She tried to make new black friends, among girls who had a reputation for toughness, “not the bad, bad ones, just the wannabe bad ones.” She tried to befriend her would-be attackers. A lot of the black girls were “turning into bullies,” and she decided that “I’m going to get into your head, and I’m going to be your friend, you’re not going to bully me, you’re going to protect me, I’m going to find out why you are a bully, and I am going to soften you up. This was my technique of survival, while the other kids pulled back hard and treated them as bad girls.”123 But this tactic didn’t always work, and she

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complemented it with a method of survival appropriate to IS 72’s Darwinian conditions. “You didn’t dress with good clothes, not that we could afford good clothes anyway. You wore very thick clothes that couldn’t be penetrated [by straight pins]; you tied your hair up in a ponytail, you didn’t wear braids, and you avoided the lunchroom.” To avoid being accosted to or from school, “We walked different ways back to school to avoid [bullies], and cut through the backs of buildings.”124 The racial differences at IS 72 also reflected class differences between the middle class whites and blacks who lived in Rochdale (and in the private homes that surrounded the cooperative), and those who came from a few blocks further away, areas of dire poverty. One black teacher commented, “You had kids coming from the Baisley projects, you had kids with no running water in their houses and no glass in their windows, going to school with black and white kids from good homes. The black kids from the good homes were just as tortured as the white kids were.”125 Not everyone had such dark views of IS 72. Some do not remember encountering great problems at the school, nothing beyond an “occasional food fight in the cafeteria.”126 There certainly were coping strategies, from Francesca Spero’s efforts at befriending the more threatening attackers (a strategy that probably was more effective for girls than boys) to the usual masculine approach of presenting a general image of strength against would-be intimidators. One man, the product of an interracial marriage, after listening to IS 72 horror stories, said, “I was never beat up, never robbed, and never harassed; maybe it’s possible the problem was you. . . . Some kids get the crap kicked out of them no matter what school they go to. That’s part of growing up. You have to learn how to take care of yourself.”127 Another black student said you had to avoid becoming a patsy. “There were bullies, they would ask for a nickel, and you would say you didn’t have any, and they would say, ‘So it would be okay if I go through your pockets and keep what I find?’ You have to stand up to bullies, or the nickel a day becomes a daily routine. You never let anyone go through your pockets.”128 But whatever strategy you employed, whether you were a tough guy or girl manqué or an easy mark, most who attended the school would have agreed with Francesca Spero. “I was wearing a mask in school. I was extremely uncomfortable. When I got to 72 I wanted to hide.”129 The security and disciplinary lapses at IS 72 went beyond problems in the hallways and cafeteria, and for many reflected a general sense of malaise, a feeling that no one was in control, and that there was no one to turn to for redress. Anita Starr said, “There was a sense of security missing, and this could be very stifling, and the lack of security kept you uneasy and from being the sort of student you could be, and the sense that you could go to the teacher and complain.”130 Although incidents were going on all around her, she remembers that “no one complained to me.”131 Spero remembers that she was angry all the time that the school didn’t help her.132 Some former IS 72 students are still angry at what happened, and still feel a sense of powerlessness, and that their problems were simply ignored. “What could our parents have been thinking of,” said one woman, “while we were being stabbed, molested and beaten in that school? . . . I’ll never forgive them for their neglect.”133

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Some parents certainly had ideological commitments that made them reluctant to take school crime as seriously as they might. Francesca Spero would come home to complain of being beaten up by a gang of girls, only to find “Mother is comforting me, my dad wants revenge. My mother said they are the product of a sick society, they didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t mean it.”134 (My mother also gave us a “products of a sick society” lecture after I or my brothers complained of harassment at school.) Others equally upset at conditions at IS 72 felt that their parents, still committed to living in Rochdale, and thinking of their own run-ins with the occasional bully from their own schooldays, couldn’t appreciate how bad the situation really was, and perhaps on some level refused to accept it.135 But in the end, almost all parents acknowledged that there was something very wrong about IS 72. By 1970, parents in Rochdale with elementary school children started to plan to move out of the cooperative before their children were ready for intermediate school.136 Even the principal acknowledged that the situation was hopeless. One student remembers that, according to his mother, “during a PTA meeting, Mr. Block, the principal, told parents that the only remedy for what was going on was to move away from the district. That is something for a principal to say!”137 No one was more upset by the developments at IS 72 than the progressive liberals, white and black, who saw in the chaos a refutation of all their cherished dreams about integration. When an early Martin Luther King Jr. Day’s celebration in 1971 became an occasion for a general rampage of black students against white students, the Rochdale Black Students wrote an open letter to minority students in the school, read out in every homeroom, stating that fighting in school was a betrayal of King’s legacy.138 In 1970 Sue Raskin and an interracial coalition of committed integrationist parents wrote to the chancellor of the Board of Education about conditions at IS 72, pleading with them to do something about the situation, and making suggestions for changes:139 There are many factors that cause people to remain in a community such as ours; moderate rents, beautiful apartments, attractive surrounding etc. They can accept along with the best features of the community, inconveniences and problems that come with urban living. However the one problem they cannot accept is a poor school situation. Parents sacrifice many things in order to provide what they feel is a good education. This above all is what is causing many white and middle class families to move out of this community. This creates the danger that this experiment in naturally desegregated living and education would be destroyed. Steps must be taken immediately to improve the schools and to undertake those steps which are necessary to introduce the process of real integration. But by then it was probably too late. Integration was failing at IS 72, and its failure, like ripples from a stone in a pond, was steadily spreading outward, throughout

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Rochdale Village. Albert O. Hirschman, in a classic work of social science, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, discussed different responses to members and persons in organizations in decline, especially the choice between “voice,” that is, “to make an attempt at changing the practices [and] policies . . . of the organization to which one belongs,” and “exit,” to get out, and just leave the organization behind. In Rochdale, after the 1968 teachers’ strike, many discovered what Hirschman calls the “neatness of exit” in contrast to the “the messiness” of voice.140 In the words of Kenneth Tewel, “Rather than mass hysteria with everyone moving out at once, things got so strained that all the efforts at integration, and all of the good work that people did to try to maintain the integrated nature of those communities really just fell apart, because the people you relied on to do that, they just said screw it, they didn’t want to do it anymore. . . . The strikes accelerated what might have taken twenty years to occur, and given how people can change, mature, and grow up, might not have occurred at all.” Perhaps the most succinct explanation of the impact of the teachers’ strike on Rochdale was offered by Nancy Brandon, a black teacher who taught at IS 72. “Everyone wanted integration, but everyone wanted it on their own terms.”141

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What is happening to our beautiful Rochdale Village??? William Dunlap, president of Rochdale Village House Congress, 1974

In 1973, WNET, the public television station in New York City, had a relatively short-lived news program, The 51st State (a catchphrase popularized in Norman Mailer’s 1969 mayoral bid).1 The show prided itself on its daring and willingness to flutter the dovecotes of conventional wisdom. On March 22, 1973, they had a program on Rochdale Village, and whether it still deserved its reputation as a showcase for successful integration. If the program was intended to be provocative, it succeeded. The program rather gave away the ending in its title, “A Dream That Failed,” concluding that integration in Rochdale was in disarray, with rising rates of crime, growing dissatisfaction in the schools, heightening racial tensions, and an ongoing white exodus. Lewis Lachman, president of Rochdale’s Board of Directors, interviewed on the program, certainly avoided the pitfalls of boosterism when he said that he was shortly going to be moving out of Rochdale, and those who moved out were generally “very happy” with their decision. Lachman predicted that within a few years, very few whites would be left in Rochdale. The program came to the conclusion, in the words of its producer, Hal Levenson, that “the possibility of successful integrated housing in New York City is a most difficult goal at best, if one examines the Rochdale experience.”2

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Figure 12. A line of sitters on a Rochdale bench, August 3, 1966. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

The general response in Rochdale to the program was one of outrage. In a letter to the Rochdale Village Bulletin one person claimed that the program seemed to be set up “to scare white people into moving and discourage white people from moving in,” and wondered why the program didn’t interview people like him who had “no intention of moving” and that Rochdale “can still be a beautiful place to live” with “many social functions” not available elsewhere. He advised Rochdale’s management to sue the producer of the program for defamation. Another resident maintained that “the truth of the matter is people of different backgrounds, of different ages, and different persuasions live here side by side amicably without getting in anybody’s way,” and that the purpose of the program was to “incite fear” and provoke “racial tension between Blacks and Whites.”3 In his response, which was printed in Inside Rochdale, Hal Levenson said that, actually, he had pulled his punches in the program, and that he had honored his promise to Harold Ostroff to “attempt to temper the report in the interest of the Rochdale community,” but now “all gloves were off,” and he proceeded to pop Rochdale right in the kisser. Providing damaging information he claimed to have omitted from the program, he cited statistics from the local precinct showing that

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between 1969 and 1973 in many key categories Rochdale’s crime rates had doubled or tripled. Vandalism costs alone were running a fairly staggering $14,000 a month. He stated that he had omitted some of the more negative and inflammatory comments about Rochdale’s management and racial tension in the cooperative. In short, the real situation in Rochdale was far worse than The 51st State had indicated.4 Looking back in retrospect, who had the better of the argument? In many ways, Levenson was certainly correct. Crime in Rochdale was definitely on the upsurge, and the schools were deteriorating. Integration was certainly faltering, and would, in a matter of years, fail utterly. Almost all the whites who complained about the negative impact of The 51st State likely moved out of Rochdale within a few years. And most of those who did write defending integration in Rochdale were, not coincidentally, Jewish retirees, the group in Rochdale who were probably most afraid, as one woman at the time expressed it, of Rochdale “becoming a ghetto,” and who because of age and financial resources, were the least interested in moving and starting all over somewhere else, in addition to the obvious reality that retirees were the group least affected by problems in the schools. As one of those who wrote to Inside Rochdale to defend life in the cooperative acknowledged, “True, young people (married couples) with children moved out because of the school situation, we all know it is bad.”5 But at the same time there is something about Levenson’s response that is disconcerting in its cocksureness and condescension, his conviction that he somehow understood Rochdale better than people who had lived there for a decade, and in his sweeping relegation of Rochdale to the rubbish heap of failed ideas, an indication perhaps that the smart money in 1973 was already placing its bets on the death of the social democratic city, and on the dawning of neoliberal triumphalism, which had no place for limited-equity cooperatives. Levenson seemed to think that the defenders of integration were oblivious to ongoing social trends, and that Rochdale residents hadn’t somehow noticed “that black /white relations following the 1968 school strike” had deteriorated “in Rochdale and elsewhere.”6 As one man complained of the program, the producers “very casually crumpled the idea of Rochdale Village like a piece of scrap paper, and tossed away all our years of cooperative effort.”7 And what stung all those committed to staying in Rochdale was that the program portrayed cooperative residents as sort of passively awaiting their fate, grumbling to the camera about their problems as their community fell apart, just waiting for grand sociological forces to wash over them and claim new victims. The African American president of the House Congress said the program displayed a “negative defeatism-type attitude as indicative of Rochdale Village.” In fact there was no lack of proposals for how to stanch the flow from Rochdale, and how to organize those who remained. One of the cardinal principles of the ethos that created and nourished Rochdale was that no problem was beyond the grasp of people working cooperatively to solve it. However, on one point The 51st State was clearly correct. One issue overrode all others in Rochdale in the early 1970s: the steady and inexorable departure of white families from the cooperative.

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Lewis Lachman wrote to Charles J. Urstadt, commissioner of the State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal in 1972, asking for additional financial assistance: “There has been a heavy turnover at Rochdale Village which is not healthy for this community and inimical to its stability. The problem of schools, security, increase in the cost of living and other factors have contributed to this turnover. While we realize that the state may legally ignore social considerations in the pursuit of legal obligations, we nevertheless believe that the survival of Rochdale Village as an integrated community should be preserved.”8 Throughout the 1970s the masthead of the Rochdale Village Bulletin proclaimed itself, at first proudly, then defiantly, the newsletter of an “integrated cooperative of 25,000.” The dimensions and timing of the white departure from Rochdale are not easily quantified, and have to be pieced together from a number of disparate sources. Most would date its start to 1969, in the aftermath of the 1968 teachers’ strike.9 The most official figures extant do not contain any racial data, but it is reasonable to assume that most of those who moved out were white. In 1970, 447 families (8 percent of the total) moved out; in May 1973 the Rochdale Village Bulletin stated that 1,800 families (31 percent) had left over the past three years. Later that year the Bulletin reported that the departure continued unabated, with fifty to sixty moveouts a month. This data is corroborated by the shifting impressions at the time of Rochdale’s racial composition. Estimates of the percentages of blacks in Rochdale range from 50 or 60 percent in 1974, 70 percent in 1977, 85 percent in 1979, and by the early 1990s, 98 percent.10 A small survey I conducted among twenty-two former Rochdale residents, with primarily white and Jewish respondents, found that one family left before 1970, though by 1975, only four families were still in Rochdale, with half the families leaving from 1971 to 1974. (We moved in 1973.)11 It is worth noting that by no means all the families that left Rochdale were white; as Cal Jones states, “There wasn’t a mass exodus of black families, [but] many left to buy homes.” And by the 1980s the changing character of black middle-class redoubts in southeastern Queens such as St. Albans led some to speak of “black flight.”12 But if the departure from Rochdale was to some extent biracial, it was certainly true that white families were no longer moving in, and almost all those who left were replaced by blacks. In Rochdale and other communities undergoing racial change at the time, the focus on the drama of “white flight” can obscure a concomitant dynamic, the lack of “white replenishment.” The factors contributing to the mass departure of white families were largely beyond the control of Rochdale’s other residents; increasing rates of crime, turbulence in the city schools, and increasing rates of inflation (which was reflected in an increase in housing costs). In December 1970, in a memo to the Rochdale Board of Directors, Leonard Bridges, an assistant manager in Rochdale, offered five reasons, on the basis of his conversations with departing families, for the decision to move: an interest in purchasing a house, relocating for work, problems with the schools, “social conditions

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or problems” (a euphemism for crime), and the “community political atmosphere” (the rancorous internal politics in Rochdale). He noted that most of the families moving out “were families with young children or teenagers.”13 Some of the reasons offered by Bridges are overlooked in discussions of the departure: personal considerations having little to do with the broader sociological trends. A number of families moved to Rochdale with the full intention of moving out in fairly short order; they would save money by living relatively inexpensively for a few years, and then light out for the suburbs.14 And this trend was hastened by the women’s movement and broader economic trends that led many households to gain a second income, which placed many families over the upper-income limit for Mitchell-Lama housing, beyond which a surcharge had to be paid and Rochdale became less and less of a bargain. Many two-income Rochdale families started thinking of going elsewhere.15 And of course some people simply moved to follow their jobs. One woman remembers her father got a new job in New Jersey. After a few months of a horrendous commute, they moved across the Hudson.16 There probably are as many variants of the “why we moved from Rochdale” story as there are families who left. Certainly those relating to the schools, or to crime, are the most common. One former student at IS 72, who, after issuing a litany of problems with the school, concluded that “in spite of all the nonsense, we weren’t moving either, until my sister got attacked in the lunch room. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and we were out of there in a matter of months.”17 Another woman remembers her family left because of “dangerous neighborhoods and schools (my mom worked at IS 72 and saw it all), and we had enough for a house in the suburbs, where there would be better schools for my sisters.”18 For many there came a particular turning point, an episode or incident that offered an instance of clarity, when the question of staying or going came into focus. As Cal Jones said, whether or not a family moved from Rochdale often “depended on whether or not you got mugged when you came home.”19 A typical story was one told by a man from an interracial household. His parents were committed to Rochdale, but after his mother was mugged they moved elsewhere.20 Another former resident “left because my parents did not like the element they saw moving in— they already were looking when my mother was mugged at gunpoint in the parking lot. This pushed them over the edge.”21 Sometimes reporting the crime was as upsetting as the crime itself. One woman remembers, after a mugging, the attitude of the police was “What are you doing here? As a white family you don’t belong in this neighborhood. This is no place for you.”22 If Rochdale had brought extended families together, moving from Rochdale could pull them apart. “The dangerous conditions finally forced my mother, sister, and grandmother to break up their homes and move to different communities. By then [everyone in my family] had been mugged at least once, and threatened on several occasions.”23 At times, the incident that prompted someone to leave was so painful and frightening that it was never shared. One woman remembered: “We

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moved for my mother’s well-being. For many years I thought it was simply so she could go out and meet people, but she told me recently that a fellow passenger on the LIRR had threatened to take a gun and ‘blow her head off.’ ”24 Epiphanies could arrive in other ways as well. One family realized it was time to move when “we were eating dinner one night and a rather large rock came sailing through the window and left a dent in the wall.”25 There was a rash of such incidents after 1971, when a new park—built on the site of Rochdale’s abortive swimming pool project—opened adjacent to IS 72, contoured with berms rising twenty and thirty feet high, an architect’s idea of complementing the unrelieved flatness of Rochdale’s terrain.26 And though the design won awards, even before it was completed there were worries that the city was building a haven for criminal activity, and it immediately became the perfect mountain hideout for thieves who would descend from their lairs to waylay passersby and use the hills as launching pads for throwing stones into the windows of the school and adjacent Rochdale apartments, breaking hundreds of panes of glass.27 “From my apartment I could see the entire park,” remembered one man. “Predators would lie in the ill-lit park, on the top of the hills waiting for someone to walk by. In a matter of seconds they would clamber over the crest, strike their victim, and disappear back over the hill.”28 Rochdale’s manager complained, “You can’t blame the police. This is a guerrilla training ground. There’s no spot from which you can see everything. They’d need a helicopter to patrol here.”29 Eventually the park was flattened to make space for a more easily policed park, and was later turned into a public garden. For many, there was an internal “tipping point” that was joined to a general sense of an irreversible neighborhood deterioration. Certainly the sight of friends leaving confirmed doubts and made them concrete and visible. One man remembered, “We were growing up (I was already in college) and the neighborhood was getting bad. It had also become apparent that a mass exodus was under way.”30 Rochdale residents were not homeowners, and did not to worry about selling at a loss; they could pick up stakes and move fairly easily. And as a community less than a decade old, no one had the lifelong ties to place, kin, and church that often prompted defenses of the old sod and homestead. Most Rochdale residents had moved from there changing neighborhoods, and moving from Rochdale came fairly easily. On the other hand Rochdale did have unique institutions, and ten years in one location can seem like a lifetime.31 Perhaps especially for senior citizens, moving away was painful, as Pearl Grossman tried to explain in 1974:32 We have lived in Rochdale Village for 10 years, but we applied for an apartment in a new co-op built for middle income families; when we looked at the apartment we were disappointed. After much discussion and many sleepless nights, we have decided to remain in Rochdale where we have all the conveniences retired people need. We don’t have to cross streets when we go shopping; we don’t have to travel to see a doctor, the HIP [a local HMO] is right on the premises. If we moved, we would be leaving many good friends and

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the social and organizational activity that is such an important part of our life here. Our honest advice to our neighbors is “don’t move simply because you see other people moving.” We hope everyone will take into consideration all the privileges and conveniences we have here, and not make the mistake we almost did. As whites were steadily moving out of Rochdale, blacks were staying and moving in. Large numbers of black families worked in civil-service positions, such as mass transit and the post office, and many others were working in private industry. By the early 1970s Rochdale had become that rarest of housing phenomena, a stable, relatively inexpensive home for the upwardly mobile black middle class. If Jews had many such options for stable middle class communities, blacks did not. By the early 1970s, most Jews simply needed places like Rochdale less than they did a decade before. This was not true for blacks. In 1973 the New York Times had a feature article about the black middle class, focusing on John Henry Howell, a thirty-one-year-old accountant who lived in Rochdale, and had grown up, rather poor, in South Jamaica. “While John was making his hardworking, cautious ascent up the middle-class ladder, the Howells lived in a cheerful, tastefully furnished 10th floor apartment in Rochdale Village, a sprawling low-cost cooperative project. [He] said at the time he didn’t want the expense or responsibility of owning his own house yet.” The Howells were not committed to Rochdale as a permanent home. “Maybe in five years,” the article suggested, “Sandra Howell, who is no fan of city living—‘the people are too cold, the city too hectic, dirty and full of crime’ ”—would move to suburban New Jersey. But for now, Rochdale would do fine.33 But many of those who left Rochdale appreciated that they were leaving someplace special, with a unique combination of qualities that were not likely to be reproduced elsewhere. Indeed, one emotion that contributed to the departure was disappointed idealism, the tarnishing of the high hopes that so many had for Rochdale. For one person it wasn’t anger so much as frustration, “people moved out because it no longer lived up to their expectations.”34 Cal Jones remembers the sadness that many felt on leaving. “I was sad when families moved. One person moving told me it was too painful to discuss with me. It was painful . . . [but the sort of cooperative] you were dreaming of and towards which you were moving was not going to be forthcoming, that was something that residents quietly faced.”35 For some, the imperatives of integration had been turned upside down. One woman remembered her family left Rochdale because “[our parents] didn’t want us to grow up to be racist, which is what they were afraid would happen if we stayed in Rochdale.”36 By the 1970s, many, black and white, had concluded the safest path to better (or at least less explosive) race relations was to keep blacks and whites as separate as possible. People left Rochdale with a variety of emotions. Some moved in anger, some in sorrow, and many with a combination of both. Many told their neighbors of the decision in tears, and apologized for letting them down.37 Some felt acutely

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embarrassed at moving. Young people and teenagers sometimes left without telling their friends, and those left behind wondered where they had gone.38 Of course many were glad to move, angry at Rochdale, and eager to start over somewhere else. I can’t remember having strong emotions either way when we moved. And in truth, once I moved, I hardly gave it another thought for three decades. It was, as nonhistorians like to say, history. Out of sight, out of mind. I suspect I was fairly typical in this callowness, certainly among my teenage peers. Others, who had drank more deeply of Rochdale’s uniqueness, were often profoundly conflicted. Anita Starr, a teacher at IS 72, and deeply committed to the cooperative and integrated vision of Rochdale remembers:39 My youngest daughter complained bitterly that she felt ignored when she complained that she didn’t feel safe going to IS 72, that I so wanted Rochdale to work out as an integrated community that I had failed to understand my duties as a parent. My other daughter would complain about school, and say “This happened today Mom, but forget about it,” so I forgot about it. I disregarded complaints about IS 72 until they became really intense. One day my husband came home late and he was mugged, his wallet was stolen and something he had been working on for months had been stolen, and he said we have to move. This was in the spring of 1975. I was horrified; he wasn’t a person who [usually] complained but we had to move. I felt terribly guilty about moving [out of ] Rochdale. When I moved, I said, “Wherever I look all I see are white people, I don’t know if I can make the adjustment.” Those who stayed in Rochdale had a variety of emotions about those who left. Some were angry and resentful. The bulletin of the Rochdale Black Society in 1971 criticized the winning slate in the local elections as wanting “to keep control of Rochdale Village until such time as they could move out.” Cal Jones remembers that a common feeling among Rochdale’s blacks was that “It was as if everyone just picked up and ran and didn’t have any commitment to Rochdale.”40 He wrote in 1973 that no matter who was living in Rochdale, the challenge remained much the same: “Whether the cooperative is black, white, integrated, or whatever, that is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that the cooperative serve all of the people in the community.”41 But if there was anger at those departing, most of those remaining recognized that the underlying causes for the white departure were real and needed to be addressed by those still living in Rochdale, and this became grist for Rochdale’s everchurning political mill. In 1972, one political faction, then out of power, promised Rochdale residents that they had “formulated a plan which would make Rochdale Village a place that people will fight to move into, rather than run to move out.”42 In response Lewis Lachman, chair of the Board of Directors, countered: “I agree that a most serious problem, if not the most serious problem in the community, is the number of families moving out, but to imply that there are magic steps to prevent

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this is ridiculous. The current board has spent more hours with this problem than any other.”43 One briefly considered proposal for keeping up the percentage of white families in Rochdale was a quota system that would give some preference to white applicants by keeping racially separate waiting lists, rather than offering apartments on a first come, first served basis.44 Morris Milgram, a pioneer in integrated housing, suggested that Rochdale try something along these lines in 1977. Such a program would have been immensely controversial and of questionable legality—although it was employed to considerable effect in a Brooklyn Mitchell-Lama rental development, Starrett City, for a number of years.45 In any event, as Milgram notes, the best way to preserve integrated housing is by prophylaxis, dealing with potential problems, such as deteriorating schools, before they become a serious cause of outmigration. By the early 1970s, early prevention was no longer an option.46 Certainly the Rochdale Board of Directors did what they could to address the problems that beset the cooperative, though many things were outside their control. In 1973, Rochdale finally installed a buzzer and intercom system in the building entrances to limit access to residents, workmen, and guests.47 Jules Weinstein, Rochdale’s manager, was still struggling to place the crime issue in perspective: “Crime has increased in Rochdale Village and we have felt the impact of this as well as every other community throughout the city. We are using every resource at our command to contain and control crime, vandalism, and malicious mischief. Our security force, contrary to the opinion of some residents, has been vigilant and responsive. . . . There is no quick and easy way to solving crime and eliminating vandalism. You know this as well as I do.”48 The schools, particularly IS 72, were a continuing concern. As the percentage of whites in attendance dropped, the remaining white parents grew more afraid of sending their children to the local school. In the fall of 1971, in response to a decline in absolute enrollment numbers at IS 72, there was a change in feeder patterns, which involved busing for the first time, and the percentage of white students declined below 30 percent for the first time. By all accounts the new racial patterns and balances in the school made a bad situation worse.49 Lewis Lachman said at a board meeting in June 1971 that “quality education depends on integration. Time to stand up and say loud and clear that we want our schools to be for the children of the community, based on the existing housing.”50 Often, those who stayed were just as upset at what was happening to the cooperative as those who left. In 1974 William Dunlap, the black president of the House Congress, offered a cri de coeur on the ongoing problems with Rochdale, in an “An Open Letter to All Cooperators,” noting that he viewed “the conditions in the cooperative in very similar terms to those who had decided to move:51 What is happening to our beautiful Rochdale Village??? As tenant-cooperators, let us look around and see what is happening to our beautiful Rochdale Village.

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Our stairwells, walls are painted up with graffiti. Is your building any different? Take a walk through the stairwell and see for yourself. See the locks broken every day. See the glass broken everywhere. Kids urinate in the elevators, dogs going in the lobbies. See the kids who harass and threaten residents when we walk in and out of the building. Don’t you care what your children are doing? If this co-op will become a slum, will you be willing to live in filth and dirt? It is time that we interest ourselves, get involved, join your building committee, Hall Patrol and House Congress. Together we can get results. Help one another to make our building safe and worthy to live in. Talk to your children. Let them know that destroying our homes will benefit no one. Don’t you give a damn what happens to our homes? Implicit in Dunlap’s critique was a sense that Rochdale’s newcomers were cut from a different cloth, less committed to the cooperative ideal, less interested in dedicating their time to working for the betterment of Rochdale. Of a new venture in community involvement, the Rochdale Black Society in 1971 wrote, “One very promising aspect is that the meetings have been attended by young parents, which makes the myth that ‘young parents don’t care about their community’ a lie.”52 Jules Weinstein said in November 1971 that “Rochdale Village has not changed. Our beautiful grounds and buildings are still here. . . . There has been entirely too much scuttlebutt about the ‘best families’ moving and the reasons generally ascribed to lack of security and poor schooling. . . . Loose talk about Rochdale Village can only hurt our image. I think the time has come for residents to stop worrying about those people who have moved. The decision was theirs and we wish them well. Let us instead take pride in Rochdale, welcome the new families coming in and make them part of our community life.”53 Doubts about the newcomers extended beyond questions about their civicmindedness. There were persistent rumors that some of the newcomers were on welfare, or at least were of a lower caliber than the original residents. Leo Mossman, president of the Rochdale Board of Directors in 1978, said in that year, “When I came here fifteen years ago, the United Housing Foundation knew the color of my underwear. Then management stopped screening people—looking for people concerned about the concept of cooperative living—because they were planning to leave and didn’t care.”54 This was a common sentiment. Juanita Watkins thought Rochdale declined because there had been “a loosening on the tight reins on screening,” allowing drug dealers and other unsavory people into the cooperative, and thought that management had made a mistake when they “allowed people to move in who would not have been able to live there a few years before.”55 There were persistent rumors—I remember hearing them before we moved in the fall of 1973—that families on welfare had been admitted. This was vociferously denied at the time by Rochdale management, and was subsequently denied by several knowledgeable people in interviews with me.56 Nonetheless, many believed that Rochdale

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was admitting poorer families than ever before, and was becoming just another housing project. Indeed, at some time in the late 1970s or 1980s, those in the vicinity began to refer to Rochdale as “the projects,” a sobriquet that never was used in the 1960s.57 Programs were developed to help acculturate new residents. By 1971 building 14 had started a program with the purpose “of educating and informing the tenantcooperators of their building on cooperative living” with the goal of restoring “a feeling of pride and to initiate a program in our building whereby people . . . see each other as neighbors and not as strangers,” and it promised to “zero-in on areas like vandalism, maintenance and security.” A “welcome wagon” was established to greet and instruct new families on their arrival in Rochdale.58 In 1972 Lewis Lachman called for the establishment of “building parties,” so “that the new cooperators could get to meet the established ones, to promote a better rapport and understanding of cooperative living.”59 A similar program was discussed by Jules Weinstein in 1973. “Unfortunately we are experiencing an apathy by new residents to the principles and control of children in their family. To overcome this, an Operation Handshake program has been started by House Congress whose members are personally visiting each new family to acquaint them with the positive side of Rochdale Village and to invite community involvement as well as respect for mutually owned property.”60 But it was one of the paradoxes of Rochdale in the late 1960s and 1970s (and one that escaped the notice of committed declensionists such as Hal Levenson of The 51st State), that despite (or because of) the problems it faced, the cooperative’s internal politics was showing a new vitality, though one person’s vibrant democracy had others muttering about a descent into mob rule. If nothing else Rochdale’s politics were proof positive against those, such as Jane Jacobs, who have argued that cooperatives fostered a politics of coercive blandness in the name of community harmony. All this became fully manifest only in the fall of 1969, when, finally, Rochdale residents were able to vote directly for a majority of the fifteen person Board of Directors.61 This did not lead to a complete repudiation of the UHF—Harold Ostroff would remain perhaps the most influential member of the board for many years thereafter—but a majority was captured by the Tenants Council, an anti-UHF faction with its roots in the politics of the Old Left. They viewed the UHF as out of touch, as a bureaucracy that had long ago abandoned its idealism and needed to be challenged. The Tenants Council captured eight seats (six whites, two African Americans), which made for a bare majority of the fifteen-person board,62 and they used their narrow majority to effect a minor revolution in Rochdale. They dropped Rochdale’s legal counsel (who were also lawyers for the UHF), filed a $3 million lawsuit against an arm of the UHF, and fired the UHF-appointed manager, Abe Brown, who was, it was claimed, “a tool of management,” “incompetent,” and under whose leadership “maintenance, security and service have deteriorated continuously.”63 They made changes in the cooperative itself: increased

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the income-level minimum for surcharges, and changed the lease, making renewals easier. The Tenants Council allowed residents to bring baby carriages up to their apartments (rather than requiring them to be stored in “carriage rooms” notorious for a lack of security for the vehicles stored there),64 and they took down many of the chain fences and monitory signs from the lawns, allowing Rochdalers to walk on the grass, and walk directly from point A to B without labyrinthine detours.65 But above all, the Tenants Council made enemies. With the power to make changes comes responsibility for what follows. Those upset by the Tenants Council complained of financial incompetence and hinted at financial malfeasance. A new set of washing machines purchased by the board broke down frequently, and turned into a fiasco. By March 1970 there were complaints that the Tenants Council–dominated board “has not done anything that it promised to do. Nothing has been done about improving security, nothing’s been done about cleaning up Rochdale.” Others accused them of “totalitarian” tactics in board meetings (using their one-vote majority to ram through numerous proposals by an 8–7 vote) and of being (because of their hostility to the UHF), “interlopers bent on destroying Rochdale Village.”66 After the Tenants Council lost their majority in 1971, a man wrote that had they not been ousted, “our village would have been completely destroyed. Presently we call it a partial destruction, because our lawns are destroyed beyond repair [referring to their “stay on the grass” policy].”67 If the aggressive anti-UHF stance of the Tenants Council vitalized a determined opposition, their own tactical rigidity and penchant for confrontation didn’t do them any favors. Hugh Williams, one of those elected to the board with the Tenants Council in 1969, felt the deck was stacked against them from the beginning, and that they were unfairly demonized and red-baited. (One former resident remembered the Tenants Council as “that bunch of Commies.”) However, Williams allowed that some of the problems of the Tenants Council were self-created. It was difficult to make the transition from gadflies to administrators. “The strange thing is you run for the board because you see so many things that are wrong, and so many things that need to be improved, and need to be changed, but when you’re sitting in the seat it’s a different thing; you can see how difficult it is, and you see how much you don’t know about how to run a development.” And, unfortunately, the Tenants Council faction wasn’t into coalition building. “We felt we were the progressive people in the community, and we had to be leadership, and the other people just had to fall in line, but things just don’t work that way.” In the end, Williams says, “we won the election, but we lost the war.”68 It did not take long for an organized opposition to develop. In March 1970 a new organization formed and called itself the Concerned Cooperators. At first the group consisted of moderate to conservative Democrats, though it later would ally with more left-leaning social democrats. They were broadly (though they would argue not uncritically) sympathetic to the UHF, and the extent to which the UHF was behind the formation of the new organization is a matter of some debate.69 By the

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time the next election was held many of those who had voted for the Tenants Council had become disenchanted, and in October 1970, the Concerned Cooperators, in a bitterly fought election in which over 80 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, enough members of the Tenants Council were defeated to provide the Concerned Cooperators with a narrow victory.70 The backers of the Concerned Cooperators savored their victory, reversed some of the decisions of the Tenants Council, and maintained better relations with the UHF. However, the fruits of their victory were relatively short-lived, because in 1972, the remnants of the Tenants Council, shorn of some of their rougher edges and renamed the United Shareholders, emerged victorious in board elections.71 And for much of the next two decades, these two factions would rancorously rotate in and out of office, trading accusations and trading positions. What is perhaps most remarkable about Rochdale’s politics in the 1970s and 1980s is that the two main factions reflected long-standing divisions in Jewish politics that continued to dominate the cooperative’s leadership long after the Jews had moved on. And though internal politics in Rochdale was frequently nasty and bitter, race was never a factor, and over time, the leadership of the different factions changed from being predominantly white, to mixed, to predominantly and then entirely black, with relatively little change in their essential positions. Jack Raskin said, “The changing racial composition did not have an impact on the governance—all of the factions remained integrated; differences between the groups were not based on race.”72 Over time the issues would change, and in particular, the question of the relation of Rochdale to the UHF would fade, as the residents of Rochdale took an ever greater role in the running of the cooperative, and by the mid-1970s the UHF itself entered a steep and irreversible institutional decline. One issue that would remain central to internal debates was finances and carrying-charge increases. For all Mitchell-Lama developments, the 1970s were a time of troubles, when in New York City and State declining tax revenues and increasing expenses placed the government-assisted housing developments into parlous circumstances, raising anew old questions of why the middle class required the subventions that the Mitchell-Lama program provided.73 Rochdale Village was typical among Mitchell-Lama projects in that it had rarely broken even. A 1975 report on Rochdale Village prepared by the Office of the State Comptroller came to the conclusion that Rochdale Village had been in financial difficulty beginning with the first year of full occupancy. Indeed, as the comptroller’s report noted in 1975, in only two of the previous nine years had Rochdale not ended up in the red.74 Fuel costs doubled (due to the 1973 oil embargo) between November 1973 and April 1974 (rising to all of $0.31 a gallon).75 In November 1973, at the height of the energy crisis, Rochdale was in danger of losing its gas supply, and dropped the temperature of hot water from its usual 140 degrees to a tepid 124.76 Carrying charges rose sharply to cover fuel costs. Per-room rentals from the opening of Rochdale through the end of 1968 averaged $23.18. Through November

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1971 they increased to $26.66, then $31.46 through April 1973, $37.41 at the beginning of 1974, and by the beginning of 1975, $41.48. In less than four years, there was an almost two-thirds increase in carrying charges.77 The increases led to a rent strike in early 1974, called by the United Shareholders. Rochdale was very divided by the prospects of a rent strike, and only about five hundred families participated. (The 10 percent participation during the rent strike at Rochdale stands in sharp contrast to the 75 percent rate in the rent strike then going on simultaneously at Co-op City.)78 Nonetheless, given the tight margins under which Mitchell-Lama projects operated, that 10 percent produced a $500,000 deficit, enough to put Rochdale on the brink of bankruptcy, and state housing officials began to initiate foreclosure proceedings. (In the event of foreclosure the state would have taken over Rochdale, it would have ceased to be a cooperative, and residents would have lost their equity down payments of $450 per room.)79 After complex court proceedings, which first favored one side and then the other, the increased carrying charges were ruled to be valid, and the United Shareholders accepted the decision.80 The next year Rochdale required a special grant from the legislature of $625,000 to avoid foreclosure proceedings.81 In early 1976 State Comptroller Arthur Levitt charged that Rochdale, Co-op City, and Starrett City were in weak financial condition, and the three huge projects, accounting for nearly half the $1.6 billion mortgage-loan commitments held by the state, were imperiling the health of the Housing Finance Agency, already battered by the consequences of the 1975 fiscal crisis. Levitt’s dire forecast was challenged by state housing officials and by Rochdale management.82 Rochdale’s factional fighting continued, with each side pointing fingers at the other for the cooperative’s shortcomings. The continuing internal division, which had become standard in Rochdale, led Inside Rochdale in October 1975 to describe the cooperative as perpetually “wracked by internal battles,” though to many the whirring of political factions was a background noise that had little impact on their daily lives.83 By the late 1970s Rochdale was 75 to 85 percent black. The white departure was beginning to ebb, if only because most of the whites who were planning to leave had already done so, leaving, with only a few exceptions, elderly whites. But another challenge, the most serious Rochdale would face, was around the corner.

13. The Trouble with the Teamsters

Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on? Florence Reece

It is striking how often Rochdale, created by a consortium of labor unions, the home of many thousands of union members, and dedicated to the proposition that protection of the rights of labor was a core principle of a fair, just, and equitable society, had serious problems with labor unions. Indeed, one can demarcate major transitions in the history of Rochdale by its labor troubles; the controversy over discrimination in the building trades unions at the Rochdale construction site in 1963; the teachers’ strike in 1968 and its aftermath; and in the late 1970s, the bitter strife that accompanied the strike by the Teamsters Local 80, representing Rochdale’s security guards and maintenance workers. Rochdale had a history of generosity toward the workers it hired. Jack Raskin recalls that in 1970, when the Tenants Council controlled the Board of Directors, their commitment to paying Rochdale workers a living wage led them to top the negotiating position of the union representing the cooperative’s maintenance workers; the union asked for a 25 percent increase, and Rochdale’s negotiator shrewdly countered with an offer of 37 percent. The union representative quickly shook hands on the deal.1 At the time, Rochdale was feeling relatively flush, though by the late 1970s, with a few carrying charge hikes, an oil embargo, and a fiscal crisis under

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their belts, Rochdale’s residents were still committed to giving their hired workers a fair wage, but were in a more cautious and less generous mood. Initially the security guards and maintenance workers were represented by Local 32b of the Building Services Union. By the early 1970s representation had switched to the Local 80 of the Teamsters, with Barry Feinstein as its president. Feinstein had emerged as one of the most powerful union leaders in the city in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis.2 He had a reputation for brashness and unpredictability, and for parlaying his presidency of two relatively small locals into a position of real influence in the city’s turbulent post–fiscal crisis labor situation. He was also very well connected politically, having been an early supporter in 1974 of Hugh Carey’s successful bid to become governor, gave $10,000 to Carey in 1978 toward his successful reelection bid, and was no doubt convinced, with reason, given that the state held Rochdale’s mortgage and ultimately controlled its fate, that in a contest of wills with Rochdale’s board, his would prevail. (On November 7, 1978, Election Day, several days after the 1978 strike began, Feinstein declared a one-day truce, and had his Teamsters leaflet Rochdale for Carey.) He was also something of a gambler, willing to throw his dice and take his chances. All these factors would come into play in the strike in 1978.3 Rochdale’s security and maintenance workers had struck before, in December 1976. Feinstein engaged in typical hardball tactics, setting up a picket line around the power plant, halting deliveries, and holding out the prospect of cutting off Rochdale’s light and heat. With six hours of fuel in the power plant left, Rochdale’s Board of Directors capitulated. As William Booker, the chairman of the Board of Directors said, “When a thief holds a gun at your head, you give him your wallet, don’t you?”4 The settlement gave the Teamsters almost everything they wanted, starting with an increase that amounted on average to 24 percent, and bringing the average salary, in the opinion of the Rochdale board, to $18,000 a year. (It needs to be kept in mind that many households in Rochdale had annual incomes in the $9,000 to $12,000 range.)5 There were other provisions that the board found onerous, including one that mandated cost-of-living increases that were projected to reach $1.6 million over five years.6 It was also, under the contract, exceedingly difficult to fire workers, and since there was a general feeling that there was considerable overstaffing–some members of the board felt that up to twenty members of the sixty-man security force were superfluous. Rochdale’s board complained of “numerous cases of drunk guards, guards sleeping, or guards who had committed crimes. We spent most of our time trying to get one or another of them fired.”7 In 1974, the only year for which hard data is available, Rochdale had a staff of 279, of whom 21 worked in the management office, 160 worked on maintenance, 23 in the power plant, 5 supervised activities in the community center, and 60 served on the security staff, for a total annual payroll of $3.1 million.8 In a year when most municipal workers had their wage increases frozen or deferred, the generosity of the Rochdale settlement stood out. Feinstein, always one to stick a shiv in the ribs of a defeated opponent, gloated the day after the settlement,

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“This is the best settlement any union in the city has won in five years.”9 Although most Rochdale board members were union members, they felt they had been had, and that the Teamsters settlement placed a great strain on Rochdale’s finances. They vowed to be tougher in the next round of negotiations.10 The contract was due to expire on November 1, 1978. On June 5, Rochdale’s board unanimously agreed to “commit itself to strive to obtain an equitable settlement in the forthcoming negotiations and to develop a contingency plan to combat a strike, should it develop.”11 There were serious concerns about the size of the eventual financial package; Rochdale was running an annual operating deficit of $250,000, and was in arrears for a $1.3 million property-tax bill. However, the main worry was the security guards. Besides the obvious reality that in a high-crime area of New York City in the late 1970s, Rochdale Village really needed security guards, they did not want to be defenseless against retaliations by strikers. And there were some on the board, from the beginning, who believed that given the lack of discipline and problems with the guards from Local 80, the union needed to be broken and replaced. Rochdale’s board made an agreement, should a strike occur, to hire replacement guards from the International Bureau of Protection and Investigation (IBPI). The new guards were not unionized (union security guards would not have crossed the Teamsters picket lines), and had reputations as strike breakers. The board also hired a lawyer, Samuel Rosen, who typically advised management in labor situations, and had previously represented IBPI.12 Various attempts to reach a compromise came to naught. Rochdale had made it clear that if a strike started, the security guards would not get their old jobs back. (They had also obtained a court order to prevent the Teamsters from stopping deliveries to the power plant.) For Jack Raskin, on Rochdale’s board of directors, it was simply a matter of self-preservation—“We had a community to protect.” For Feinstein this plan was “union busting, plain and simple.” Battle lines were drawn. A board member said his attitude before the strike began was, in response to Feinstein’s demands, “No, no, a thousand times, no. We’ve had enough and will fight like the British did when they were threatened by Hitler’s armed might.”13 On November 1, 1978, the Battle of Rochdale commenced. Within hours, there were acts of vandalism by the Teamsters. On one night, shortly after the strike started, electrical closets in five buildings were doused with gasoline and set on fire, putting hundreds of apartments into darkness. Sewer lines were plugged with cement. In early December Rochdale’s manger, Oscar Whitfield, came to his office one morning to find six bullet shots fired into his window.14 For Jack Raskin, the strike was “a nightmare.” For Barry Feinstein, three weeks into the strike, it was “Harlan County, Kentucky, in Queens.”15 If nothing else, most Rochdale residents would have agreed with Feinstein that, like the famous song the Harlan County strike spawned, Rochdale soon became a place where only one question mattered: “Which side are you on?” By the following August, a writer in New York magazine could describe the still ongoing strike as “the longest-running major strike in New York City history.”16

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Though Rochdale was able, by court order, to keep fuel deliveries coming to the power plant, the Teamsters were able to shut down almost all other commercial traffic into the cooperative. Another court order was needed to permit deliveries to continue to the Co-op Supermarket, though not before at least three delivery vans were met with gunfire. (Thereafter trucks entering Rochdale received police escort.) The garbage went uncollected, and without a maintenance staff, residents took out their own garbage, and placed it outside, sometimes having to walk long distances to do so. However, until another court order was received, no one would cross the Teamsters picket line to pick it up. Reporters noted residents wading through piles of debris every morning, and pictures of large, informal garbage dumps, bags wastehigh, slowly encroaching on open spaces, appeared in many newspapers. Snow removal was another problem, with drifts gathering and lingering for weeks in the legendarily severe winter of 1978, until a nonunion company was hired to collect it.17 Many residents intensely disliked the way their community looked and smelled. “This place is getting too slummy, like a ghetto” one longtime resident told a reporter at the height of the strike.18 Nothing did more to give Rochdale a sense of slummy decrepitude than the constant vandalism. An article in the New York Amsterdam News titled “Rochdale Under Siege” described the shuttered auditorium in the community center: “At the center of the stage is a pile of charred wood, the remains of a grand piano that was set on fire; huge picture windows are either cracked and taped up or replaced with sheets of plywood.” In addition to the piano, the curtains on the stage had been torched, and the auditorium floor had been burnt and pulled apart. The reporter walked through the cooperative seeing everywhere “twisted door frames and soot-blackened walls.”19 Another account of vandalism included “firebombing, gunfire, the burning of electrical closets, destruction of sewer pipes and lighting fixtures, the slashing of tires and the shattering of windows.”20 There were also acts of vandalism directed against specific individuals. One morning, William Booker, one of the leaders of the Concerned Cooperators, went to the parking lot to find his car utterly smashed, the windows broken, the chassis beaten and twisted by sledgehammers. The striking guards regularly taunted Rochdale residents, built bonfires out of garbage on the lawns, parked illegally and dangerously, and did whatever they could to show their disrespect for Rochdale and its residents.21 By August 1979 the bill for vandalism was already at $250,000 and rising.22 But as unsettling as the vandalism was, the most alarming aspect of the strike was the violence and the physical intimidation. About one month into the strike, at least ten of the newly hired guards (out of a force of about fifty) had been hospitalized, assaulted by striking guards.23 Although they were not supposed to, persons on both sides often carried weapons, both knives and guns. The striking security guards engaged in acts of intimidation against their replacements, and the replacement guards, no choirboys either, knew how to defend themselves. One replacement guard was kidnapped, stripped, and dumped naked in the middle of the night in the Aqueduct IND station. One evening, Rochdale’s manager, Oscar Whitfield, was

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walking by himself when he was set upon by striking security guards, waiting for their prey, who grabbed him, turned him upside down, held a gun to his head, and said, “It’s time for you to go.” He soon resigned.24 Fred Wilson, a Democratic leader in Rochdale and a strong strike opponent, was also jumped and assaulted by strikers. Jack Raskin, one of the lead negotiators for Rochdale, received a threatening message, and was escorted home by detectives for a month. When this protection ended, his son met him at the LIRR station nightly for the remainder of the strike.25 With all the guns, the Dodge City swagger, and the macho posturing, it was only a matter of time before someone got seriously hurt. One cold night, a striking guard stood in the way of a snowplow. The snowplow, like almost all maintenance activities in Rochdale during the strike, had a security guard riding shotgun. When the striking guard refused to move, a rapidly escalating exchange followed. The replacement guard opened his jacket, displayed his weapon, and offered the standard street threat, “Any of you motherfuckers want to challenge me?” Someone did, shots were exchanged, and the striking worker was seriously injured.26 Violent confrontations between striking and replacement security guards were a frequent occurrence. Rinker Buck, in an article on the strike in August 1979, described one incident he witnessed:27 A ragged line of maintenance men . . . fanned out across the lawn to clear it of months of accumulated refuse. The crew was protected front and back, by three beefy securitymen, billy clubs in hand, watching for trouble. . . . Moments later, an angry group of Teamsters from a nearby picket line, tripping across a chain fence as they advanced, moved among the maintenance crew. Billy clubs flew, rakes and brooms became defensive weapons, and lawn mowers were ripped apart during a furious scene that lasted less than a minute. Serious injury was averted only by the timely arrival of the police. It was just another day in the life of Rochdale Village. One similar episode had a more tragic ending. Another group of maintenance workers were attempting to cut the grass and remove garbage from the property, accompanied by security guards. Strikers from Local 80 attempted to intimidate them, and one of the strikers, Tony Dickson, pulled a knife, and according to some accounts, tried to remove the gun from the holster of a replacement guard, Edwin Suarez. The striker was told to drop his knife, and when he did not do so, he was shot, seriously wounded, and died several days later. When, after the funeral, the Teamsters attempted to parade through the cooperative with a mock coffin to protest the murder, anonymous phone calls were received by the 113th Precinct, threatening to shoot the picketers.28 The strike was one of the most violent in the recent labor history of New York City.29 In addition to direct physical intimidation, the Teamsters used other means to metaphorically twist the arms of Rochdale’s board. Barry Feinstein tried to get Jack

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Raskin fired, telling Raskin’s employer, a manufacturer of office equipment, that if he kept Raskin on his payroll, future contracts with any unionized workplace, including city and state agencies, would be severely disadvantaged; he also spread rumors that Raskin was racist and was trying to get black workers fired. Raskin got a call from his own union vice president telling him to back off or face bodily harm. Other union members on the board (and most were) faced similar pressure. For Feinstein this was just business as usual in a difficult strike. He said in 1979: “Sure I put the heat on Jack Raskin. I went over to his union personally to get them to change his vote on the Rochdale board. And I’ve done the same to other board members. What’s he crying about? When you’re in a war, you use whatever means are available to you to win.”30 All that Feinstein accomplished was to make his opponents more resolute. An anonymous leaflet, from April 1979, somewhat melodramatically captured the dominant sentiment in Rochdale about the Teamsters. “Too much has been destroyed, too many hours of sweat and strength have been given to keep Rochdale safe, for us to turn around and say YES—do to us what you did two years ago! In Rochdale’s case—we do not say—when rape is inevitable—relax and enjoy it!!,” and as for giving into the Teamsters demands and rehiring the guards, “This Cannot, Must Not, and Will Not Happen! ”31 By working together, Rochdale residents could challenge the pervasive sense of fear that had pervaded the cooperative since the beginning of the strike. Rochdale residents attempted to cope with the situation of the strike, and tried to keep things as clean and orderly as possible, taking turns in cleaning the laundry rooms, emptying the filters, and washing the floors, and performing as much maintenance as possible. Many people praised the coming together of Rochdale residents as an indication of the true cooperative spirit, facing adversity through mutual assistance. Meetings were held in buildings, tasks were divided, and many senior citizens took the lead in directing the activity, including, in one building, an eighty-year-old man who spent his days supervising the collection and depositing of garbage. Rochdale Village for a few months was more kibbutz than cooperative. Abraham Kazan would have been pleased and proud. Rochdale residents soon set up their own security details, including twenty-four-hour hall patrols manned by residents, and card tables in building lobbies where residents checked the IDs of those entering the buildings.32 One group, calling itself the Committee to Save Rochdale, looked around the cooperative, found it to be in horrible disrepair, and decided that both a cleanup and an act of defiance against the Teamsters, around the time of Easter and Passover in 1979, would send a spiritual message to all sides: Rochdale would get out of its house of bondage, and Rochdale would be resurrected. The group started near the power plant on Bedell Street, where the strikers congregated, leaving a slovenly mess behind them. They threw away garbage, cleaned sidewalks, emptied trashcans, painted defaced siding. The group draped a large homemade banner over part of the power plant. Its message was simple and direct: “We Shall Overcome.”

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It was a common sentiment among Rochdale residents. Rochdale residents also formed the Rochdale Defense League and they told the local precinct that if the police wouldn’t defend them against the Teamsters, they would take matters into their own hands. Police protection notably increased thereafter, and the incidence of vandalism was curtailed when some enterprising Rochdalers obtained the names and addresses of the shop stewards of the Teamster local, and dumped garbage on their lawns.33 It would be nice to report that Rochdale residents, faced with the challenge of the Teamsters strike, put their past disagreements behind them and began to work together for the common good. But this is not what happened. Indeed, the strike brought a new ferocity to the cooperative’s combative internal politics. When, at the beginning of the strike, the Concerned Cooperators, holding a slim eight to seven majority on the Board of Directors over the United Shareholders, refused to share offices, the latter group walked out, making a quorum impossible and plunging Rochdale into chaos.34 (Any collaboration between these sworn enemies would have been very difficult; on the other hand, one is reminded of Lyndon Johnson’s famous comment that it is better to have a political opponent inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.) And the United Shareholders, originally opponents of the Teamsters, by December were arguing that the strike was proving too expensive— Arthur Greene, one of the Shareholders’ leaders, later estimated that fighting the strike had cost $1.5 million—and called for a negotiated settlement.35 Whether a middle ground such as Greene sought was possible is perhaps to be doubted, but he felt the intransigence of the board and Feinstein were mutually reinforcing.36 By some accounts the United Shareholders’ neutrality shaded into active support for the Teamsters, such as bringing them coffee on cold mornings, and on occasion joining them on the picket lines.37 Whether or not those accounts are true, the Teamsters did successfully exploit the differences between the two factions. Barry Feinstein was in favor of arbitration, largely because he was confident that he had sufficient influence and pull to get most of what he wanted in the end, and that any compromise would certainly have to involve bringing back the striking workers in some capacity. The board was wary of arbitration for this very reason. The sticking point was the security guards, who had, in the words of the board’s president, Leo Mossman, orchestrated “Barry Feinstein’s reign of terror.”38 Mossman said the board would be willing to “arbitrate all issues except the guards returning as guards.” (The board was willing to consider their return as maintenance workers.) Arbitration sessions took place at the World Trade Center with Deputy Mayor Basil Paterson (Feinstein walked out of several meetings).39 When Paterson proposed binding arbitration, Feinstein (and the United Shareholders) said yes, the Concerned Cooperators said no. To the press Feinstein accused Rochdale of having a “bananas” management, which had refused “every recommendation made by impartial arbitrators” and of “setting labor relations back to the 1930s.”40 In private, Feinstein was convinced he had the upper hand. According to Rochdale board member Cleo Smith, Feinstein once threatened him, saying that Feinstein “didn’t

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have to do business with us. ‘We can break you and then the state will take you into receivership. I know the state will give me the deal I want.’ ”41 In any event, the main political factions in Rochdale continued to spar, and in December 1978 their feuding made it to the editorial page of the Daily News, which had a cartoon of two big bruisers in a wrestling ring, wearing respectively the singlets of the Concerned Cooperators and United Shareholders, eyeing each other warily, waiting for the chance to wallop each other.42 The Concerned Cooperators made their own cartoons, including one that put their opponents in bed with Feinstein, and another with Feinstein (with “666” on his forehead) playing the pan pipes, while Arthur Greene and Frank McKanic (another leader of the United Shareholders) danced on a grave with a tombstone inscribed, “Rochdale, Murdered 1979.”43 (The third, smaller faction, the Committee to Save Rochdale, mentioned above, were very much opposed to the Teamsters but were convinced that the two dominant factions were spending too much of their energies attacking each other, and they issued a leaflet that pleaded with everyone to put their “miscellaneous B.S.” behind them.)44 The hostilities between the Concerned Cooperators and the United Shareholders reached a climax when the former tried to oust Greene and McKanic from the board of directors. A cooperative-wide recall election was held in April 1979 that, by a decisive two to one margin, called for their removal. However, this was fought in the courts, and the episode ended inconclusively.45 And it was in the courts where the dispute between Rochdale and the Teamsters would be resolved. The National Labor Relations Board ruled in April 1979 that Rochdale Village Inc.’s contract with Teamsters Local 80 was properly voided on October 30, 1978; but on May 9, 1979, an arbitrator (appointed when the Teamsters, after complicated legal proceedings, won the right to have binding arbitration) ruled that the Teamsters contract was still in effect, and ordered any replacement workers to leave the cooperative by May 31.46 The Rochdale board refused to do this, saying that no one else would decide whom they hired or fired, and locked out the Teamsters.47 (The United Shareholders urged an acceptance of the arbitrator’s edict.) The state commissioner of housing, Victor Marrero, said that unless they obeyed the order, the members of the board faced removal.48 A stalemate ensued until this opinion, in turn, was overturned in October 1979 in the appellate court. Fred Wilson, the Democratic district leader in Rochdale, exulted, “The Teamsters are finished.”49 And though it took the Teamsters a while to realize it, they were. The denouement occurred in late November, when the US district court judge Eugene Nickerson ruled that the Teamsters contract had expired the previous October, and that all of the union’s claims were without merit.50 There were no further appeals, and the union decided that given the adamantine stance of Rochdale, and recent court reverses, their cause was lost. Many members of the Teamsters Local 80, some of whom lived in Rochdale, told Rochdale residents that they had been opposed to the strike, but had been forced by Feinstein. One union member said, “We’ve all been screwed. The residents should never have been put through this. I know—I live here. The Teamsters have lost—I know that too.”51 There was

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no way back. The striking workers would not be rehired. The strike, which had started with such a bang, ended in whimpers, and simply melted away. One day, about a year after it began, the pickets on Bedell Street near the power station were not there, and Rochdale’s residents, and the new security guards and maintenance workers, got on with their lives. Rochdale Village had defeated the Teamsters. Barry Feinstein had suffered a major setback, one that put his career as a labor leader on a downward trajectory. In 1993 he would be removed from his positions with the Teamsters for corruption, and though he would make a comeback, his days as one of the city’s major labor leaders were over.52 The strike, for those who lived through it, was a defining moment of their years in Rochdale. It was a time when their commitment to the cooperative was challenged as never before, when even daily tasks such as taking out the garbage became imbued with a broader political and moral significance. In many ways the strike transformed Rochdale’s image of itself. For many, the strike was most easily interpretable in racial terms. While, as far as I can determine, there was never any anti-Semitism directed against Barry Feinstein (and almost all the striking workers were black and minority), the strike was interpreted as a fight against the white power structure of the city. As Tom White, the chairman of the Committee to Save Rochdale, who would soon emerge as a power in Rochdale politics, put it, “a lot of strikers were misled, deceived and betrayed into thinking that it was a union dispute when it was actually warmed-over racism in disguise” and that the strike “shows disrespect for the black community” raising the ire of “an angry community bent on self-determination and the right to exist in peace with dignity.”53 There were many who thought that Barry Feinstein had chosen Rochdale as a setting to flex his labor muscles because, in Cal Jones’s words, “The union wanted to use us as an example, because we didn’t have the political clout of white communities.”54 With the exception of the Daily News, Newsday, and WNBC, the strike was scandalously undercovered, and there were complaints about a “conspiracy of silence,” and the lack of politicians coming to their aid.55 Placing the Rochdale Teamsters strike in the context of the broader struggle between blacks and whites in New York City was a common response. Al Mossman, the president of the Board of Directors, felt that Local 80 was annoyed that Rochdale’s $18 million-a-year operating budget was in the control of blacks. Fred Wilson, the Democratic leader in Rochdale, felt that the UFT had played an insidious role in the strike, writing letters to all their members in the cooperative, attacking the Rochdale Board of Directors. For many who viewed the Rochdale strike from the outside, including the Amsterdam News, which covered the strike extensively, this was its meaning: the 1968 teachers strike redux, another chapter in the endless struggle between white perfidy and black resistance. “No matter what concessions the black majority on Rochdale’s board of directors offered last October to avoid a strike, the teamsters union negotiator warned that it was out to get rid of those ‘black bastards.’ That, in a nutshell, is what the year long strike of security guards is about—the determination by the teamsters and their representatives

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including Al Shanker’s UFT, to demonstrate their awesome power and show its 25,000 residents who’s boss.”56 The Amsterdam News went on to rewrite, not terribly accurately, the history of Rochdale, reducing it to a simple racial struggle, the ultimately failed effort of whites to control the destinies of black South Jamaica, offering the following nutshell history:57 Rochdale sprang up as a “white enclave” to stem the exodus of whites fleeing Queens. Demonstrations by blacks who threw themselves in the path of heavy machinery were of no benefit. . . . The 15,000 white voters played a key role in the social, political, and economic policies of Jamaica. In 1969 they joined forces with the teachers union in the borough to deny blacks their rightful control of schools in their neighborhoods there. This was not a particularly well-informed view of Rochdale’s history, and it is doubtful that many in Rochdale interpreted the Teamsters strike in such crudely reductive racial terms, certainly not the leaders of the major political factions in the cooperative. Rochdale, after all, still had a substantial white population of 10 to 15 percent in 1979, and many of the leading figures in Rochdale’s internal politics during the strike, such as Jack Raskin and Arthur Greene, were Jewish, and, as always was the case in Rochdale, all the major factions were racially integrated, and their fierce fights had no racial subtext. But this era was coming to an end, and within a few years almost all of Rochdale’s politicians would be African American. (The time was coming when prominent white leaders in Rochdale would be asked to leave their positions. Sue Raskin, who was president of the Concerned Cooperators during the strike, remembers meeting several years after its conclusion with a group of the faction’s leaders, who said that it was time for black leadership. “I was upset by it, but I understood it, if you want to run it, you run it,” Raskin said.)58 It was easy to view the strike in terms of stark dichotomies; a powerful and well-connected union, whose tentacles reached into the highest echelons of influence at City Hall and the state Capitol, doing all it could to crush and destroy what by the late 1970s was the largest predominantly black housing cooperative in the city. The forces arrayed against Rochdale, Basil Paterson aside, were at best incidentally black, while Rochdale had become at best incidentally white. Dramatic events can encapsulate and underline the consequences of longgathering social trends. The labor-based social democratic city of the 1950s that had given birth to Rochdale was no more. The Rochdale Village that emerged victorious from the Teamsters strike, its head bloodied but unbowed from its struggle with its formidable foe, was a cooperative with a new racial identity. In place of an experiment in integration, Rochdale had become a model for hard-won racial selfdetermination. Rochdale Village was now in its purpose, its meaning, and its aspirations, a cooperative that was proudly, determinedly, and defiantly black.

Epilogue LOOKING BACKWARD

I wouldn’t have traded my years in Rochdale for anything in the world. Cal Jones, interview

You can’t go home again, I suppose, but you can go back to where you used to live. Rochdale looks great. In many ways, it looks unchanged. The bus from Hillside Avenue has a new number, but it still takes the same route through South Jamaica, past the main branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, a building with innumerable good memories, and down Merrick Boulevard, past Junior High School 8, a building with a different set of memories. The former St. Albans Naval Hospital closed in 1974—I never quite figured out what it was doing in a gritty urban neighborhood, anyway—and now most of the grounds have been reborn as the Roy Wilkins Park, with a newly refurbished community center. (I was privileged one day to have the person most responsible for the park’s creation, Paul Gibson, give me a personal tour.) The Allen AME Church, which now claims 18,000 members, dominates Merrick Boulevard with a grandiose cathedral. One thing that hasn’t changed is that Merrick Boulevard and South Jamaica remain almost entirely black, though with a difference: a large Caribbean population (primarily Jamaican and Haitian) that was only beginning to take root when I left the area. When the bus makes the turn onto Bedell Street, all seems as it was. My little white schoolhouse, PS 30, still stands out with its horizontal lines set off against the red brick verticality of the apartment buildings. On the far side of Bedell Street

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

is the power plant, Abraham Kazan’s pride and joy, still whirring away, giving Rochdalers heat in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer. And Rochdale’s apartment buildings seem much the same; they don’t seem quite as imposing as I remember them, but they still loom over and dominate the surrounding area of South Jamaica, with its parks and private homes. The paths seem unchanged, though an urban garden now stands where the park with artificial hills once stood. The skinny trees, once tied to poles for support, are still there, but they are now fully grown (just like me), verdant and leafy bowers. And there are other continuities, lying deeper than one can observe at first glance. Rochdale Village is still a limited equity cooperative, and it remains a place where its residents are proud of their homes and community, and where they have worked and fought to keep it clean, safe, and solvent, and a model of democratic possibility. • • • After the successful conclusion of the Teamsters strike came a savored moment of glory, and then a long anticlimax. The strike left the cooperative in disarray, its finances in tatters, and with the usual political instability. Some people left. Shortly

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after the Teamsters strike, Arthur Greene moved on and moved elsewhere. “I left at the urging of my family; it became increasingly unpleasant, I became the whipping boy, and I was taking a lot of heat, so after a while I acceded to the wishes of the family, and we moved.” Some stayed, such as Frank McKanic, and in 1981, with a shift in his fortunes, the United Shareholders won a majority of the board. Having forgotten nothing, and perhaps, having learned nothing from his recall battle at the hands of Concerned Cooperators two years earlier, his first act as president of the Board of Directors was to peremptorily and without notice fire the acting manager, controller, assistant manager, chief of security, security captain, management consultant, maintenance director, and newspaper editor, in an action that became known as the Thanksgiving Eve Massacre.1 Everyone who was not a union member in the management office was fired; those fired were not allowed back into the office to clean their desks, take their possessions, or grab their coats.2 The merrygo-round continued to churn. Almost every change in administration was accompanied by a new broom sweeping things clean, with accompanying court challenges and lawsuits. “Every time the board changes,” Hugh Williams complained in an interview with me, “you don’t need a new management team.” William Greenspan, an attorney who has been on one side or another of Rochdale’s internal political squabbles for many decades, said that if there was one useful by-product of its litigious politics, it was that “a lot of law on the rights and powers of cooperative boards has been made because of Rochdale.”3 The political and social environment of New York City in the 1980s and 1990s was hostile to the survival of cooperatives like Rochdale, with rampant inflation, tight budgets, and soaring rates of crime. Middle-income cooperatives, which had always been supported by subvention, found that after the fiscal crisis, in the words of Louis Winnick, “the subsidy spigots tightened and then almost closed.”4 Rochdale struggled and came close to bankruptcy more than once. As a result of the chaos of the Teamsters strike, Rochdale fell behind at least $500,000 in its mortgage payments, and in the first “work-out” agreement, in 1980, the state allowed Rochdale to backend their late payments to the year 2000 interest free, with the possibility of up to $15 million in new state money going to pay for structural defects at Rochdale and Co-op City.5 Nonetheless problems continued, in part because there had been no increases in carrying charges since the mid-1970s; all Rochdale factions had learned that the penalty for supporting increases was being voted out in the next election. By the late 1980s Rochdale was again in a similar financial position, close to default on its mortgage obligations, and in 1987 a second work-out agreement was negotiated with the state, which granted Rochdale almost $23 million, most of it to be used for rescheduling its debt, and $8.3 million for repairs.6 The agreement also scheduled increases in carrying charges amounting to 45 percent between 1987 and 1991.7 However, the 1987 work-out agreement solved little, because most of the money intended for repairs was used for hiring architects and engineers rather than actually making needed improvements. (In the first years of the agreement, as little as

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$25,000 of the $8 million was used for repairs, according to William Greenspan.)8 All the while Rochdale’s physical and structural problems grew worse, especially the underground system that brought power and light from the power plant, which was failing badly. Sinkholes opened, and at least one person fell into one and was burnt badly.9 “Rochdale Village was in a slow disintegration that would have made it uninhabitable in ten years,” said David E. McClean, who was elected chairman of the Board of Directors in 1991.10 The 1987 work-out agreement was amended in 1990, making more money available for repairs. Then the Concerned Cooperators gained control of the board in 1990, ushering in a long period of relative political stability, through 2002. They hired the Marian Scott firm to manage Rochdale in February 1991, and they would remain in that position for more than fifteen years. Over the next decade the underground pipe system was replaced, roofs were repaired, and new double-pane windows were installed in every apartment. By 1993 the financial situation was so improved that the board was able to forego a carryingcharge increase.11 Along with its rocky finances and turbulent internal politics, the biggest problem Rochdale faced in the 1980s and 1990s were still-rising rates of crime. Like many predominantly black areas of the city in the 1980s, Rochdale came to the attention of the city at large only when a particularly gruesome crime was committed within its precincts. In 1980 blood dripping from the trunk of a car in a Rochdale parking lot led the police to a double murder.12 In 1982 the rape and murder of an eighteen-year-old college student, thrown naked from the roof of a building, and the murder of a ninety-one-year-old woman, suffocated with a pillow during a robbery, was causing “neighbor to fear neighbor” in the words of an article in the New York Times, especially when it was discovered that the murders were committed by Rochdale residents. One resident was quoted as saying she wanted “to double-lock the door of her apartment and never go out again. . . . I moved here from Brooklyn because it was getting rough there. Now it’s getting rough here. I don’t know where I’m going.”13 In 1986 two of Rochdale’s security guards were murdered in a hail of bullets; in 1993 three bandits staged a brazen daytime robbery of a bus, brandishing their weapons, shooting into the roof, making off with the valuables and money of the terrified riders, who likened the experience to a stagecoach heist by desperadoes in a western.14 In the late 1980s and early 1990s Rochdale was near the epicenter of a burgeoning epidemic of crack cocaine use in southeastern Queens, which brought with it gangs armed with automatic weapons. What was probably the most notorious crime during the crack era, the machine-gun execution-style slaying of a police officer named Edward Byrne in February 1988, while Byrne was guarding a drug witness, occurred in an area adjacent to Rochdale in South Jamaica.15 In 1987 the 113th Precinct, including Rochdale and Springfield Gardens, had the highest murder rate of any precinct in Queens, with forty-eight murders (up from forty-two in 1986), accounting for 16 percent of all murders in Queens.16 (There were problems in the precinct itself: in 1988, 49 officers, a quarter of those assigned to the

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precinct—which totaled 143 white and 31 black and Latino officers—were transferred in response to racial slurs and what was termed “racial disharmony.”)17 Rochdale’s schools also remained troubled and rife with criminal activity, and in 1993, Rochdale’s IS 72 was in the unenviable position of having the highest rate of violent incidents of any intermediate school in the city, with eight incidents per one hundred students. The director of operations for the local school district said the school had four security guards on duty but acknowledged that “the school had been poorly run for some time.” (In the rankings among the most dangerous elementary schools in New York City, Rochdale’s PS 80 finished seventeenth, and had the highest level of criminal activity of any elementary school in Queens.)18 Rochdale’s crime rate declined in the 1990s with the ebbing of the crack trade and the general decline in the city’s crime. This is not to say there wasn’t the occasional horrific reminder of how violent Rochdale, and New York City, could be, as in 2004, when a man delivering a Chinese takeout order to a Rochdale address was murdered by two teenagers; his body was dumped in nearby Baisley Pond.19 But terrible crimes of this sort were by then seen more as anomalies and exceptions, rather than grisly confirmations of a general trend. In the 1980s and 1990s some of the appurtenances of the cooperative life fell away. In the early 1980s the co-op supermarkets closed and were replaced by conventional stores. Powerful voices argued that the markets were expensive relics of a time that had passed, and that Rochdale should install modern, for-profit supermarkets in its malls. A petition drive gathered five thousand signatures, not only from Rochdale but from the surrounding community, to save the stores, and according to one of the petition organizers, the managers “said in an open membership meeting that the decision wasn’t made but the fix was in and the board had already signed with the private company.”20 But the new firm that came in to run the supermarket was not very successful—as usual, it was difficult to find a major supermarket chain to set up shop in a black neighborhood—and there was a general sense that after the switch, service and quality deteriorated. The Concerned Cooperators, who had been behind the move, were voted out at the next election. William Greenspan, the lawyer who had largely engineered the switch and who would be a power in Rochdale for decades, said it was the worst mistake he ever made in Rochdale politics. Without Rochdale the nine cooperative supermarkets that had been set up under the UHF’s aegis could not find economies of scale, and they fell apart.21 By most accounts, the vibrant internal political and cultural life of Rochdale declined as well. A common complaint by longtime residents is that Rochdale has never recaptured the spirit of its early years, when 150 organizations vied for members, and the turnout on Candidates Night could bring upwards of 2,000 to the community center.22 For Hugh Williams, the onetime member of the Board of Directors in the late 1960s, “the biggest change in Rochdale today is that you don’t have a lot of organizations, and you miss that, and because you don’t have that, you don’t have that sort of participation in other things, because when people are active,

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they aren’t just active in one thing, and if people are used to staying home, they just stay at home.”23 Williams shares with other Rochdale residents I spoke to a sense that civic life in the cooperative is attenuated and narrow. More than ever the power to control the cooperative is vested in the Board of Directors. (After a dispute several years ago, the House Congress was abolished.) Williams said of contemporary Rochdale that “people don’t want to participate, they want people to do things for them. The cooperative spirit, that we should manage ourselves, has died. The feeling is now, I’m paying and I want to be serviced. They don’t realize that you need to put something into it, to get something out of it.” Williams saw Rochdale, in the early twenty-first century, on the rebound after a long decline. “In the 1970s and 1980s there was a sense of decline in Rochdale. After the exodus, all of the people who knew what button to press and who to contact left, and we lost them all at once, not in ones or twos, but in droves. There definitely was a vacuum of leadership, and after the exodus of the whites many people felt that we wouldn’t be able to govern Rochdale by ourselves, it was a real negative feeling, and thank God that feeling is now behind us. But what hasn’t caught up is the feeling that ‘I need to roll up my sleeves and help out’—but Rochdale has come back a long way.”24 Williams’s sense that Rochdale has “come back a long way” over the last decade and a half is widely shared. By the late 1990s, articles about Rochdale were less likely to have titles like “The Death of a Dream” or “A Utopia Fades” and more likely to be upbeat, such as one in Newsday in 1997, “Rochdale Village in Renaissance After Years of Social, Fiscal Ills.” A quiet and modest renaissance, perhaps, but one that was deeply satisfying to long-term residents. Norma Boucher, who moved to Rochdale in 1970, said in the article, “In many ways Rochdale hasn’t changed. I can still see flower gardens from my window. Security is intact and I feel safe here. We have central heating and air-conditioning and if anything goes wrong all you have to do is call and they’ll fix it.”25 For many there was a sense of continuity and improvement. Herb Plever, who has lived in Rochdale since its opening in 1964 (and is now, with his wife, only one of a handful of white families remaining) talked to me in 2004, in an apartment filled with plants of all kinds, crowded with flower pots and hanging gardens: “[Rochdale] is better managed now, by far. It’s cleaner, the staff is more diligent, the grounds are nicely maintained and they keep the place clean, the horticulture is on a top level, and financially it is fairly secure. There was the first rent increase in eleven years this past year, crime is down but people are still complaining about security. . . . Where else in the city can you get a six-and-a-halfroom apartment with a balcony, where the basic rent is $800 a month?” One of Rochdale’s greatest challenges came not with the hard times of the 1970s and 1980s, but the flush years around the turn of the twenty-first century, when there was increasing pressure on limited-equity cooperatives to privatize, to vest each household with the right to sell their apartment at market value. Given that a family’s initial investment was at most several thousand dollars, there was potentially much profit to be made in privatizing, and several former UHF cooperatives

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followed that route, including Grand Street Houses on the Lower East Side. Although there were discussions about privatizing Rochdale around 2002, it never came to a vote, because it was clear it would not have passed. (A vote of two-thirds of all households would have been necessary for taking Rochdale private.) William Greenspan, who was in favor of privatization, thought this was a big mistake, and that Rochdale really needed the money that privatization would have brought. He predicted, correctly, that without it Rochdale’s fifteen years of relative financial stability (and political stability) would come to an end. Indeed, recent years have been stormy years, with fights over carrying-charge increases, delays in needed repairs, including to the old and balky power plant, which shuts down at odd hours, and the return of general political instability. However, the main reason people were opposed to privatizing Rochdale was that people more or less liked their homes the way they were, and what they had accomplished as a limited-equity cooperative. They were proud that Rochdale was the largest predominantly black housing cooperative in the city, and they were afraid of the inevitable loss of control that would be the consequence of privatization.26 For all that has changed, Rochdale today is still very much what Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses imagined, a limited-equity cooperative, home to thousands of families of modest income, on the cusp of the middle class. No doubt the most obvious change to Rochdale Village from the years when I lived there is the absence of whites and the lack of integration. On one level this clearly does not matter. Rochdale belongs, physically, economically, and spiritually, to the people who live there. Indeed, if the history of Rochdale since the 1970s shows anything, it is that a form of housing and cooperative enterprise created by the Jewish labor movement in the early twentieth century did not need either Jews or the labor movement to continue to thrive. Harold Ostroff told me in 2004, “A few years ago somebody who had worked many years in housing called me on the phone and asked me, ‘Well how do you like Rochdale now?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Well, it’s almost all black.’ So what? It’s perfectly decent housing, it’s still a functioning cooperative, and if whites don’t want to live in Rochdale it’s their problem.”27 For Herman Ferguson, the black radical who started his political career when he became a leader of the demonstrations at the Rochdale construction site in 1963, the original predominantly Jewish residents “outgrew the place, and the blacks moved in.” After his flight to Guyana to avoid imprisonment in the early 1970s, he returned to the United States in 1990, cleared up his legal problems, and in what he acknowledges is a considerable irony, moved to Rochdale Village and in due time was elected to Rochdale’s Board of Directors. “I think Rochdale has enormous potential. Here we have a cooperative that we sort of inherited from the first tenants, but today Rochdale is 98 percent black, something so wealthy and rich in resources, and we need to work to bettering their condition by owning and controlling 170 acres of prime real estate. I like the cooperative ideal, there is evidence that it works. . . . But Rochdale Village is not living up to its potential.”28

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Ferguson’s uncompromising radicalism and black nationalism is by no means typical of Rochdale residents, but even he pays tribute to the cooperative vision that created Rochdale from the heart of the city’s Jewish labor movement, and shares with Abraham Kazan the belief that building large-scale cooperatives was an essential step in building democratic institutions. He calls himself a believer “in the cooperative ideal, there is evidence that it works” and argues that Rochdale, “98 percent black, [and] something so wealthy and rich in resources,” can become a place where Malcolm X’s vision of black self-government in America is finally realized. In his own way, Ferguson is an unlikely successor to the legacy of Abraham Kazan, and a tribute to the flexibility of Kazan’s cooperative vision.29 But New York City in the twenty-first century is a very different city from the one in which, fifty years earlier, Rochdale had been built. The institutions and personalities that helped created Rochdale are no more. Rochdale Village was a dream of old men. Abraham Kazan and Robert Moses were both in their seventies during the years of Rochdale’s construction. Kazan died in 1971; Moses, after a retirement that was typically cantankerous, died in 1980. (Rochdale’s architect, Herman Jessor, lived to be ninety-five, marrying for the first time a few months before his death in 1990.)30 The Mitchell-Lama program, incubator of so many cooperative housing ventures since its birth in 1955, was a victim of the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. No new Mitchell-Lama housing has been built since the 1970s, and the program became oriented toward the past, minding already constructed projects rather than seeking new ventures. The social democratic city, the last best hope of so many socialists, anarchists, union activists, and New Deal liberals, slowly faded away. Political movements rarely last longer than a single generation, about forty years or so, and the constellation of ideas and institutions that gave rise to the cooperative housing movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s died a natural political death in the early 1970s. Rochdale (and Co-op City) were among its final acts of parturition. After the mid-1970s Rochdale no longer had the United Housing Foundation either to kick around or to look to for support. The UHF had been an organization with extravagant ambitions, chief among them to convert the world to the cause of cooperative housing. Its triumphs were real enough, but its cooperatives, even behemoths on the scale of Rochdale and Co-op City, were trifling in comparison with what it imagined itself accomplishing. In 1967, Harold Ostroff, seeking new worlds to conquer, spoke before the City Council and suggested that the largest area of conveniently located, underutilized land in the city was the huge expanse of cemeteries between Brooklyn and Queens, which he thought should be used for cooperative housing. “Can we afford this $157 million tax exempt luxury for the dead when the problems of the living are so pressing?” Calling for razing and raising the dead, he also suggested that no one would miss the northernmost ten blocks of Central Park, which could be turned into cooperative housing for people living on 110th to 120th streets, after which all the housing on 110th to 120th would be

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torn down, making Harlem one great big cooperative. (After hearing this, Robert Moses summoned Ostroff to a meeting and told him that while he liked him and admired his ambition, he never wanted to hear him talking about building housing in Central Park again. Ostroff obeyed.)31 Within a few years the UHF had largely ceased to be an active builder. The rising costs and expectations of the fiscal crisis and, in particular, the rent strike in Co-op City in the mid-1970s, followed by a suit by the rent strikers that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, brought the UHF to its knees and into bankruptcy. The effect of the tumult and controversy at Co-op City on the UHF board was devastating. It made them cautious and gun-shy, afraid to engage in the herculean task of planning and building new cooperatives. Some new projects like Starrett City in Brooklyn, were developed by others and not as cooperatives. Other plans, like those for giant new cooperatives in Jersey City or Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula, of a size that would have dwarfed even Co-op City, died on the drawing board.32 Although the UHF faced real financial and political difficulties, the real problem, as one close to the UHF in its final years explained, lay deeper. The leadership had been profoundly hurt by the fallout from the Co-op City rent strike and did not want to go through the process again, only to be sued, besmirched, and dragged through the mud by one of their creations. A lack of will and a healthy draft of self-doubt, of the sort that Abraham Kazan would never have entertained, now blocked the way to new projects. Harold Ostroff left the UHF in 1975, and he was never really replaced.33 The UHF built no new cooperatives after Co-op City, and without new cooperatives to build, the UHF lacked a purpose, and it dwindled away into insignificance. Although its actions were always couched in the language of rational business decision-making, in many ways the UHF died of a broken heart.34 Since the 1970s large-scale limited-equity cooperatives have generally been seen as urban dinosaurs, ungainly monsters that long since should have waddled to their deserved extinction. For many contemporary urbanists, Rochdale and its siblings are simply products of an idea whose time has passed; living on borrowed money and borrowed time. Those who regret their privatization, wrote Louis Winnick in the Times in 2000, were just “lamenting the passage of a bygone era with dim prospects of return.” They cost too much to build and require too much political and financial capital to maintain. Winnick suggested that liberals and progressives turn their attention to other, more achievable political causes, such as “crime and schools, the environment and health care,” and stop dreaming of a cooperative revival, since most of New York City’s politicians and residents “seem reluctantly reconciled to the vertiginous drop in the volume of affordable housing.”35 If this was accurate and good advice, or at least practical counsel in 2000, it seems much less apt a decade later. It is true; building new limited equity cooperatives is a very expensive proposition. But so too has been bailing out the private real estate market and its speculative engines since their collapse in 2007. Those who would criticize Rochdale as a limited equity fossil need only look around to its immediate

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environs. From 2007 to 2010 South Jamaica has had some of the highest rates of default and foreclosure on subprime mortgage loans in the nation.36 Certainly South Jamaica and many other low and moderate income areas across the United States would have been far better served, as Robert Moses long ago suggested, by building more Rochdales, than by listening to the sirens of the “ownership society” that lured hapless millions to the illusion that the true path to self-advancement and a better life lay through purchasing an expensive private home that all too often came complete with a lawn, a garage, and an exploding mortgage. We again need to ask, with Abraham Kazan, whether a necessity as basic as housing should or in the end can rest on the shaky foundations of a ferociously speculative real estate market. And the question is not whether we can afford to build more limited equity cooperatives but whether we can afford not to. There has never been a better time than now to once again start building Abraham Kazan’s cooperative commonwealth. His original vision, social democratic and anarchist in its inspiration, practical in its orientation, is badly missed in the hyper-capitalist city and housing market of the early twenty-first century. And if limited equity cooperatives seem like a relic of the social ideals of a bygone age, so too does the fate of the quest for an integrated America. Since the 1970s, the most common attitude toward racial integration has been in many ways analogous to that toward limited equity cooperatives; a nice idea, perhaps, but one that is perilously easy to sentimentalize. And many, looking at the history of Rochdale, have concluded that the failure of integration in Rochdale was predestined, and that lamenting the inevitable is a useless self-indulgence. That an integrated Rochdale was doomed from the outset is a very common view of its history. Many have allocated blame to the usual racial suspects. One former resident, in a chatroom of ex-Rochdalers opined, “Rochdale could hardly have been considered an integrated community by any stretch of the imagination,” and that the whites in Rochdale probably “wished that someone like Ariel Sharon would have constructed a huge wall around Rochdale, keeping the outsiders from the insiders.” To which another participant in the chatroom replied, “I think it takes two to tango, and the outside community made absolutely no effort to welcome Rochdale residents at all. Please let’s stop this version of history. We [white residents] clearly weren’t wanted from the beginning, and I don’t care if we were yellow with pink polka dots, we were branded the outsiders and that was the end of the story.”37 Many wouldn’t apportion the primary blame to either side of the racial divide but maintain that all the goodwill in the world would not have been enough to overcome the differences between predominantly white Rochdale and overwhelmingly black South Jamaica. Although it did not prevent him from becoming a leader in Rochdale’s politics, Arthur Greene argued that Rochdale “was a white enclave within a black community, and I felt it was doomed from the start because you cannot establish a white enclave in a black community without having the interactions and connections affect the situation; in the beginning it was 85 percent white,

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and in a very short time white families began to move out. As the numbers began to change, and the schools’ makeup changed, the phenomenon increased, and the tipping point was reached, and there was no turning back. . . . Looking back, the underlying assumptions were faulty, as was the belief that you could establish a white community in a black neighborhood.”38 There is much to reckon with in these objections. The problem of race and racial equality in America and in New York City was deeper and more intractable than the creators or most the original residents of Rochdale realized, or perhaps could have imagined. There were flaws inherent in the UHF’s conception of Rochdale itself as an integrated community, in internal race relations within the cooperative, and between Rochdale and surrounding South Jamaica, that were never transcended. As both Kenneth Tewel and Sue Raskin suggested to me, Rochdale Village was cursed to open in the 1960s, that decade of both racial possibility and rage, which cruelly revealed all the flaws in its racial thinking. Urban liberalism took a great fall in the late 1960s and early 1970s and its pieces have never been reassembled. Perhaps, if the owners of Jamaica Racetrack had made an earlier decision to take their horses and stables elsewhere, and Rochdale had opened in the early 1950s, an additional decade spent building the institutions of an integrated community might have enabled Rochdale to better weather the storms and tempests of the 1960s. Perhaps. And perhaps an integrated Rochdale was doomed to failure, and the reasons for this have only become clearer over the years. But I hope the history of integration in Rochdale is not seen simply as a failure. Certainly those who moved to Rochdale in the mid-1960s did not know how the story was to turn out. And if the 1960s proved a curse for Rochdale, it was in many ways a blessing as well. Certainly at no time in New York City’s history, before or since, had there been such public concern (and willingness to fund) affordable middle-income housing, on the scale of a Rochdale Village. The era of Robert Moses was one of urban plasticity, of the belief that the cityscape and built environment could be reshaped in broad, bold strokes for the public good. And neither before nor since has the idea of building a mammoth integrated cooperative in the midst of one of the largest black neighborhoods in New York City gotten off the drawing board. Before the 1960s, it would have likely been defeated by racism, pure and simple, as Rochdale almost was in any event. After the 1960s, all sides would have been too committed to the nurturance of racial grievances to contemplate anything like it. In Rochdale a serious attempt was made to merge, or at least bridge the gap between what Jerald Podair calls the two separate cities, white New York and black New York, that were the dominant social reality in the 1960s, and if Rochdale was a tale of those two cities, its early years were no doubt the best of times and the worst of times.39 In the four and a half decades since Rochdale opened, the prospects for genuine racial balance in housing and education have receded ever further, and the whole topic seems to have vanished from national concern, even when racial matters are discussed. Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires write of “integration exhaustion,” the contagious intellectual yawning that is the usual consequence of

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its introduction into policy discussions by persons of all races and political persuasions.40 Depending on one’s political perspective or racial vantage, there are numerous explanations for the failure of integration (which invariably include pointing fingers and assigning blame to someone else), and many, scholars and average citizens alike, have concluded that integration is either a good idea that was just simply unworkable, or was just a bad idea from the outset.41 As a result, we have tried to solve America’s racial problem in every way but the most obvious way: trying to get people of different races, especially whites and blacks, to live together and go to school together. And New York City remains one of the most segregated cities in the United States, and South Jamaica, despite some highly touted progress in this regard elsewhere in Queens, remains solidly and uniformly black, with African Americans now mixing with a large Caribbean and African population. Integration remains the great exception in American housing patterns. Fewer than 4 percent of Americans live in stable integrated communities.42 In his classic 1955 work The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward wrote of the “forgotten alternatives” of America’s racial history.43 Woodward was writing about the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods, and his work scraped away layer after layer of conventional wisdom that held that blacks and whites living together and sharing power as equals was a preordained failure. A similar veneer now obscures 1960s efforts to create genuinely integrated communities, when we learned, the hard way, of the chasm that existed between the end of racial barriers and the creation of a genuinely interracial society. History of course cannot be rewritten, and like Reconstruction, the effort to create an integrated Rochdale in the 1960s was ultimately a failure. Its failure may confirm the worst in our racial attitudes. Success is imitated, failure is shunned, and Rochdale’s attempt to create an integrated island in the middle of South Jamaica has largely been ignored.44 Rochdale Village represented the best of New York City in the 1960s in the hopes of its founders and first residents. They believed that they were creating and living out a solution to the city’s and the nation’s racial and housing crises. Let us honor their intention and ambition, and learn from their naivety and mistakes. The complexities of our social ills defy easy answers, in the early twenty-first century as half a century earlier. But as Abraham Kazan long ago argued, utopianism is often just another name for the most thoughtful and most practical way to try to find a solution to a difficult problem. Two closing comments. First, Cal Jones, who was a founder of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, and who, as much as anyone else, reflected the social idealism that Rochdale generated in its early years:45 Rochdale was a tough community for anyone to try to manage. I don’t mean it was a rough community; it was vibrant, it was energized, there were a million ideas, and some ego. You had people who moved to Rochdale from all over the city saying, “This is it, this is going to be my home.” You could feel the energy. You could find someone to support any cause. You said anything, there

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were two contrary opinions. We had an early-morning discussion group, people liked to talk so much. My children are better for their experience in Rochdale. I had to deal with certain truths that you wouldn’t have to deal with if you lived in a community of one race. Let me give the last word to original and still current (as of 2009, when this is being written) Rochdale resident, Herb Plever:46 There’s nothing like living side by side. It’s a learning experience on both sides. All of your conceptions of what the other people are like, sometimes negative ones get reinforced, sure, but they fall away if you live side by side. You can’t have a society unless you have that living and learning experience. If integration in Rochdale failed it has to be tried again.

Notes

Introduction 1. Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together,” New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1966. 2. Abraham E. Kazan, “The Significance of Rochdale Village,” Co-op Contact 6, no. 11 (March 1964), 7–8. Co-op Contact was the magazine of the United Housing Foundation, distributed to cooperators in all member cooperatives. 3. Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2002), 119. 4. Ibid. 5. “State Sets Loans for Queens Co-Op,” New York Times (hereafter NYT ), February 17, 1960; James Gaynor to Robert Moses, February 18, 1960, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, New York State Archives. 6. Robert Moses to William Lebewohl, November 20, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Robert Moses Papers, New York Public Library. 7. For histories of the cooperative movement, see Johnston Birchall, Co-op: The People’s Business (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), and Johnston Birchall, The International Cooperative Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 8. “Select Your Apt. Now,” advertisement, NYT, June 11, 1961. 9. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 10. Interview with Olga Lewis. For East New York in the 1960s, see Walter Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

254 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

Notes to Pages 8–13 Interview with Jack and Sue Raskin. Interview with Cal Jones. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Rochdale Forum [internet chatroom], June 1999. Interview with Francesca Spero. Interview with Helen White. For Charlotte Street, see Jill Jonnes, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 219–267. Ibid., 220. “The People,” Co-op Contact 4, no. 5 (1960). Kenneth G. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan: The Story of the Amalgamated Houses and the United Housing Foundation,” master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1991, 46–47; Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 514. Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), 317. “Eye Tax-Abated All-White Sites,” New York Amsterdam News (hereafter NYAN), August 17, 1963. “Cooperatives Build Socially and Economically Balanced Communities,” Co-op Contact 4, no. 2 (1960). “Workshop on Successful Integrated Projects,” 3rd National Conference on Cooperative Housing (Washington, D.C.: National Conference on Cooperative Housing, 1960), 30–31. United Housing Foundation (hereafter UHF) Minutes, April 8, 1960, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. Interview with Harold Ostroff. UHF Minutes, August 10, 1960, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. “Enjoy Country Living in Rochdale Village,” advertisement in NYT, January 8, 1961. For advertisements in the New York Post see Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” UHF Minutes, August 10, 1960, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. Many large superblock projects, such as Stuyvesant Town, developed by the Metropolitan Life Company in the late 1940s, were advertised as a “suburb in the city”; see Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 77. “As Cooperative Housing Grows,” Co-Op Contact 5, no. 2 ( January 1962). See also UHF, Rochdale Village: A New Concept in Community Living (New York, 1967), 7; advertisement in New York Post, October 22, 1961. See also advertisement, NYT, October 14, 1962. “Here’s Why 4,000 Families Have Already Selected Their Apartments in Rochdale Village,” advertisement, NYT, October 14, 1962; “Rochdale Village Sales Exceed 5,000 Mark,” NYT, October 6, 1963; Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 514. An April 8, 1964, advertisement in the NYT announced, “Rochdale Village—A Self-help Community of 5860 Families . . . All Taken!” Bernard Seeman, Inside Rochdale, September 25, 1967. Inside Rochdale began publication in 1965 with Eddie Abramson as editor and publisher until 1968. The publication went under a variety of different names, especially after it was sold by Abramson: Inside Rochdale, Inside Rochdale News, Inside Rochdale and the South Queens Star, the South Queens Star and Inside Rochdale News, and a few other permutations. It was generally known as Inside Rochdale, however, and I have referred to it as such throughout. Harold Ostroff, speech at Princeton University, April 18, 1968. For testimonies that the attractiveness of the apartments and inexpensive prices were the main reasons for the move to Rochdale, see “Rochdale Tenants: New Home Is Okay,” Long Island Press (hereafter LIP), February 26, 1964; Anne Estock, “Big Boosters for Largest Co-Op,” LIP, March 29, 1964. In the informal survey I conducted with about twenty-five former Rochdale residents, economic reasons and the attractive houses (and, of course, central air-conditioning!) were the main

Notes to Pages 13 –16

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

255

reasons given by almost every respondent. (The Long Island Press was known as the Long Island Daily Press until 1967, and the Long Island Press thereafter, and until it ceased publication in 1977. The name change made official what had been the paper’s popular name for many years, and I have referred to it as the Long Island Press throughout.) Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan,” 50. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Jerome Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion,” New York Herald Tribune, March 14, 1965. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Harold Ostroff agreed that there were a fair number of families who had second thoughts and backed out but disagreed with Swados’s characterization of the number as “thousands.” Interview with Harold Ostroff. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Pat Patterson, “Long Island Sounds,” New Pittsburgh Courier, January 7, 1961; Olga Pierre Lytle, “Queens Private Line,” NYAN, March 30, 1963. “Heydorn Realty Corp.,” advertisement, NYAN, November 17, 1963; “North Star at Rochdale,” advertisement, NYAN, November 20, 1965. Interview with Harold Ostroff; photo in Co-op Contact 4, no. 5 ( June–July 1960); UHF photograph collection 1/613. Interview with Harold Ostroff. Two consequences of this were that section 5 (buildings 17–20) had a higher percentage of African Americans than sections 1–4, and the initial waiting list was also skewed toward African Americans, a development that would have profound consequences for the later history of Rochdale Village; see Zukovsky, Rochdale Village. Interview with Arthur Greene. For the history of African American cooperatives see Mary Jenness, “A Negro Cooperative Makes Good,” in Twelve Negro Americans (1936; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 69–84; John Hope II, “Rochdale Cooperation Among Negroes,” Phylon 1 (1940), 39–52. The 1930s was the heyday of African American cooperatives. In 1938 W. E. B. DuBois wrote that by developing cooperatives, “the Negro group in the United States can establish, for a large proportion of its members, a cooperative commonwealth.” “Dusk of Dawn,” in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 708, and 706–715. Eunice and George Grier argued in 1960 that the down payment, the memories of cooperative failures in Harlem in the 1930s, and reluctance to live in a primarily white environment were inhibiting black participation in limited-equity cooperatives in the late 1950s. Eunice Grier and George Grier, Privately Developed Interracial Housing: An Analysis of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 16. Interview with Juanita Watkins; Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Interview with Hugh Williams; Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” William Booth, who was a leader of the Jamaica Branch of the NAACP during the years Rochdale was under construction, was enthusiastic about the positive impact Rochdale would have on southeastern Queens and his mother was an original resident of building 2; interview with William Booth. The Griers note that “Negroes, even when they hear that a development is open to them, are likely to be cautious and fearful of rebuff. Salesmen at one interracial tract report that whites are casual, self-assured, and regard the salesman as on hand to serve them. Negroes, on the other hand, pause at the door and ask permission to enter. . . . All these things create an inertia in the Negro market that must often be overcome by special effort.” Grier and Grier, Privately Developed Interracial Housing, 25. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village.” For a discussion of quotas to ensure racial balance in integrated housing, see Morris Milgram, Good Housing: The Challenge of Open Housing (New York: Norton, 1977), 89–95. Florence Goodman to Kazan, June 5, 1961; Kazan to Goodman, June 7, 1961, UHF Papers. There were two articles in the Long Island Press in June 1961 that discussed the possibility of a quota in

256

53.

54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Notes to Pages 16–22 Rochdale; memo from “Rita” in Kazan files, June 14, 1961, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. In a discussion with me, Harold Ostroff strongly denied that the UHF ever maintained a quota during the Rochdale application period; interview with Harold Ostroff. For various discussions of possible minority “tipping points,” see Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors (311), suggesting somewhere between 5 percent and 30 percent; Walter Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto, 43 (between 17 and 30 percent); Morton Deutsch and Mary Evans Collins, Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 15 (50 percent); Grier and Grier, Privately Developed Interracial Housing, 60–65, offer various “scare point” figures, between 20 and 40 percent. Donald D. Martin, “Open Membership,” Co-op Contact 2, no. 8 (October 1957), 7. Kazan wrote to a prospective Rochdale resident, “Our applications [from blacks] are not running anywhere near the percentage [40 percent] quoted [in the article].” Kazan to Mrs. Florence Goodman, June 7, 1961, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. “Rochdale Village, a Self-Help Community,” advertisement, NYT, April 8, 1964. Abraham Kazan, the president of the UHF, also gave a figure of 20 percent, in his oral history, Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 512–513. Zukovsky, “RochdaleVillage.” William R. Mowat, An Experimental Ministry to a High-Rise MiddleIncome Housing Complex (New York: Protestant Council of the City of New York, 1967), 3. Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 116–121. E-mail to Rochdale Forum, June 1999. Mowat, An Experimental Ministry to a High-Rise Middle-Income Housing Complex, 3. UHF, Rochdale Village: A New Concept in Community Living (New York, 1967), 9. The numbers add up to only 5,833. The percentages are calculated on the basis of the total number of apartments, 5,860. The survey does not make clear whether it was conducted when Rochdale opened or in 1967, but the population of Rochdale was very stable from its opening through 1967. Inside Rochdale, October 7, 1966. Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 39. Thomas E. Ennis, “Low Rate Loans Held Housing Aid,” NYT, February 12, 1961. UHF, “Construction Report on the World’s Largest Housing Cooperative: Rochdale Village, Inc.,” April 1963, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing: General Characteristics of the Population, New York, 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1972). UHF, Rochdale Village: A New Concept in Community Living, 10. Interview with Harold Ostroff. UHF, Rochdale Village: A New Concept in Community Living, 10. Interview with Cal Jones. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing: General Characteristics of the Population, New York, 1970. UHF Minutes, April 8, 1960. There were 2,740 one-bedroom apartments in Rochdale, or about 47 percent of all available units, with 2,080 two-bedroom, and 1,040 three-bedroom apartments. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.”

1. The Utopian Epigraph. Horace M. Kallen, The Decline and Rise of the Consumer: A Philosophy of Consumer Cooperation (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 436–438. 1. “Abraham E. Kazan Dies at 82; Master Co-op Housing Builder,” NYT, December 22, 1971. 2. Robert F. Wagner, “ ‘His Achievements Have Laid a Permanent Beneficent Kazan Stamp On Our Town . . . ,’ ” in Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing Cooperatives, Story of a Co-op Community: The First 75 Years (New York: Herman Liebman Memorial Fund, 2002).

Notes to Pages 23–25

257

3. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1970, 3–4. The account of Kazan’s early life is drawn heavily from this source. 4. For an approximate tally see Donald E. Pitzer, “America’s Communal Utopias Founded by 1965,” in Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 471–473. 5. Abraham Menes, “The Am Oylom Movement,” in YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 4 (1949), 9–33. For anarchist influences on the early Jewish collective settlements in Palestine, see James Horrox, A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009). For treatments of Jewish agricultural settlements in the United States, see Ellen Eisenberg, Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 1882–1920 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Joseph Brandes, Immigrants to Freedom: Jewish Communities in Rural New Jersey since 1882 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); and Pearl Bartelt, “American Jewish Agricultural Colonies,” in Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias, 352–374. 6. Brandes, Immigrants to Freedom, 63. 7. Ibid., 63–64. The main principles of an 1889 agreement to collectively farm and market agriculture and agricultural related products are reproduced in Eisenberg, Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 109–110. 8. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 7–8. 9. Ibid., 20–25; Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1931), 262–264; Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 29–33. Goldman met Bell in Scotland during a speaking tour of Scotland in January 1900, and Bell lived briefly in Goldman’s apartment with his family after his arrival in New York in 1904; Candace Falk et al., Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003–), 504; and vol. 2, 22–23. The one problem with the identification of the Tom Bell in Kazan’s oral history with Thomas Hastie Bell is that Kazan describes Tom Bell as a “Scotsman, quite an elderly man” of about sixty years of age. Bell was born in 1867, and would have been about forty when he met Kazan, which certainly does not qualify as quite elderly. On the other hand, Kazan describes Bell as suffering from asthma, and that he moved to Arizona for health reasons. Marion Bell, Thomas Hastie Bell’s daughter, says her father suffered from asthma and moved to Arizona around 1910 (Anarchist Portraits, 29–33). Emma Goldman describes him as “a very sick man, suffering from asthma,” Goldman, Living My Life, 264. There can’t have been many Arizonabound asthmatic Scottish anarchists named Tom Bell living in New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century, and perhaps the asthma made Bell appear older than he really was. In any event, the second half of his life was an advertisement for the restorative properties of Arizonan and Southern Californian air—he lived until 1942, into his late seventies. 10. Goldman, Living My Life, 264; “Revolutionary Portraits: Tom Bell,” in Organise for Revolutionary Anarchism, no. 66 (Spring 2006), http://flag.blackened.net/af/org/issue66/portraits. html. For Bell’s connection to Jewish anarchism and his friendship with Saul Yanovsky, the longtime editor of the well-known Yiddish language anarchist newspaper, the Fraye Arbeyter Shtime, see Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 197–198. 11. For Bell’s connection to Morris, see Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 29–33, 154. 12. Thomas Bell, Edward Carpenter: The English Tolstoi (Los Angeles: Libertarian Group, 1932); Bell, Oscar Wilde: sus amigos, sus adversarios, sus ideas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Americalee, 1946). This is a translation from Bell’s unpublished manuscript “Oscar Wilde Without Whitewash,” which probably is similar to Bell’s article, “Oscar Wilde’s Unwritten Play,” The Bookman 71 (April–May 1930), 139–150, an account of Bell’s interactions with Wilde while working as a secretary for the English publisher and author Frank Harris (1856–1931). According to the melodramatic account by Bell, his final encounter with Wilde took place when Harris sent him on a mission to deliver Wilde some badly needed funds, only to arrive at Wilde’s cheap Parisian hotel several hours after his death. 13. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 26–27.

258

Notes to Pages 26–29

14. Ibid., 53; Robert Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 17. 15. Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 114 –178. 16. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 32–34. 17. Fraser, Labor Will Rule. 18. Although the earliest credit unions were created in Germany in the 1860s, there were very few credit unions in the United States until 1910. Joseph Knapp, The Rise of American Cooperative Enterprise (Danville, IL: Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1969), 138–142. 19. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 71–72. 20. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 153. 21. Ibid., 154. Fraser notes that despite Hillman’s enthusiasm for cooperatives, at the 1920 ACWA convention many felt the cooperative movement was “based on bourgeois principles” and that the “cooperative movement is a capitalist institution.” 22. Ibid. 23. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 77. 24. Kenneth G. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan: The Story of the Amalgamated Houses and the United Housing Foundation,” master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1991, 6; Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 71–72. 25. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 151–159. See also Andrew Hazelton, “Garden Courts to Tower Blocks: The Architecture and Social History of the Labor Cooperative Housing Movement in New York, 1919–1950” and “Three Bronx Utopias: Pre-War Labor Housing Cooperatives and the Socialist Vision”; Tony Schuman, “Labor and Housing in New York City: Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing Movement,” unpublished papers. 26. Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 180. 27. For philanthropic housing and John D. Rockefeller Jr., see Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 88–121, 155, 160. For the anarchist tradition in urban planning and its influence on urban planning as a whole see Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (London: Blackwell, 1996), 3–9, 143–144, 241–272. For Peter Kropotkin’s views on urban planning see Fields, Factories, and Workshops (London: Thomas Nelson, 1898). 28. Abraham Kazan, “Our Latest Step Forward,” November 8, 1929, reprinted in Story of a Co-op Community: The First 75 Years (New York: Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing Cooperatives, 2002). 29. Leyla F. Vural, “Unionism as a Way of Life: The Community Orientation of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1994), 219, citing Abraham Kazan, “Building the Co-operative City of the Future,” Milwaukee Leader, May 10, 1930. 30. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 31. Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 349–351, 435–439. In the 1960s, Pesotta moved into Penn South (a UHF cooperative) in part to be close to her anarchist colleagues, where in the words of her biographer “she joined a co-op credit union, supermarket, and pharmacy, always trying to live her anarchistic cooperative beliefs.” Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 165. In the 1920s the ILGWU became the venue for one of the first and one of the most bitter fights for control of the labor movement between the Communist and non-Communist left, and the anarchists played an important, and by some accounts, crucial role in the decisive victory of the non-Communists, and many, like Rose Pesotta, rose in the hierarchy of the union. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue, 31–53. Abe Bluestein told Paul Avrich that David Dubinsky acknowledged that without the support of the anarchists, the Communists would have won; Anarchist Portraits, 437. 32. Interview with Harold Ostroff; Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 150, 439. 33. Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937); interview with Harold Ostroff.

Notes to Pages 30 –38

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34. James Peter Warbasse, “Basic Principles of Cooperation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 191 (May 1937), 14. 35. Kazan, “The Birth of the Amalgamated Housing Corporation,” in Story of a Co-op Community. 36. “As Cooperative Housing Grows,” Co-op Contact 5, no. 2 ( January 1962); Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 510. 37. Kazan, “Our Latest Step Forward.” 38. “Visionaries Wanted,” Co-op Contact 4, no. 5 (June–July 1960). 39. Each of these cooperatives was independent, and had to be separately joined by its members. Anyone could shop in the Co-op Supermarket, but only members could participate in its management or receive a dividend computed as a percentage of their purchases. Persons in the surrounding community who did not live in Rochdale could, and did, join the Co-op Supermarket. 40. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 508. 41. “Plans for Groundbreaking Ceremonies,” January 1960, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. 42. “6,318 Unit Housing Cooperative to be Built on the Site of the Jamaica Race Track,” Co-op Contact 4, no. 3 (February–March 1960). 43. “Governor and Mayor Help Launch Rochdale Village,” Co-op Contact 4, no. 4 (April–May 1960).

2. The Anti-Utopian Epigraph. Robert Moses, A Tribute to Governor Smith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 38. 1. Robert Moses, “Rochdale: Master Planner Moses Views A Master Housing Plan,” LIP, December 1, 1963. Until otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations are from this article. 2. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1970, 493. 3. Moses expressed similar sentiments at the dedication ceremonies for Penn South in May, 1962: “And when the World’s Fair opens at Flushing Meadow in 1964 we shall be able to show visitors from abroad Rochdale Village, the finest achievement of labor in the cooperative field. This will surely be an example to the whole world of what we can do for industrious, selfrespecting people of moderate income.” “Remarks of Commissioner Robert Moses at Penn South Dedication,” Co-Op Contact 5, no. 10 (Summer 1962). 4. Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus, OH; Ohio University Press, 1993), 135. 5. Robert Moses, “Remarks of Robert Moses, City Construction Co-ordinator and Chairman of the Slum Clearance Committee, at Seward Park, October 11, 1956,” Speeches—1956, Robert Moses Papers, New York Public Library (hereafter Moses Papers). 6. For the biography of Moses, see, of course, Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Random House, 1974), though Caro needs to be supplemented with Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: Norton, 2007) and Timothy Mennel’s meticulously researched “Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses’s New York” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2007). 7. “Talk by Robert Moses to Affiliated Young Democrats,” Speeches—1960, Moses Papers. 8. For Moses on “the fallacy of expertizing,” see Robert Moses, Working for the People: Promise and Performance in Public Service (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), 39–40. 9. Robert Moses, “Plan and Performance,” in A Century of Social Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1939), 128, 139. 10. Robert Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 493–494; Moses, Working for the People, 49–59; Robert Moses, “A Salute to Chicago,” May 14, 1959, Speeches—1959, Moses Papers. 11. Moses, “A Salute to Chicago.”

260

Notes to Pages 39 –44

12. Alfred E. Smith, Up to Now: An Autobiography (New York: Viking Press, 1929), 274 –275. 13. Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2002), 111; “Thirty Years of Amalgamated Cooperative Housing,” in Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing Cooperatives, Story of a Co-op Community: The First 75 Years (New York: Herman Liebman Memorial Fund, 2002). 14. Kenneth G. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan: The Story of the Amalgamated Houses and the United Housing Foundation” (master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1991). 15. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan,” 15–19. 16. Robert Moses, “Rochdale.” For Moses and Stuyvesant Town, see Schwartz, The New York Approach, 84 –107. 17. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan,” 16. 18. Ibid., 16–18; Freeman, Working Class New York, 111–112. 19. For the best account of Moses and Title I, see Hilary Ballon, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” in Ballon and Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City, 94 –115; Freeman, Working Class New York, 114 –119. 20. “Mr. Moses Dissects the ‘Long-Haired Planners,’ ” NYT, June 25, 1944. 21. Freeman, Working Class New York, 114 –115. 22. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan,” 22. 23. The best account of the founding of the UHF is Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan,” 22–29. 24. Hilary Ann Botein, “ ‘Solid Testimony of Labor’s Present Status’: Unions and Housing in Postwar New York City” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005), 74. 25. “Remarks of Commissioner Robert Moses at Penn South Dedication,” Co-Op Contact 5, no. 10 (Summer 1962); Freeman, Working Class New York, 105. 26. At the time Rochdale was proposed, in 1960, the UHF 19 union members included the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union; Local 802 of the musicians union; the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers; the Building Service Employees; Department Store Workers Union; International Association of Machinists; International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; New York City Central Labor Council; and the Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers. There were also nonunion members, including several secular Jewish organizations: the Farband Labor Zionist Order and the Workmen’s Circle, as well as the University Settlement and Hudson Guild, and the Society for Ethical Culture. Rochdale Village: A Cooperative Housing Development (New York: United Housing Foundation, 1960), 2. 27. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan,” 22–29. 28. Ibid., 27–29. 29. Ibid., 30–63. 30. Moses, “Rochdale.” 31. Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan,” 12–14, argues that one reason no cooperatives were built by the Amalgamated Housing Corporation after 1931 was Hillman’s lack of interest. 32. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 33. Moses, Working for the People, 111–112. 34. Moses, “Remarks of Commissioner Robert Moses at Penn South Dedication,” Co-Op Contact 5, no. 10 (Summer 1962). 3. The Birth of a Suburb, the Growth of a Ghetto Epigraph. Langston Hughes, “Simple Does Some Talking About Dogs, Cars, Houses, and Lots,” Chicago Defender, September 3, 1949. 1. Elias Loomis, “Notice of the Hail-Storm Which Passed Over New York on the First of July,” NYT, August 1, 1853. 2. “Shooting of Robin Leads to Game Warden’s Murder,” Washington Post, September 30, 1929. 3. James H. Hubert, “James H. Hubert Writes Interestingly on Long Island Town Now Holding Attention of Entire Countryside,” NYAN, October 7, 1925.

Notes to Pages 46–48

261

4. “South Queens Grows,” NYT, September 8, 1929; Vincent Seyfried, “South Jamaica,” Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 5. William F. Russell, “From ‘Trouble Area’ to Neighborhood,” NYT, April 13, 1947. 6. Federal Writers’ Project, WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New York (1939 repr.; New York: Pantheon, 1982), 588. 7. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1979), 227–237; Lynda R. Day, Making a Way to Freedom: A History of African Americans on Long Island (Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1997), 61–62. A loophole allowed segregated schools in some rural hamlets, which persisted until 1943, when the last formally segregated school was closed, in Rockland County; see “Hillburn,” in Peter Eisenstadt, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005). 8. For other black neighborhoods, see Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Harold X. Connolly, A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn (New York: New York University Press, 1977). 9. Charles Grutzner Jr., “Clergymen Join Civic Workers in Fight to ‘Save’ South Jamaica,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 24, 1935. 10. Hubert, “James H. Hubert Writes Interestingly on Long Island Town.” This was at the site of the future South Jamaica Houses. 11. “L.I. Lumber Merchant to Build Homes for Colored People in Jamaica,” NYAN, November 25, 1925. 12. Pearl Grissom, Some Factors Affecting the Lives of Negroes in South Jamaica (New York: Family Welfare Society of Queens, 1932). 13. “L.I. Lumber Merchant to Build Homes for Colored People in Jamaica”; “Fifty-Two Plots Secured by Milla-Cohn Company to Erect Homes for Negroes,” NYAN, November 25, 1925; “Negroes and Jews Combine to Serve Interests of Home Buyers This Spring,” NYAN, February 3, 1926. 14. Hubert, “James H. Hubert Writes Interestingly on Long Island Town.” 15. “Residents of Long Island Should Beware Many Things,” NYAN, October 21, 1925. 16. Hubert, “James H. Hubert Writes Interestingly on Long Island Town.” 17. Artie Simpson, “Jamaica L.I. in Spotlight Because of Rapid Growth,” NYAN, July 21, 1926. 18. “Negroes in Queens Doubled in Decade,” NYAN, September 30, 1930. 19. Grissom, Some Factors Affecting the Lives of Negroes in South Jamaica. 20. “Property Owners Up in Arms,” NYAN, December 15, 1926. 21. “NAACP Branch Gets Good Start,” NYAN, April 13, 1927; Jamaica NAACP, Fifty Years of Service (Queens, NY: Jamaica NAACP, 1977). 22. “Jamaica Branch N.A.A.C.P. Brings Membership Drive to Successful Close,” NYAN, May 23, 1928. 23. For the Communist left in South Jamaica, see “Press Plans for National Race Congress,” Chicago Defender, January 11, 1936; “Woman Runs for Lt. Governor on Communist Ticket in N.Y.,” NYT, September 22, 1934. On later Communist activity in Jamaica see “Communist Rally in Jamaica Town Hall Is Barred by Harvey in Attack on Party,” NYT, September 9, 1945. 24. “Threaten Jamaica Resident’s Life,” NYAN, October 5, 1927; “Home Painted Red,” October 12, 1923, Chicago Defender; George S. Schuyler, “Insurance: Another Kind That Pays,” NYAN, February 19, 1930. 25. “Jewish Congress Wins Job Rights for Negroes,” Chicago Defender, August 24, 1946. 26. “Bilbo Refuses Apology to Brooklyn Woman for Addressing Her as ‘My Dear Dago,’ ” NYT, July 24, 1945; “Demand for Ouster of Bilbo Growing,” Chicago Defender, August 11, 1945. 27. Jamaica NAACP, Fifty Years of Service; “Insulting Label on Polish Stocked by A & P Stores,” Chicago Defender, August 16, 1941. 28. “Two Fascisti Die in Bronx, Klansmen Riot in Queens, in Memorial Day Clashes,” NYT, May 31, 1927; “The Klan and the Police in Queens,” Chicago Defender, June 18, 1927.

262

Notes to Pages 48–51

29. “Smith Is Invited to Talk to Klan,” NYT, July 2, 1928; “90-Foot Cross Burned in Jamaica,” NYT, July 9, 1928. 30. “Klan Plans Jamaica Lodge,” NYT, July 8, 1928. 31. For the Klan in St. Albans in the 1930s, see “Klan Cross Is Set Up,” NYT, May 31, 1936; “War Pall Clouds Honor to Our Dead,” NYT, May 31, 1940. 32. “FBI Acts on Klan in Seven States,” NYT, August 1, 1946. 33. Russell, “From ‘Trouble Area’ to Neighborhood.” 34. Grutzner Jr., “Clergymen Join Civic Workers in Fight to ‘Save’ South Jamaica”; Warren Bennett, “South Jamaica Terrorized for Years by Guinzberg Gang of Young Toughs,” NYT, January 9, 1940. 35. “3 Shot as Cops Fear Digit War,” NYAN, May 3, 1933; “Jamaica Cops Nip Terrors,” NYAN, March 18, 1939. “Jamaica Vice Drive Opened,” NYAN, August 11, 1934. 36. “Jamaicans Demand Police Protection,” NYAN, March 11, 1939; “South Jamaica Residents Protest Lawlessness; Demand More Police,” NYAN, April 4, 1941. 37. “One Dead, Seven Injured in Fight Over Parking Cars,” Chicago Defender, January 29, 1938; “NAACP Charges Bias in NY Parking Riot,” Chicago Defender, February 5, 1938. 38. “NAACP Meeting to Protest Increasing ‘Police Brutality,’ ” NYAN, October 9, 1949; “Seek Dismissal of Cop in LI Arrest,” NYT, December 24, 1949. 39. “South Jamaica Gets New Welfare Group,” NYAN, June 1, 1935; “Merchants Join Fight on Slum Area,” NYAN, June 22, 1935; “Jamaicans Continue Fight for Slum Clearance,” NYAN, August 3, 1935. 40. “South Side Community Work Head Quits Job,” NYAN, January 31, 1935. “South Side” was a term used to describe South Jamaica, perhaps borrowed from Chicago’s South Side. The term had some currency in the interwar years but seems to have been little used subsequently. 41. “Queens, New York,” Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Home Owners City Survey Files, 1938, National Archives, RG 195.3. 42. “Open Two Playgrounds,” NYT, October 16, 1937; “Playground Opened in South Jamaica,” NYT, July 1, 1939. 43. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 240. I am grateful to Catherine Manning Flamenbaum for sharing her paper with me, “Interracial Public Housing by Default in South Jamaica: Promises, Problems, and Processes,” presented at Researching New York, Albany, NY, November 2005. 44. “Charge Racial Bias at Project,” NYAN, May 18, 1940; “South Jamaica Houses,” editorial, NYAN, July 13, 1940. 45. “N.Y. Housing Project Proves Races Can Live in Harmony,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1942; Thomas F. Farrell, “Object Lessons in Race Relations,” NYT, February 12, 1950; Morton Deutsch and Mary Evans Collins, Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951). 46. New York City Market Analysis (New York: News Syndicate Company, 1943). 47. Harold Cruse, “My Jewish Problem and Theirs,” in Nat Hentoff, ed., Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 149. When he moved to Harlem in the mid-1930s Cruse lamented that “gone were the green fields and the pure air and space of Jamaica, and I profoundly missed the atmosphere of the Jamaica public schools” (150). 48. “Whites Bar Andy Kirk From Prospective Home,” Chicago Defender, May 9, 1942; “Ban on House Sale to Negro Upheld,” NYT, December 23, 1947; “Wins 2-Year Fight for Home,” Chicago Defender, July 21, 1948; Olivia Frost et al., Aspects of Negro Life in the Borough of Queens (New York: New York Urban League, 1947), 31; “Hugo R. Heydorn Is Dead at 66; Promoted Mixed Communities,” NYT, February 2, 1963. 49. Interview with Olga Lewis. 50. Interview with Hugh Williams. 51. Interview with Omar Barbour. 52. Frost, Aspect of Negro Life in Queens, 89.

Notes to Pages 51– 55

263

53. Milton Bracker, “Gaps in Queens are Filling Up: In Idlewild Area Future Is Most Dramatically Close to Present,” NYT, August 8, 1955; Edward Carpenter and Jacquelyn Peterson, South Jamaica: A Community Study (New York: Queens College Children and Parents Center, 1966), 11, 15. 54. Carpenter and Peterson, South Jamaica, 63. 55. “Housing Project Fought in Queens,” NYT, June 23, 1955.

4. From Horses to Housing Epigraph. “Mayor Denounces Gambling in State,” NYT, April 16, 1940. 1. “Racing on Jamaica Track Opened,” NYT, November 8, 1903. The article relates that Big Tim Sullivan had a winning horse in the opening meet of the fall session. Sullivan and his partners purchased the 107-acre site for $89,352.75 and planned to spend almost as much to build the one-mile track, grandstand, and stables. The Long Island Railroad was planning to build a spur to the new track. “Deed for New Track Filed: Transfer Recorded of Jamaica Land for Sullivan’s Race Course,” NYT, August 24, 1901. According to the track’s builders, the start-up costs were $1,000,000; Metropolitan Jockey Club, Official Souvenir of the Inaugural Meeting of the Metropolitan Jockey Club ( Jamaica, N.Y.?, 1903). 2. William R. Conklin, “Final Racing Card at Jamaica Stirs Memories of 56-year Old Track,” NYT, August 3, 1959. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. “Progress Noses Out Sentiment at Jamaica,” LIP, September 7, 1960. 6. Jamaica had almost 2 million paying customers in 1953; by contrast the New York Giants had a home attendance of 811,518; the Brooklyn Dodgers 1,163,419; and the New York Yankees 1,537,665; Arthur Daley, “What’s That, John?,” NYT, December 20, 1953; Stanley Levey, “Racing Now Virtual King of Sports, Topping Baseball in Gate Appeal,” NYT, April 30, 1953; John Thorn et al., Total Baseball (New York: Sportclassic Books, 1999), 107–108. 7. Metropolitan Jockey Club, Official Souvenir. 8. For locating Jamaica Racetrack within South Jamaica, see “Four Arrested at Races,” NYT, May 19, 1916; “Official Racing Dates,” NYT, May 10, 1916. 9. New York City Market Analysis (New York: News Syndicate Company, 1943). This study, which had Foch Boulevard as the demarcation between South Jamaica and Springfield, had the racetrack about four blocks over on the Springfield side. 10. “54% of Our Wealth Is in Real Estate,” NYT, January 31, 1926; “Racing Men Study PariMutuel Plan,” NYT, February 7, 1932. The latter article mentions a plan afoot in the 1920s to sell the tracks at Jamaica and Aqueduct and establish a new track at Long Beach, Long Island. 11. Charles Hall, “Track Pays $25,735 City Tax; Homes Would Pay $170,000,” Long Island Star, May 21, 1940. 12. Levey, “Racing Now Virtual King of Sports.” 13. “Threat of Seizure Faces Race Tracks,” NYT, February 25, 1953; “Council Bill Asks Race Track Razing,” NYT, March 25, 1953. 14. James Roach, “Jockey Club Gives $100,000,0000 Plan for State Tracks,” NYT, September 21, 1954. 15. Alexander Feinberg, “State Racing Unit Aids Supertrack,” NYT, June 22, 1955. 16. Leo Egan, “Strong Opposition to ‘Dream’ Race Track Here Develops at Albany,” NYT, March 26, 1955; Warren Weaver Jr., “Flat Track Bill Passes and Goes to Gov. Harriman,” NYT, April 3, 1955; “Governor Approves 3 Bills for Belmont ‘Dream Track,’ ” NYT, May 2, 1955. 17. “Aqueduct Group to Sell Shares,” NYT, September 8, 1955. The stock of Aqueduct and Belmont were acquired for $9.1 million each, and that of Saratoga for $4.1 million.

264

Notes to Pages 55–59

18. Robert Moses to Robert Wagner, July 6, 1955, Correspondence—1955, Robert Moses Papers, New York Public Library (hereafter Moses Papers). 19. Robert Moses to William Lebewohl, May 1, 1957, Correspondence—1955, Moses Papers. 20. For the best account of the constraints on Moses’s power, see Hilary Ballon, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” in Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: Norton, 2007), 94 –115. 21. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1970, 493. 22. Robert Moses to Robert Wagner, July 6, 1955, Correspondence—1955, Moses Papers. 23. Robert Moses to F. M. Flynn, August 22, 1955, Correspondence—1955, Moses Papers. 24. Robert Moses to William Lebewohl, March 24, 1956, Correspondence—1956, Moses Papers. 25. Robert Moses to F. M. Flynn, August 22, 1955, Correspondence—1955, Moses Papers. Robert Moses to John Cashmore, August 26, 1955, Correspondence—1955, Moses Papers. 26. For accounts of the Dodgers that blame Moses for their exit, see Michael Shapiro, The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together (New York: Doubleday, 2003), and Neil J. Sullivan, The Dodgers Move West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). The blame is properly replaced on O’Malley in Henry D. Fetter, Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball, 1903–2003 (New York: Norton, 2003), 210–253. 27. Robert Moses to F. M. Flynn, August 22, 1955, Correspondence—1955, Moses Papers. 28. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 493. 29. Robert Moses, “The Role of Housing Cooperatives in Urban Development,” Co-op Contact 1, no. 2 (November 1956); Homer Bigart, “Moses Plans Deal on Jamaica Track,” NYT, October 5, 1956. 30. Warren Weaver Jr., “Jockey Club Urges Harriman to Join Move to Close Tracks,” NYT, February 1, 1955; “Role for Jamaica in Racing Hinted,” NYT, April 25, 1956. 31. Robert Moses to Charles Preusse, February 4, 1957, Correspondence—1957, Moses Papers. 32. Robert Moses to William Lebewohl, March 4, 1957, Correspondence—1957, Moses Papers. 33. Charles Grutzner, “Moses Is Annoyed by a ‘Slow’ Track,” NYT, October 18, 1957. 34. Robert Moses to William Lebewohl, February 26, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 35. Robert Moses to John Cahill, April 10, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 36. New York Racing Association, A Report to the Public (New York, 1958). 37. Robert Moses to John Cahill, July 2, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers; New York Racing Association, A Report to the Public (New York, 1958). 38. Robert Moses to John Cahill, November 6, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 39. Robert Moses to Austin Tobin, October 23, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 40. Charles Grutzner, “Homes in City Far Too Few For Middle-Income Renters,” NYT, May 11, 1952; Ira S. Robbins, “City Program of Partial Tax Aid to Encourage Construction Urged,” letter, NYT, August 10, 1952; Lotte Doverman, letter, NYT, May 23, 1952. 41. “Wagner Offers Plan to Spur City Housing,” NYT, June 18, 1953. 42. Robert Moses, “Remarks at the Annual Dinner of Building Trades Employers Association,” January 11, 1956, Speeches—1956, Moses Papers. For Moses and Mitchell-Lama housing (and Warren Moscow’s claims that Moses stole the credit for the program), see Peter Eisenstadt, “Mitchell-Lama Housing,” in Ballon and Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City, 305–306. 43. Charles Grutzner to Robert Moses, February 18, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 44. New York State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal, The People Decide for Housing (Albany, NY, 1958). 45. “Select Your Apt. Now in Rochdale Village,” advertisement, NYT, June 11, 1961. See also Rochdale Village advertisement, October 14, 1962; “As Cooperative Housing Grows,” Co-Op Contact 5, no. 10 ( January 1962).

Notes to Pages 60–63

265

46. “$21 Average Per Room Including Central Air Conditioning,” New York Post, October 22, 1961. In April 1960, Kazan spoke of a sliding scale for Rochdale, where the average carrying charge would range from $13 to $25 a room, but this plan evidently was never implemented, “Racetrack Housing Approved by City,” LIP, April 29, 1960. 47. Charles G. Bennett, “Jamaica Housing Meets Opposition,” NYT, April 14, 1960. For other efforts of the UHF to lower per room carrying charges, see Kenneth Wray, “Abraham E. Kazan: The Story of the Amalgamated Houses and the United Housing Foundation” (master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1991) 35, 39. Kazan fought for carrying charges of $18 per room at the Jamaica site, which Moses rejected; “Jamaica Project Pleases Moses,” NYT, May 18, 1959. For contemporary studies that place Rochdale Village on the very low end of middle-income housing, see Thomas E. Ennis, “Low Rate Loans Held Housing Aid,” NYT, February 12, 1961; George Auerbach, “Median Housing Is Found Scarce,” NYT, September 24, 1961. 48. Robert Moses to Charles Grutzner, February 22, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 49. “Remarks by Robert Moses at the Opening of the North Queensview Houses,” January 20, 1958, Speeches—1958, Moses Papers. 50. Ibid. 51. William Celzich to Nelson Rockefeller, March 30, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 52. New York State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal, The People Decide for Housing (Albany, NY, 1958). 53. MacNeil Mitchell to Robert Moses, June 22, 1956, Correspondence—1956, Moses Papers. 54. Robert Moses, “Remarks by Moses at Groundbreaking for Seward Park Extension,” October 11, 1958, Speeches—1958, Moses Papers. 55. Robert Moses to Roger Schafer, May 26, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 56. “Battista Lists Eight Government Actions Believed Harmful to Small Owners” (newspaper, ca. March 1960 source unidentified), UHF clipping file, Kheel Center Archives. 57. James J. Crisona to Robert Moses, March 27, 1958, Nelson Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. Robert Moses to James Crisona, March 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 58. Robert Moses to J. Anthony Panuch, November 30, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 59. Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing Cooperatives, Story of a Co-op Community: The First 75 Years (New York: Herman Liebman Memorial Fund, 2002). 60. Eisenstadt, “Mitchell-Lama Housing,” 305–306. 61. Robert Moses to J. Anthony Panuch, November 30, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers; Abraham Kazan, “Thirty Years of Cooperative Housing,” in Story of a Co-op Community. 62. Robert Moses to Robert Wagner, July 6, 1955, Correspondence—1955, Moses Papers. 63. “Jamaica Project Pleases Moses,” NYT, May 18, 1959. 64. Robert Moses to J. Anthony Panuch, November 30, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 65. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 493. 66. For the history of the development (or really the lack of development) of the UHF proposal for the Seward Park extension, see UHF Annual Report 1963, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. 67. Matthew Gordon Lassner, “Penn Station South Title I,” in Ballon and Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City, 293–295. 68. See Robert Owen Houses, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives. I thank Marci Reaven for sharing her research in this collection with me. 69. Grutzner, “Moses Is Annoyed by a ‘Slow’ Track.” 70. “Remarks by Robert Moses at Opening of North Queensview Houses.” 71. Robert Moses to Abraham Kazan, April 13, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 72. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 494. 73. Ibid.

266

Notes to Pages 63–66

74. Ibid., 495. 75. Ibid., 496. 76. Robert Moses to David Rockefeller, December 15, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 77. Robert Moses to Lebewohl, April 9, 1959, and Robert Moses to Lebewohl, April 13, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 78. Robert Moses to Robert Wagner, December 9, 1958, Correspondence—1958, Moses Papers. 79. Abraham Kazan to Robert Moses, July 29, 1959; Robert Moses to Robert Szold, August 4, 1959; and Robert Moses to John Cashmore, September 5, 1959; Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 80. Robert Moses to Abraham Kazan, July 29, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 81. Ibid., July 6, 1959. 82. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 504. 83. This was confirmed to me by Nicholas Gyory, who in the mid-1950s was a young leader of the Cap, Hat, and Milliner’s Union. Interview with Nicholas Gyory. 84. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 504. 85. Kazan defended Moses in a letter to the Times, an act that brought a grateful letter from Moses; Kazan to NYT, June 22, 1959; Moses to Kazan, June 25, 1959, Correspondence— 1959, Moses Papers. For Moses’s rough summer, see Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, Random House, 1974), 1040–1066. 86. See for instance “Huge Co-op Plan Favored by City,” NYT, August 21, 1959. In a memo of November 16, 1959, to Rockefeller, Moses placed Jamaica third on his to-do list, after a proposed state park proposition, and a report on atomic power plants, and in front of five other items. Robert Moses to Nelson Rockefeller, November 16, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 87. Robert Moses to Nelson Rockefeller, September 17, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 88. Robert Moses to Rockefeller, September 30, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 89. Ibid. 90. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 497. 91. “The city comptroller is providing the necessary real estate tax exemption,” Robert Moses to Nelson Rockefeller, December 7, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files— Housing, New York State Archives. 92. Robert Moses to John Clancy, July 31, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers; Robert Moses to Robert Wagner, August 3, 1959, and Robert Moses to Robert Wagner, January 14, 1960, in Robert F. Wagner Papers, Subject Files—Housing, Rochdale Municipal Archives, New York City. 93. “Great Housing Opportunity,” editorial, NYT, December 4, 1959. 94. John Cahill to Robert Moses, October 19, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 95. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 497. 96. Robert Moses to Nelson Rockefeller, telegram, November 23, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 97. Investment Advisory Council of the NYS Employees Retirement System, undated, ca. January 1960, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 98. Edward T. Dickinson to Robert Moses, January 15, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 99. Robert Moses to Nelson Rockefeller, January 14, 1960, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 100. “State Sets Loans for Queens Co-op,” NYT, February 17, 1960; James Gaynor to Robert Moses, February 18, 1960, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives. 101. Charles G. Bennett, “Jamaica Housing Meets Opposition,” NYT, April 14, 1960.

Notes to Pages 66–72

267

102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

“John J. Reynolds, 78, a Broker For Real Estate Transfers in City,” NYT, May 27, 1981. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 507. “Co-op Tax Exemption Brings New Protest,” LIP, April 20, 1960. Charles G. Bennett, “Jamaica Housing Meets Opposition.” The new borough president of Queens, John T. Clancy, was also balking at the last minute, much to the annoyance of Moses, but eventually voted for the project. John T. Clancy to Robert Moses December 23, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 107. Robert Moses to Nelson Rockefeller, September 30, 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Subject Files—Housing, New York State Archives.

5. Robert Moses and His Path to Integration Epigraph. Robert Moses, “A Salute to Chicago,” May 14, 1959, Speeches—1959, Robert Moses Papers, New York Public Library (hereafter Moses Papers). 1. Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Random House: New York, 1974), xvi. 2. Ibid., 318–319, 578, 736. 3. Michael Powell, “A Tale of Two Cities,” NYT, May 6, 2007. 4. “Powell Inquiry Set on Negroes at Fair,” NYT, March 12, 1962. 5. Robert Moses, “Remarks of Robert Moses at Unveiling of Statue of George M. Cohan,” September 11, 1959, Speeches—1959, Moses Papers. 6. Philip Kennecott, “A Builder Who Went to Town,” Washington Post, March 11, 2007. 7. Robert Moses, Theory and Practice in Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 44; “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over” in Robert C. Bannister, ed., On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 252–262; Robert Moses, Working for the People: Promise and Performance in Public Service (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), 38. 8. Moses, Working for the People, 59. For example, Robert Moses, “Talk by Robert Moses to Affiliated Young Democrats,” April 21, 1960, Speeches—1960, Moses Papers. See also “Moses’ Philosophy of Government,” in Cleveland Rodgers, Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 1952), 204 –219; Robert Moses, “Plan and Performance,” in A Century of Social Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1939), 126–142. 9. Rodgers, Robert Moses, 10; Caro, The Power Broker, 51–52. Both biographers were told the story by Moses, and Caro reports that Moses “told him the story with glee,” 1181. 10. Robert Moses, The Civil Service of Great Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 64. 11. Ibid., 266. The quotation is from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man” (1733) epistle 3, line 303. The same quotation from Pope appears in Moses, Theory and Practice in Politics, 37, and Robert Moses, Working for the People: Promise and Performance in Public Service (New York: Harpers, 1956), 38. 12. Moses, The Civil Service of Great Britain, 243–245. See his comments on his dissertation in Working for the People, 7–8. 13. On Moses’s lack of circumcision, see Caro, The Power Broker, 411. For his funeral see Timothy Mennel, “Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses’s New York” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2007), 918. 14. For Moses’s dislike of being identified as a Jew, see Caro, The Power Broker, 411. 15. Robert Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 778–789. 16. “Fair Rejects Plea on Jordanian Mural,” NYT, April 26, 1964; “Wagner Says World’s Fair Will Remove Jordans Pavilion’s Controversial Mural,” NYT, April 30, 1964; Philip Benjamin, “Fair Bars Protest Over Mural; Moses Calls for Understanding,” NYT, May 19, 1964; Robert Moses, Public Works, 579–582; Robert Moses, “Harness the Jordan,” NYT, June 5, 1971. In the latter op-ed, Moses calls on Israel to return territory occupied in the Six Day War of 1967.

268

Notes to Pages 72–76

17. Leonard Sussman to Robert Moses, December 2, 1959; Robert Moses to Leonard Sussman, December 5, 1959, Correspondence—1959, Moses Papers. 18. Caro, The Power Broker, 316–318; “Moses Uses Fists at a Park Meeting,” NYT, October 17, 1929. 19. Robert Moses to Oscar Handlin, December 13, 1957, Correspondence—1957, Moses Papers; for Moses’s critique of Handlin’s portrait of Smith in Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958) as a “waxwork,” see Robert Moses, A Tribute to Governor Smith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 18–19. 20. Paula Eldot, Governor Alfred E. Smith: The Politician as Reformer (New York: Garland, 1983), 391. 21. One episode with racial overtones that did occur during Moses’s time in the Smith administration is the well-known accusation that Moses kept low clearances on the bridges approaching Jones Beach on Long Island to keep out buses and the racially mixed urban riffraff. Caro, The Power Broker, 317–319. Caro made much of this, though the evidence is exiguous. To make the clearances two feet higher would have doubled the cost of the crossings, and despite the low clearances there was regular bus service to Jones Beach from the time it opened. Kenneth T. Jackson, “Robert Moses and the Planned Environment: A Re-evaluation,” in Robert Moses: Single-Minded Genius (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes Publishing, 1989), 26. 22. For an excellent account, see Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), esp. 121–153. 23. Caro, The Power Broker, 512–514. Caro’s charges that he refused to heat the pools in white neighborhoods to keep blacks away have been effectively countered by Marta Gutman. See Marta Gutman, “Equipping the Public Realm: Rethinking Robert Moses and Recreation,” and Marta Gutman and Benjamin Luke Marcus, “Pools,” in Ballon and Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City, 72–85, 135–157; Marta Gutman, “Race, Place, and Play: Robert Moses and the WPA Swimming Pools in NYC,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 86 (December 2008): 532–561. 24. Moses, Theory and Practice in Politics, 17–18. 25. In 1957, the well-publicized killing of Michael Farmer, a racially motivated killing in a fight between two gangs in Washington Heights over access to public swimming pools, would galvanize attention on the question of “juvenile delinquency.” Robert W. Snyder, “A Useless and Terrible Death: The Michael Farmer Case, ‘Hidden Violence,’ and New York City in the 1950s,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 2 (March 2010): 226–250. 26. Moses, Theory and Practice in Politics, 17–18. 27. Ibid., 55. 28. “Negro Singers Out, Smith, Moses Quit,” NYT, July 3, 1941. On his fondness for barbershop quartet singing, Mennel, “Everything Must Go,” 915–916. 29. Moses, Public Works, 884. 30. “New Deal Policies Assailed by Moses,” NYT, October 8, 1935. 31. “Moses for Dewey, Listing 7 Reasons,” NYT, October 5, 1944. 32. For an overview of the 1938 constitution see Peter J. Galie, The New York State Constitution: A Reference Guide (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 24 –28. For Moses’s accounts of his role at the constitutional convention see Theory and Practice in Politics, 13–14; “What’s the Matter With New York?” NYT, August 1, 1943. 33. Moses, Theory and Practice in Politics, 15. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 15–16. 36. Ibid., 17. Moses’s revision of the civil rights statute proved crucial in the New York State Court of Appeals 1949 decision upholding the right of Metropolitan Life to discriminate at Stuyvesant Town. See Galie, New York State Constitution, 56–58. 37. Moses, “What’s the Matter With New York?” 38. Ibid. 39. Cleveland Rodgers, Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 1952), 215–216. For Stuyvesant Town see Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Joel

Notes to Pages 76–80

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

269

Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 84 –107; Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 73–154. Robert Moses, “Stuyvesant Town Defended,” letter to the Editor, NYT, June 3, 1943. “New Era Held Near for City Housing,” NYT, February 5, 1944. Moses is quoted in Rodgers, Robert Moses, as saying “insurance companies, fearing agitation, socialization, and nationalization, preferred to put funds in government securities, mortgages, and in other investments that did not involve them in agitation over the racial question,” 216. For accounts of the passage of the Ives-Quinn Act, see Tod M. Ottman, “ ‘Government That Has Both a Heart and a Head’: The Growth of New York State Government during the World War II Era, 1930–1950” (PhD diss., SUNY Albany, 2001), and Anthony S. Chen, “ ‘The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas’: Racial Conservatism and the Politics of Fair Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941–1945,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1238–1265. Leo Egan, “Bias Bill Battle Waged at Hearing,” NYT, February 21, 1945. Ibid. Chen, “ ‘The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas,’ ”; Anthony S. Chen, letter to the editor, Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (December 2006): 1006–1009. For proportional hiring programs in New York State during the years of World War II, see Paul Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933–1972 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 30–65. To give one example that Moses and most of his listeners would have been familiar with, in 1941 there was an agreement between the 5th Avenue Bus Company and the Transport Workers Union to hire blacks and whites in equal numbers until blacks were 17 percent of the skilled workforce. Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action, 54. Oswald Garrison Villard, “Discrimination, It Is Held, Cannot Be Overcome by Legal Means,” letter, NYT, February 13, 1945; William H. Harbaugh, Lawyer’s Lawyer: The Life of John W. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 494; Anthony S. Chen, “ ‘The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas.’ ” Tod M. Ottman, “ ‘Government That Has Both a Heart and a Head,’ ” 88–189; Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Latham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 158–161. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), 1021–1023. Morton Deutsch and Mary Evans Collins, Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 126. Irving Ross, “Robert Moses,” New York Post, July 1, 1956. Robert Moses to James Felt [chairman, City Planning Commission], August 20, 1956, Correspondence—1956, Moses Papers; Robert Moses to Herbert Bayard Swope, January 3, 1956, Correspondence—1956, Moses Papers. Moses made a similar argument in regard to Stuyvesant Town; Mennel, “Everything Must Go,” 980. Robert Moses to James Felt, August 20, 1956, Correspondence—1956, Moses Papers. Moses, Public Works, 431–433 Rodgers, Robert Moses, 215–216. In Public Works, Moses included an excerpt from a letter he wrote in July 1949 including similar criticisms of Metropolitan Life, 432–433. Still, it is worth noting with Martha Biondi that he said nothing of this sort when the controversy over Stuyvesant Town was raging, Martha Biondi, “Robert Moses, Race, and the Limits of an Activist State,” in Ballon and Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City (New York: Norton, 2007), 119. Schwartz, The New York Approach, 139–142, 179–183. Ross, “Robert Moses.” Ibid. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Housing for Everybody,” Co-op Contact 1, no. 7 (May 1956). See also Donald D. Martin, “Role of Cooperatives in the Social Revolution of 1963,” Co-op Contact 6, no. 8 (October 1963), 8.

270

Notes to Pages 80–87

60. Jack and Bea Moss, “One of Queensview’s Most Distinguished Families,” Co-op Contact 1, no. 5 (February 1956), 6. 61. Robert Moses, “Rochdale: Master Planner Moses Views a Master Housing Plan,” LIP, December 1, 1963. 62. Edith Isaacs, Love Affair with a City: The Story of Stanley M. Isaacs (New York: Random House, 1967), 99. 63. Robert Moses, Public Works, 469; Robert Moses, “Housing or Riots,” Newsday, January 27, 1968. 64. Robert Moses, Public Works, 467–469. 65. Rochdale and Co-op City were not the only interracial housing projects backed by Moses in the 1950s and ’60s. For other examples, see Schwartz, New York Approach, 136–143; Lawrence Kaplan and Carol Kaplan, Between Ocean and City: The Transformation of Rockaway, New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 88–89; Moses, Public Works, 468.

6. The Fight at the Construction Site Epigraph. Interview with Herman Ferguson (unless otherwise indicated, all references to Ferguson’s career are from this interview); “Rochdale Village Opens,” NYT, December 11, 1963. 1. City Commission on Human Rights, Bias in the Building Industry: An Updated Report, 1963– 1967 (New York: New York City Commission on Human Rights, 1967). 2. Homer Bigart, “City Urges Unions to Favor Negroes,” NYT, August 15, 1963; Sidney H. Schamberg, “State Says Union Barred Negroes for Last 76 Years,” NYT, March 5, 1963. Joseph Mitchell, “The Mohawks in High Steel,” in Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 3. “Beep’s Urban Committee Runs into Storm of Anger,” LIP, May 8, 1962. 4. Interview with Omar Barbour. 5. For an account of the importance of agitation against building trades discrimination in the growth of the civil rights movement see Thomas J. Sugrue, “Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969,” Journal of American History ( June 2004): 145–173, which appears in expanded form in Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). In his book, Sugrue, happily, takes note of the demonstrations at Rochdale (303, 313–314). 6. “Negroes Advised on Job Protests,” NYT, June 9, 1963; William G. Weart, “Negroes Win Jobs at Philadelphia,” NYT, June 1, 1963. 7. Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2002), 189. For the demonstrations at Downstate Medical Center, see the excellent account by Brian Purnell, “A Movement Grows in Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Northern Civil Rights Movement” (PhD diss., New York University, 2006), 335–395. 8. Peter Kihss, “Negroes to Push Picketing in City in Drive for Jobs,” NYT, July 29, 1963; Homer Bigart, “Negroes Call Off Brooklyn Pickets as Governor Acts,” NYT, August 7, 1963; Fred Powledge, “Rights Demonstrations Here Called Frustrating,” NYT, November 12, 1963. 9. Homer Bigart, “Near-Riot Flared in Race Protest at Project Here,” NYT, August 1, 1963. 10. “The ‘Revolution’ Spreads All over New York,” NYAN, July 27, 1963. 11. Peter Kihss, “200 Racial Pickets Seized at Building Projects Here,” NYT, July 23, 1963. 12. Charles Grutzner, “New York’s Racial Unrest: Whites Are of Two Minds,” NYT, August 13, 1963. 13. Hal Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale,” LIP, August 8, 1963. 14. Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale”; “Rochdale Fight Attracts Big Names, Little People,” NYAN, July 10, 1963. 15. William Booth, “Inside Story of the Rochdale Fight,” NYAN, August 3, 1963; Peter Kihss, “143 More Seized in Protests Here,” NYT, July 24, 1963.

Notes to Pages 87–90

271

16. On July 23, there were sixty-five protesters and eighty-five police officers. “143 More Seized in Protests Here,” NYT, July 24, 1963; Hal Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale”; Martin Arnold, “Rights Protests Cost City $15,000 a Day in Police Overtime,” NYT, August 6, 1963; William Booth, “Inside Story of Rochdale Fight.” 17. “Rochdale Fight Attracts Big Names, Little People.” 18. “No Go Slow,” NYAN, August 20, 1963. 19. Ibid.; “Project Picketing to End,” NYT, October 22, 1963. 20. Kihss, “143 More Seized in Protests Here.” 21. “Rochdale Fight Attracts Big Names, Little People”; “Rights Bill Not Enough, Say Five Negro Leaders,” Chicago Defender, July 23, 1963. 22. Jo Holly, “Long Island—Inside Out,” New Pittsburgh Courier (hereafter NPC), August 24, 1963. 23. Kihss, “Negroes to Push Picketing in City in Drive for Jobs”; interview with Herman Ferguson; “Rochdale Pickets to Rally Tonight,” LIP, September 8, 1963. For John Lewis, see Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 313–314. 24. Kihss, “Negroes to Push Picketing in City in Drive for Jobs”; “Ministers Give Call to Fight,” NYAN, July 27, 1963; “Rights Bill Not Enough, Say Five Negro Leaders.” 25. “No Go Slow.” 26. Jo Holly, “Long Island—Inside Out,” NPC, August 31, 1963. 27. Ibid., January 11, 1964. 28. Ibid., August 10, 1963. 29. “Rochdale Fight Attracts Big Names, Little People.” 30. Booth, “Inside Story of Rochdale Fight”; interview with Herman Ferguson. 31. Arnold, “Rights Protests Cost City $15,000 a Day in Police Overtime”; Homer Bigart, “City Urges Unions to Favor Negroes,” NYT, August 15, 1963. 32. Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale.” 33. Interview with Herman Ferguson. 34. Arnold, “Rights Protests Cost City $15,000 a Day in Police Overtime”; interview with Herman Ferguson. 35. Homer Bigart, “Wagner’s Panel on Hiring Negroes Notes Progress,” NYT, August 5, 1963; Grutzner, “New York’s Racial Unrest”; interview with Herman Ferguson. 36. Peter Kihss, “Pickets Arrested for Blocking Way to Mayor’s Office,” NYT, July 30, 1963. 37. Simon Anekwe, “Violence Flares at Rochdale While Picket Is Assaulted,” NYAN, September 23, 1963. 38. Peter Kihss, “Negroes to Push Picketing in City in Drive for Jobs”; Homer Bigart, “Wagner’s Panel on Hiring Negroes Notes Progress”; Peter Kihss, “Rockefeller Bars Negro Job Quota; Hails Union Plan,” NYT, July 26, 1963. 39. For the enforcement of Ives-Quinn and the 1964 Civil Rights Act see Paul Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933–1972 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 107–161; 199–230. 40. Booth, “Inside Story of Rochdale Fight.” 41. Martin Arnold, “23 Negroes on Job Quit at Co-Op Site,” NYT, July 31, 1963. 42. Kihss, “143 More Seized in Protests Here.” Another article placed the number of blacks at the Rochdale site at three hundred. Grutzner, “New York’s Racial Unrest.” 43. William Booth claimed there were 2,000 construction workers on the site; Kazan gave the figure of 1,350, though this appears to be the maximum on the site on any one day. Booth, “Inside Story of Rochdale Fight”; Kihss, “143 More Seized in Protest Here.” See also UHF Press Release, July 26, 1963, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. 44. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1970, 511–512. 45. Kihss, “143 More Seized in Protests Here.” 46. Sugrue, “Affirmative Action from Below.” 47. “Ministers Give Call to Fight.”

272

Notes to Pages 91–94

48. Kihss, “Negroes to Push Picketing in City in Drive for Jobs.” 49. Bigart, “Wagner’s Panel on Hiring Negroes Notes Progress”; Khiss, “Rockefeller Bars Negro Job Quota; Hails Union Plan.” 50. “No Go Slow.” 51. Kihss, “Negroes to Push Picketing in City in Drive for Jobs.” 52. Homer Bigart, “Union Chief Sees Reverse Job Bias,” NYT, August 17, 1963; Damon Stetson, “Brennan’s Stand on Rights Hailed,” NYT, November 9, 1963. 53. Bigart, “Negroes Call Off Brooklyn Pickets as Governor Acts.” 54. “Accord Reached at White Castle,” NYT, August 9, 1963; Purnell, “A Movement Grows in Brooklyn.” The most plausible explanation for the differences between the Rochdale and Brooklyn demonstrations was that the large size and political influence of the Jamaica NAACP made an end run around it impossible, which is apparently what Rockefeller engineered against the much smaller Brooklyn chapter of CORE. 55. Clayton Knowles, “City Panel Gives Job Racial Plan,” NYT, July 12, 1963; Kihss, “Rockefeller Bars Negro Job Quota; Hails Union Plan”; Samuel Kaplan, “Unions Reject Racial Plan of Mayor’s ‘Action Panel,’ ” NYT, July 18, 1963; Emanuel Perlmutter, “Unionist Softens Stance on Negroes,” NYT, July 22, 1963; Stanley Levey, “Unions to Screen Negro Trainees,” NYT, August 24, 1963. Brennan at first angrily rejected the plan, on July 17, saying the building trades council would not accept outside dictation on whom to admit to membership, but accepted the mayor’s plan the following week. 56. Sydney H. Schanberg, “City Urged to Act on Building Bias,” NYT, December 28, 1963; Kihss, “143 More Seized in Protests Here”; Bigart, “Union Chief Sees Reverse Job Bias.” 57. Homer Bigart, “Governor Orders Aid to Centers That Help Negroes Enter Unions,” NYT, August 10, 1963. 58. Fred Powledge, “Rights Demonstrations Here Called Frustrating,” NYT, November 12, 1963; Martin Arnold, “City Aide Chides Building Unions,” NYT, September 30, 1963. 59. Powledge, “Rights Demonstrations Here Called Frustrating.” 60. Sydney H. Schanberg, “Preferment for Negroes Is Sought by Board Here,” NYT, October 28, 1963; Clayton Knowles, “Wagner Says City Has Not Discussed Negro Preferment,” NYT, October 29, 1963; Charles G. Bennett, “Job Preference on Racial Basis Barred by Law, Wagner Notes,” NYT, November 1, 1963. 61. “City Rights Chief Weighs Resigning, NYT, November 4, 1963; “Rights Unit Head Backs Job Stand,” NYT, November 18, 1963; “US Road Program Sets Job Equality,” NYT, August 7, 1963. 62. See the interviews and photographs of Shirley Artadi and Ida Timpone in Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale,” and photographs of Paul Gibson, collection of Peter Eisenstadt. 63. Dave Hepburn and Dera Bush, “Rochdale Village Opens as Community Watches,” NYAN, December 14, 1963. 64. Interview with Anita Starr; Kihss, “Pickets Arrested for Blocking Way to Mayor’s Office,” NYT, July 30, 1963. 65. Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale”; interview with William Henry Jones. 66. Dan Simmons, “A Message to Jamaicans from the Washington Freedom Marchers,” Jamaica Branch NAACP News Bulletin (hereafter JBNNB), September 1963; Dan Simmons, “The White Picket,” JBNNB, September 1963. 67. Dave Hepburn, “This Is the Week of Decision,” NYAN, August 20, 1963. 68. Simmons, “A Message to Jamaicans.” 69. Ibid. For the continuing importance of the Rochdale protests, see the fiftieth anniversary history of the branch, Jamaica Branch NAACP, Fifty Years of Service, ( Jamaica, Queens, 1977). 70. William Booth, “The President Speaks,” JBNNB, December 1963. 71. Thomas A. Johnson, “Long Islander Seeks to Enjoy New House—With a Shotgun,” NPC, February 16, 1963; Thomas A. Johnson, “Long Island—Inside Out,” NPC, May 11, 1963; “All’s Well That Ends Well in Housing Case,” NPC, March 9, 1963; Paul Gibson, “To Be Continued,” JBNNB, February 1963.

Notes to Pages 95–104

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72. For Brewer and the Jamaica NAACP see Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Fifty Years of Service. 73. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 151; “Long Island CORE Reviews a Year of Crises Met,” NYAN, January 11, 1964. 74. Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 198. Lynch was a flight operations officer for British Overseas Airways. 75. “Minister Writes Blazing ‘Open Letter’ to Three,” NYAN, August 24, 1963. 76. “Everybody’s Talkin’ Bout,” JBNNB, September 1963. 77. For Ferguson coming to New York City in 1943, see Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale.” 78. Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 14. 79. Interview with Herman Ferguson. 80. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. 81. Shapiro, “Why They Picket at Rochdale,” 63. 82. “What’s Happening?” JBNNB, August 20, 1963. 83. “No Go Slow”; “What’s Happening,” JBNNB, September 1963. 84. Will Lissner, “Pickets Chain Themselves to Cranes,” NYT, September 6, 1963. 85. Ibid. 86. Jo Holly, “Long Island—Inside Out,” NPC, September 14, 1963. 87. Simon Anekwe, “Rochdale Defendants Free in Picketing Trial,” NYAN, December 7, 1963. 88. Ibid.; Paul Gibson, “The Man on the Crane,” JBNNB, October 1963. 89. Kihss, “Negroes to Push Picketing in City in Drive for Jobs.” 90. See for instance the largely favorable review of Robert F. Williams’s Negroes with Guns in the JBNNB, October 1963. 91. Jo Holly, “Long Island—Inside Out,” NPC, September 21, 1963. 92. Interview with William Booth. 93. Jo Holly, “Long Island—Inside Out,” NPC, October 5, 1963. 94. “Jamaica Boycott Lags as Three Factions Disagree,” NYAN, October 12, 1963. 95. Interview with William Booth. 96. “Jamaica NAACP Calls ‘Battle Stations,’ ” NYAN, March 7, 1964. 97. “Small Business Falling in Line with Rochdale,” NYAN, October 19, 1963. 98. “Is Negro Revolution a Kind of Garveyism?” NPC, January 11, 1964; “Rights Fighter Sees Strength, Pride in ‘Black Nationalism,’ ” NPC, April 4, 1964. 99. “Malcolm X Endorses Boycott,” NYAN, December 7, 1963. 100. John Sibley, “Negroes Protest Mural at Bank Depicting Banjo-Playing Slave,” NYT, May 12, 1964; “CORE Again Pickets Bank Over Mural with a Negro,” NYT, May 26, 1964; “Portrayal of a Negro in Mural Argued at Hearing,” NYT, June 15, 1966; Alfred E. Clark, “Booth Warns Bank Over Banjo Billy,” NYT, October 6, 1966; “Banjo Billy,” editorial, NYT, October 13, 1966; “Offending Mural Removed by Bank,” NYT, August 28, 1967. Banjo Billy (1738–1826)—his last name is omitted in the sources I have consulted—was raised a slave of Thomas Bowne of Hempstead and was famous for making and playing an Africanstyled banjo made from a dried gourd. Though manumitted by the 1770s, when all Quakers in good standing had to free their human property, he continued to live with his former owners and their relatives until his death. Lynda R. Day, Making a Way to Freedom: A History of African Americans on Long Island (Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1997), 27. 101. Jo Holly, “Long Island—Inside Out,” NPC, November 16, 1963; “Rochdale Leaders Seek Meeting with Chamber of Commerce,” NPC, January 18, 1964. 102. Interview with A. B. Spellman, March 19, 1964, reprinted in Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 7. 103. Emanuel Perlmutter, “16 Negroes Seized; Plot to Kill Wilkins and Young Charged,” NYT, June 22, 1967. Ten rifles, a machine gun, three carbines, a shotgun, four knives, and three metal arrows were found by the police in Ferguson’s home.

274

Notes to Pages 104 –111

104. M. A. Farber, “Brownsville Wants Death Plot Suspect as School Principal,” NYT, September 2, 1967. 105. Earl Caldwell, “Booth Gives View of I. S. 201 Dispute,” NYT, March 11, 1968. 106. Homer Bigart, “Ferguson Gives Plan for Schools,” NYT, March 14, 1968. 107. “Group Picks Spock for President,” NYT, June 3, 1968. 108. “Raw Meat for the Racists,” editorial, NYT, September 27, 1968; Fred M. Hechingher, “Racism and Anti-Semitism in the School Crisis,” NYT, September 16, 1968. 109. Tom Buckley, “Ferguson and Harris Sentenced to 3½ to 7 Years in Murder Plot,” NYT, October 4, 1968. 110. Michael T. Kaufman, “60s Militant to End Flight after 18 Years,” NYT, April 4, 1989; Joseph Fried, “60s Fugitive Returns to Start Conspiracy Sentence,” NYT, April 8, 1989. 111. Terence Smith, “New Rights Chief Criticizes Unions,” NYT, February 2, 1966. For similar comments from Roy Wilkins, see Roy Wilkins, “Rutgers Lays It on the Line,” NYAN, February 10, 1965. 112. City Commission on Human Rights, Bias in the Building Industry: An Updated Report, 1963– 1967; Damon Stetson, “Trade Union Bias Found Unchecked,” NYT, June 1, 1967. 113. Rochdale Village 25th Anniversary Celebration, Sept 8th to 18th, 1988, program (Queens, NY: Rochdale Village, 1988), 2.

7. Creating Community Epigraph. Quoted in Tony Schuman, “Labor and Housing in New York: Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Movement,” unpublished paper, 5. 1. Abraham E. Kazan, “Cooperative Housing in the United States,” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 191 (May 1937): 143. 2. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 3. “Too Much Governmental Assistance Can Be Detrimental to Cooperatives,” Co-op Contact 8, no. 3 (October–November 1964). See also Kazan, “Cooperative Housing in the United States.” 4. “Democratic Participation in Large Cooperatives: Some Cooperatives Must Cope with Problems Because They are Getting Too Big,” Co-op Contact 4, no. 3 (February–March 1960); interview with Harold Ostroff. 5. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 6. Harold Ostroff, “The Impact of Housing Cooperatives in Urban Areas,” speech delivered at National Association of Housing Cooperatives, Detroit, February 19, 1966 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Abraham Kazan, after a stroke, was granted a leave of absence from the presidency of the UHF in January 1966. Jacob S. Potofsky, president of the Amalagamated Clothing Workers of America, was named president in his stead, but the effective control of the UHF passed to Harold Ostroff, who was named executive vice president, “United Housing Group Fills Posts,” NYT, January 24, 1966. 7. “Debate on Vietnam at Community Center,” Inside Rochdale, November 4, 1966. See also Norman Thomas’s article in the first issue of Co-op Contact on the cooperative movement, “People’s Capitalism,” Co-op Contact 1, no. 1 (March 1956). 8. Donald Martin, “Open Membership,” Co-op Contact 2, no. 7 (October 1957). 9. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1970, 508. 10. Interview with Eddie Abramson. 11. Interview with Anita Starr; Larry Lapka, Rochdale Forum, June 29, 1999. 12. Ostroff, “The Impact of Housing Cooperatives in Urban Areas.” 13. “The Art of Cooperative Living,” Co-op Contact 8, no. 3 (October–November 1964). 14. “Rochdale Families Air Their Beefs,” LIP, February 2, 1964. 15. Ibid.; “Rochdale Protests Protested by Protestors’ Neighbors,” LIP, February 21, 1964; “Rochdale Tenants: New Home Is Okay,” LIP, February 26, 1964.

Notes to Pages 111–120

275

16. “Rochdale Tenants: New Home Is Okay.” 17. Harold Ostroff, “Labor Co-ops and the Housing Crisis,” AFL-CIO American Federationist, May 1969. 18. Interview with Harold Ostroff; Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing Cooperatives, Story of a Co-op Community: The First 75 Years (New York: Herman Liebman Memorial Fund, 2002). 19. “Report of the Rochdale Village House Congress, 1965–1969” (Queens, NY: Rochdale Village, 1969) (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 20. Interview with Hugh Williams. 21. Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together,” New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1966. 22. Interviews with Herb Plever, Hugh Williams. 23. Maurice Cerrier, “Observations on House Congress,” Inside Rochdale, March 3, 1966. 24. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 25. Maurice Cerrier, “Observations on House Congress,” Inside Rochdale, November 4, 1966. 26. Maurice Cerrier, “Observations on House Congress,” Inside Rochdale, March 3, 1966. 27. Bernie Seaman, “Wave of Protest over Impending Rochdale Village Rent Increase,” Inside Rochdale, January 16, 1967. 28. “Tenants Council Formed,” Inside Rochdale, January 16, 1967; “Rent Protest Awakens Dormant Rochdalers,” Inside Rochdale, February 6, 1967. 29. Editorial, Inside Rochdale, January 16, 1967; interview with Jack Raskin. 30. “Rochdale Assessment Cut By Over Six Million,” Inside Rochdale, February 27, 1967. 31. Bernard Seeman, “Reflections,” Inside Rochdale, February 27, 1967. 32. Ronald Sturman, “Inside Russia,” Inside Rochdale, September 1966. 33. For Communist and left-wing involvement in rent strikes, see Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904 –1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984). 34. Interview with Herb Plever. 35. Interview with Jack Raskin. 36. Ibid. 37. Interviews with Cal Jones, Hugh Williams. 38. Interview with Hugh Williams. Rochdale was not the only UHF cooperative where new residents found management gruff and unsympathetic. In Penn South, a sister cooperative in Midtown Manhattan that opened in 1962, residents complained in 1964 that adamant critics were met with a response something along the lines of “if you don’t like it, get out” (and intimating that there were currently 6,700 families on the waiting list ready to move in). Natalie Jaffe, “Tenants of Co-op Seek ‘Ownership,’ ” NYT, November 29, 1964. 39. Jaffe, “Tenants of Co-op Seek ‘Ownership.’ ” 40. Eddie Abramson, “An Eddie-Torial,” Inside Rochdale, May 27, 1965. 41. Aaron Safirstein, “B’nai B’rith at Rochdale Village,” Inside Rochdale, March 19, 1965. 42. Interview with Cal Jones. 43. Abraham Kazan, “Union Cooperative Housing,” in J. B. S. Hardman and Maurice F. Neufeld, eds., The House of Labor: Internal Operations of American Unions (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951), 320–326; Herman Liebman, “Social Activity in Cooperatives,” Co-op Contact, 1 no. 12 (December 1956). 44. Eddie Abramson, “An Eddie-Torial,” Inside Rochdale, November 14, 1965; Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 45. Swados, and various issues of Inside Rochdale. 46. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 47. For the bizarre story of Rochdale’s Muck n’ Futch Mystery Club, see Michael T. Kaufman, In Their Own Good Time (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), 32–49. 48. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 49. Interview with Cal Jones.

276

Notes to Pages 120–126

50. “Muddy Waters at Rochdale Village Community Center,” NYT, November 29, 1967; “Mischa Elman Comes to Rochdale Village,” NYT, February 6, 1967. 51. Alan Truscott, “Bridge: Woman Student Is Winner at Integrated Event in Queens,” NYT, July 13, 1967. For another integrated bridge tournament at Rochdale, see the bridge column in the NYT for January 31, 1968. 52. “Chorus Invites You to Come on Up,” Inside Rochdale, February 11, 1966; “Community Singers Concert,” Inside Rochdale, March 3, 1966; “Rochdale Village Community Singers,” Inside Rochdale, March 11, 1968; programs of Rochdale Community Singers (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 53. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 54. Harold Ostroff, “The Impact of Housing Cooperatives in Urban Areas.” 55. Ibid.; The utopian strain in the UHF continued until the end, As late as 1964, the UHF reprinted excerpts from Robert Owen’s classic utopian socialist tract, “A New System of Society,” in Co-op Contact 6, no. 2 (March 1964). 56. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 74 –88. 57. Rochdale Forum, April 4, 2002. 58. Rochdale Forum, June 1999. 59. Rochdale Forum, April 21, 2002. 60. Interview with Adele Goret. 61. Rochdale Forum, April 21, 2002. 62. Rochdale Forum, April 4, 2002; Rochdale Forum, April 3, 2002 63. Rochdale Forum, April 2, 2002. 64. Interview with Vicki Perlman. 65. Neil Levine, Rochdale Forum, June 29, 2000. 66. Interview with Evlynne Braithwaithe. 67. Vicki Perlman, Rochdale Forum, April 21, 2002. 68. Rochdale Forum, April 4, 2002. 69. Rochdale Forum, April 7, 2002. 70. Ibid., April 4, 2002. 71. Interview with Olga Lewis. 72. Interview with Evlynne Braithwaithe. 73. “The Art of Cooperative Living,” Co-op Contact 8, no. 3 (October–November 1964). 74. Rochdale Forum, April 4, 2002; Rochdale Forum, April 4, 2002; Rochdale Forum, April 4, 2002. 75. For excellent overviews of some pre-Jacobs fights against Moses’s conception of urban planning, see Robert Fishman, “Revolt of the Urbs: Robert Moses and his Critics,” in Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: Norton, 2007), 122–129, and Hilary Ballon, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I program,” in Ballon and Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City, 112–113. 76. Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 112. 77. For discussions of Jane Jacobs, see Alexiou, Jane Jacobs; Max Allen, ed., Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs (Owen Sound, ON: Ginger Press, 1997). 78. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 48, 71. 79. Ibid., 17. 80. This was an influential current of thought in the 1950s. For a work of popular sociology that criticized active “joiners” as basically shallow and vapid, see William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 317–318. 81. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 72. 82. Abraham Kazan, “Fuzzy Thinking,” Co-Op Contact 5, no. 5 (June–July 1962), 8. 83. Roger Starr, “Adventures in Mooritania,” Co-op Contact 5, no. 1 (January 1962). 84. Abraham Kazan, “An Award to the President of the UHF, November 12, 1963,” Co-op Contact 6, no. 10 (December 1963); “Commission for Landmarks Preservation Established,” Co-op Contact 8, no. 10 ( June 1965).

Notes to Pages 126–134

277

85. Kazan, “An Award to the President of the UHF, November 12, 1963.” 86. Schuman, “Labor and Housing in New York,” 5. 87. William E. Farrell, “Architects Score Co-op City Design,” NYT, February 20, 1965; Steven V. Roberts, “Planners Accept Bronx Co-op City,” NYT, May 13, 1965. 88. Ada Louise Huxtable, “A Singularly New York Product,” NYT, November 25, 1968. 89. “Co-op City Housing Chides Critics of Design,” NYT, February 24, 1965. 90. Peter Hellman, “Co-op City,” Apartment Ideas (Spring 1971), 98–101, 120. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Co-op City’s Grounds: After 3 Years, a Success,” NYT, October 26, 1971. 94. Hellman, “Co-op City”; interview with Harold Ostroff. 95. Harold Ostroff, “Labor Co-ops and the Housing Crisis.” 96. For another account of the pleasures of growing up in high-rise developments, see Corinne Demas, Eleven Stories High: Growing Up in Stuyvesant Town, 1948–1968 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000). For a defense of the management and internal culture in New York City Housing Authority projects in the decades after World War II, see Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.) 97. Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For her trenchant comments on Jane Jacobs’s underestimation of the forces of gentrification, see 1–34. 98. “James Agee: The Anarchist Sublime,” in John H. Summers, Every Fury on Earth (Aurora, CO: Pen Mark Press, 2008), 55–56.

8. Integrated Living Epigraph. Harold Ostroff, “Comments at Princeton University,” April 19, 1968 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 1. Abraham Kazan, “1964,” Co-op Contact 7, no. 5 ( January 1965). 2. Ibid. 3. Jerome Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion,” New York Herald Tribune, March 14, 1965. 4. Ostroff, “Comments at Princeton University.” 5. Bernard Seeman, “Rochdale Village Must Set an Example,” Inside Rochdale, November 26, 1966. 6. Reprinted in Inside Rochdale, January 27, 1965. 7. Clarence D. Funnye, “Brooklyn Project Opposed,” letter, NYT, July 13, 1967; Steven V. Roberts, “Co-op City Blend of Races Sought,” NYT, April 30, 1967; Joseph P. Fried, “Debate Still Swirls Around Co-op City,” NYT, March 17, 1968. 8. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 9. E-mail to Rochdale Forum, June 1999. 10. “High Holy Day Services,” Inside Rochdale, July 10, 1966. 11. William R. Mowat, An Experimental Ministry to a High-Rise Middle-Income Housing Complex (New York: Protestant Council of the City of New York, 1967), 3. 12. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 13. Libby Kahane, Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought, vol. 1 (unpublished ms., collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 14. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” 15. Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together,” New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1966. 16. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.”

278 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

Notes to Pages 134 –140 Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Ibid. Rochdale Forum, July 1999. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” Conversation with name withheld, December 2004. Interview with Lloyd Lawrence. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Interview with Cal Jones. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” This practice was prohibited by the Rochdale Village Management, which complained that it “defaced” the development, and instituted a fine per infraction. Rochdale Village Bulletin, November 1964. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Ibid. Ibid. Interview with Cal Jones. Rochdale Forum, August 1999. Interview with Robert Lipsky. Interviews with Barbara Brandes Roth, Vicky Perlman, February 2005. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” “Antisemitism: It’s Not as Bad as It Sounds,” Inside Rochdale, February 1969. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 72. “The Following is a Copy of a Letter Sent to the Borough President by Richard Fisher, Building 14A, Apt 12E,” Inside Rochdale, April 15, 1965. Reprinted in Inside Rochdale, March 26, 1965. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion”; interview with Cal Jones, December 2004. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” “Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society,” Inside Rochdale, March 19, 1965. Zukovsky, “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” There were talks on such topics as poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar and W. E. B. Du Bois, Inside Rochdale June 30, 1966. In 1967 the noted black nationalist John Henrik Clarke gave a series of lectures on “Africa at the Dawn of History: The Grandeur of Kush and East Africa,” Inside Rochdale, October 15, 1967. Interview with Cal Jones. Inside Rochdale, June 30, 1966. Interview with Cal Jones. Ibid. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1970, 508. “23 Bathing Pools Planned by Robert Moses,” NYT, July 2, 1934. Only eleven of those twentythree pools were ever built. Marta Gutman, “Race, Place, and Play: Robert Moses and the WPA Swimming Pools in NYC,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 86 (December 2008), 31. Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 184. Other plots, one adjacent to the proposed park, had already been turned over to the city for the building of Rochdale’s three public schools. “Hearing on Addition for Lincoln Center to be Held June 19,” NYT, June 6, 1963; Proposed Department of Parks Recreation Center: New York Blvd at 134th Ave (New York: New York City Department of Parks, 1963). “Rochdale Pool Starts Protests Swirling,” LIP, May 1, 1963. Although the lack of a swimming pool had been a concern of Jamaica civic groups for many years, the Jamaica Swimming Pool Committee seems to have been a front organization of sorts for the Queens Democratic

Notes to Pages 140–148

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

279

Party, with Queens Borough President John Clancy as honorary chairman and party regular Hyman J. Greenberg as president. Greenberg, who was probably Jewish, was a candidate for the state assembly in a bitterly contested primary in 1962 against Kenneth N. Browne. Greenberg’s efforts were presumably in part to give him a visible role supporting a popular issue among black Jamaicans; Marie L. Crichlow, “Long Island’s Social Swim,” NPC, October 13, 1962; Clayton Knowles, “Queens Party Picks Clancy for Surrogate Race,” NYT, June 5, 1962. “Rochdale Pool Starts Protests Swirling,” LIP, May 1, 1964; “Residents Oppose Rochdale Pool Site,” LIP, May 4, 1964. “Residents Oppose Rochdale Pool Site, LIP, May 4, 1964. Queens Borough President Mario J. Cariello to Commissioner of Parks Newbold Morris, May 4, 1964, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Anonymous letter, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Letter from Morris and Jacqueline Bresh, July 25, 1964, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Letter from Mr. and Mrs. Louis Abramowitz, May 3, 1964, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Letter from Mrs. Jack Cooper, May 4, 1964, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Letter from Mrs. Rochelle Bakesof, June 23, 1964, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Abraham E. Kazan to Newbold Morris, May 8, 1964, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Newbold Morris to Abraham E. Kazan, May 20, 1964, Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation, Municipal Archives. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, 511. “IS 72 Lunchroom Funnies,” Rochdale Forum, July 1999. “Rochdale Trivia,” Rochdale Forum, April 1999. For Kazan’s opposition to Con Edison, see interview with Harold Ostroff. C. W. Meyrott, “Con Edison Reveals Story Behind Rochdale Village’s Self-Generated Power,” Electric Power and Light (October 1963), 52–53. John Sibley, “3 Projects May Fight Con Edison by Building Own Power Plants,” NYT, February 22, 1960. William Robbins, “Generators Ease Blackout Plight,” NYT, November 14, 1965. Rochdale Forum, July 26, 1999. Joe Raskin, Rochdale Forum, July 23, 1999. “Two Co-op’s Lighthouses in Blackout,” New York Post, November 12, 1965. Ruth B. Krulik, “An Island of Light,” letter, LIP, November 13, 1965. Rochdale Forum, June 19, 1999; Rochdale Forum, July 22, 2004; Paulette, Rochdale Forum, July 24, 1999. Interview with Evlynne Braithwaithe. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Interview with Lloyd Lawrence. Interview with Omar Barbour. Joseph Raskin, Rochdale Forum, July 23, 1999. Interview with Cal Jones. Kazan, Reminsciences, 505. Interviews with Juanita Watkins, Eddie Abramson. Interview with Cal Jones. Myron Becker, “City Housing Project Plan Stirs Up Rochdale Village,” LIP, April 11, 1965. “Whites Reject Low Rent Housing Apartments,” NYAN, April 17, 1965; “Whites Want Exclusive Rights to New School,” NYAN, May 1, 1965; Mary Redic, “School Letter” [letter], NYAN, May 22, 1964.

280

Notes to Pages 148–152

87. “Letter by Richard Fisher, sent to the Borough President,” Inside Rochdale, April 15, 1965; “Low Cost Housing Sharply Contested at Meeting with Borough President Cariello,” Inside Rochdale, May 13, 1965; Samuel Kaplan, “Queens Borough Head Accused of Balking LowIncome Housing,” NYT, April 6, 1965. 88. “Clearview Expressway Problem,” Inside Rochdale, March 3, 1966. 89. “Introducing the South Queens Star,” Inside Rochdale, October 1968. 90. “Negro Voters Defeat ‘Enemy,’ ” Chicago Defender, November 26, 1960. 91. For Guy Brewer’s political career, including his leadership of the decidedly left-wing Jamaica Branch of the NAACP in the early 1950s, see Martha Biondi To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 73, 74, 165, 166, 169, 218. 92. District leaders in New York City were elected on the basis of assembly districts. From the 1920s each district typically had a male and female co-leader. Large districts sometimes were divided into two pairs of district leaders, A and B sections. This was the case in South Jamaica, where Guy Brewer controlled one section of the district, and the Rochdale Regular Democrats the other. In 1949, the position of district leader became elective by registered Democratic voters in the Democratic primary. For a brief history of the evolution of the position of district leader, see John C. Walter, The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920–1970 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), 57–59. 93. Diane H. Jones, “Rochdale Village: An Arena for Black Politics” (master’s thesis, Columbia School of Journalism, 1984), 7. 94. Ibid., 10. 95. Ibid.; interview with Eddie Abramson. 96. Ibid. 97. No politician ever impressed Abramson as much as the young John Lindsay. Upon meeting him in 1958 he told his wife, “I just met somebody who is going to be president,” and later told Lindsay that he should have stayed in Congress and run for president, advice that Lindsay later told Abramson he regretted not taking. 98. Kennedy spoke at Rochdale on October 8, 1968. Alicia E. Smith, “Focus on Queens,” NYAN, October 10, 1964. 99. Interview with Cal Jones. 100. After several years he charged a fee of $1 a year for its distribution. 101. Despite a tendency to overfeature himself in Inside Rochdale, Abramson was a good editor who generally tried to report the news fairly and in reasonable depth. After he sold Inside Rochdale in 1968, the paper rapidly deteriorated. 102. Comments on Jamaica Avenue from interview with Eddie Abramson. 103. Abramson lambasted Reform Democratic critics (who had briefly published Our Town, an alternative to Inside Rochdale) who had attacked his incessant self-promotion. Abramson, “Editorial,” Inside Rochdale 2, no. 25 ( June 30, 1966). 104. The officers and members of the Rochdale Regular Democratic Association are listed in Inside Rochdale, May 27, 1965. 105. Interview with Juanita Watkins. 106. Jones, “Rochdale Village,” 9. 107. Interview with Juanita Watkins. 108. “AJC Poll Reveals Much Opposition to the War,” Inside Rochdale, June 1968. 109. “Bernard Berrly New Democratic District Leader,” Inside Rochdale, September 1968. Berrly, who had fought for open housing and against block busting as president of the Neighborhood Relations Committee of the Tri-Community Council of Rosedale, Laurelton, and Springfield Gardens, told Inside Rochdale after his election that while racial discord threatened much of the city, he thought that southeastern Queens was one place that it could be avoided, and stated emphatically that “integration can work.” 110. Juanita Watkins had been offered a run for district leader with another candidate besides Abramson but refused to do so, fearing it would destroy the club.

Notes to Pages 152–159

281

111. Watkins did not go into detail about the allegations against Abramson, but one of the issues apparently involved his pledging support of the club to candidates that the club had not approved. Interview with Juanita Watkins. 112. Interview with Juanita Watkins. 113. Jones, “Rochdale Village,” 11.

9. Going to School 1. Rochdale Village Committee for Public Schools, “A Program for Quality Integrated Education at Public Schools 30 and 80, Queens NY,” ca. 1965 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 2. The term “de facto segregation” first appeared in the New York Times on November 10, 1955. For a critique of the term, see Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 285. 3. For the fight against separate school systems in Jamaica see Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1979), 227–237; Lynda R. Day, Making a Way to Freedom: A History of African Americans on Long Island (Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1997), 61–62. 4. Mabee, Black Education in New York State, 249. 5. For a summary of the fight against segregated schools in New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the role of Kenneth Clark, see Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 241–246. For Kenneth Clark in the 1950s, see Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie’s Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). 6. “Some City Schools Held Segregated,” NYT, April 25, 1954; “Segregation Laid to Schools Here,” NYT, November 10, 1955; Leonard Buder, “City Schools Invite Inquiry of ‘Jim Crow’ Allegations,” NYT, July 14, 1954; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 246; Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 48–59. 7. For an overview of the Board of Education’s halting efforts at integration in the late 1950s and early 1960s, see David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City Schools (New York: Random House, 1968), 15–35. 8. Kenneth Clark was quoted in May 1957 arguing that Superintendant Janesen was “deliberately confusing, delaying, distorting, and sidetracking the reports” of the commission established by the board to study integration, see Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 20. 9. “Some Negroes Here Send Their Children to Schools in South,” NYT, August 30, 1959. 10. See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origin of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). For the Mason-Dixon Line in Queens, see Peggy Street, “Why They Fight for the P.A.T.,” NYT, September 20, 1964; Walter Woods, “The Tug of War,” Inside Rochdale, May 29, 1967. 11. State Education Commissioner’s Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions, Desegregating the Public Schools of New York City (Albany, NY: New York State Department of Education, 1964), 3, 7. 12. To get into the Cold War spirit and name names (of some excellent and admirable historians), see Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944 –1963 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), and Biondi, To Stand and Fight. 13. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 22. 14. For the definitive history of the 1964 boycott, see Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door. For Malcolm X’s and Podhoretz’s (both admittedly lukewarm) support of the boycott, see Taylor, 147, 158. I am proud to say that I was one of the 464,000 schoolchildren who stayed home on February 3, 1964. 15. Leonard Buder, “School Boycott Called Certain,” NYT, January 28, 1961; Robert H. Terte, “Donovan Appeals to Local Boards to Fight Boycotts,” NYT, September 20, 1964.

282

Notes to Pages 159 –162

16. For a summary of complaints about the education of minorities in New York City’s public schools in the mid-1950s, see Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power, 90–98. 17. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 52. 18. “Some City Schools Held Segregated.” 19. State Education Commissioner’s Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions, Desegregating the Public Schools of New York City. 20. Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in White and Black (New York: Random House, 1964), 304. 21. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 22. “One of Last 5 Wooden Schools in City to Be Closed Tomorrow,” NYT, April 9, 1964, on the closing of PS 161. It had been built in 1895. In 1964, three of the five remaining wooden school buildings in New York City were in the Jamaica-Springfield Gardens area, with the remaining two on Staten Island. 23. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 24. Interview with Juanita Watkins. 25. “To Teach Negro History Course,” New York Amsterdam News (hereafter NYAN ), July 6, 1935; “Segregation Move Denied,” NYAN, January 26, 1935; “Rev. Imes to Speak at Victory Meeting,” NYAN, April 27, 1935. 26. “Probers Challenge Principal’s Answer,” NYAN, February 2, 1935; “Mother and Student Picket School in Transfer Protest,” NYAN, February 11, 1939; “End Jamaica School Strike,” NYAN, September 16, 1939. 27. “Big School Fight in Jamaica,” NYAN, November 10, 1945. 28. Leonard Buder, “City Schools Cleared in Segregation Study,” NYT, November 7, 1955; “Wagner Surveys Needs of Queens,” NYT, September 4, 1953; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 240. There were fourteen wooden frame school buildings in Queens in 1953. 29. Peter Kihss, “Queens Is Growing, and So Are Its Troubles,” NYT, November 29, 1963. 30. Peter Kihss, “Jansen Will Face Critics in Queens,” NYT, March 23, 1957; Tillman Durdin, “Barriers for Negro Here Still High Despite Gains,” NYT, April 23, 1956. 31. “He Didn’t Talk to Negroes But Says We Don’t Want Integration,” NYAN, April 6, 1957. 32. Street, “Why They Fight for the P.A.T.” For PAT see, Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 23–30. The term “white backlash” first appeared in the New York Times on November 10, 1963, about a month before the first family moved into Rochdale. 33. For the development of the “neighborhood school” as an idée fixe within the school integration debate, see Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 21–47. 34. Rosemary Gunning, the leader of PAT, would be Buckley’s candidate for City Council president. William F. Buckley Jr., The Unmaking of a Mayor (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 205–206. 35. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 30. 36. “Civil Rights and Housing,” Co-op Contact 4, no. 3 (February–March 1960). 37. David Ser to Harold Ostroff, March 29, 1963, Rochdale Village File, Max Rubin Papers, New York City Board of Education Records, Municipal Archives. 38. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 510. 39. Interview with Herb Plever. The Board of Education announced plans to replace the two wooden elementary schools in South Jamaica in late 1958, but nothing further was heard of this until 1961, when plans were approved to build PS 80 (but not PS 30); Homer Bigart, “All Schools Here to Get Fire Check,” NYT, December 3, 1958; “23 New Schools Slated for 1961,” NYT, January 8, 1961. A year later PS 30 was still languishing in “advance planning” status; see Gene Currivan, “Schools Will Set Building Record,” NYT, January 8, 1962. By April 1963, PS 30 was among a group of four projects slated for “immediate construction,” pending Board of Estimate approval; Gene Currivan, “Mayor Will Urge School Building,” NYT, April 22, 1963. By November 1963, an article noted that “PS 80 is nearing completion on the site, and a contract was recently awarded by the school board for the construction of PS 30”; “Co-op to Include Classroom Space,” NYT, November 24, 1963. 40. Plever was a member of People’s Songs, a musical organization very close to the Communist Party, and said that Harvey Matusow, one of the most unscrupulous and least veracious of

Notes to Pages 162–165

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

283

the prominent ex-Communist informants of the early 1950s, accused him of being the “commissar” of a party cell that included Pete Seeger, folk singer Betty Sanders, and bluesman Brownie McGhee; interview with Herb Plever. For People’s Songs, see Ronald D. Cohen and Dave Samuelson, Songs for Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs, and the American Left, 1926–1953, liner notes for Bear Family Records, BCD 15720 JL, 26–33. As Martha Biondi has shown, the early fight for school integration in New York City was pressed by such diverse groups as the Teachers’ Union (expelled from the CIO for its Communist leanings), the NAACP, and the National Urban League. Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 241–249. Interview with Herb Plever. Samuel Zipp writes of the emergence of a new breed of left/ liberal neighborhood-based organizations and coalitions in New York City in the mid- to late 1950s, addressing such issues as educational and housing inequality that provided Jane Jacobs with her initial exposure to the sort of issues that would make her reputation. The Rochdale Village Public School Committee was similar to these new groups in many ways, though it was a grassroots organization that ultimately backed, rather than opposed, urban renewal. See Samuel Zipp, “Living for the City,” The Nation, April 5, 2010, and Samuel Taylor Zipp, “Manhattan Projects: Cold War Urbanism in the Age of Urban Renewal” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2006). For Stein’s background see Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 55–58. Interview with Herb Plever. Interview with Sue Raskin. For the initial response of Harold Ostroff to the school protesters, see interviews with Herb Plever, Jack and Sue Raskin. Interview with Herb Plever. Interview with Harold Ostroff. Sylvia Jaffee to Bernard Donovan, April 2, 1963, Rochdale Village File, Max Rubin Papers, New York City Board of Education Records, Municipal Archives; interview with Herb Plever. Bernard Donovan to Harold Ostroff, April 4, 1963; Memo to Max Rubin, April 9, 1963; Rochdale Village File, Max Rubin Papers, New York City Board of Education Records, Municipal Archives. Anonymous quotation in Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 520. “Special Bulletin by the Rochdale Village Temporary Committee for Public Schools,” ca. 1963 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). “Co-op to Include Classroom Space,” NYT, November 24, 1963. “Fear Rochdale Will Swamp Local Schools,” LIP, November 8, 1963. Interviews with Herb Plever, Sue Raskin. David Ser to Harold Ostroff, March 29, 1963, Rochdale Village File, Max Rubin Papers, New York City Board of Education Records, Municipal Archives. Interviews with Jack and Sue Raskin, Herb Plever. Rochdale Village Committee for Public Schools, “Letter to Dr. Ryan, Werner, and Members of the Board,” December 5, 1963 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Interview with Jack and Sue Raskin. Rochdale Village Committee for Public Schools, “Letter to Dr. Ryan, Werner, and Members of the Board.” “2 Rochdale Schools to Get Grant,” LIP, February 1, 1965. Doxey Wilkerson, “Teacher Institute on Individualizing Instruction for Classroom Integration at PS 30 and PS 80, Queens, New York City: 1965–66” (handbook, collection of Peter Eisenstadt). In the words of the report, the primary purpose of the institute was to “further school integration by helping teachers to develop certain specified understandings, attitudes and abilities deemed important in adapting instruction to the varying needs of pupils who differ in racial and social-class background, academic achievement, social attitudes, and general patterns of conduct” (page a).

284

Notes to Pages 166 –168

63. For a broader introduction to Wilkerson’s and Gordon’s educational thinking on integrated education and tracking at the time of the Rochdale study, see Edmund W. Gordon and Doxey A. Wilkerson, Compensatory Education for the Disadvantaged: Programs and Practices: Preschool through College (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1966). 64. Rochdale Village Committee for Public Schools, “Letter to Dr. Ryan, Werner, and Members of the Board.” 65. Interview with Jack Raskin. According to Raskin, a pamphlet was prepared proposing the Rochdale Educational Park by Stein and Wolff, but I have been unable to locate it. For Wolff ’s writings on educational parks, see Max Wolff, Educational Park Development in the United States in 1967: A Survey of Current Development Plans, Educational Park Survey (New York: Center for Urban Education, 1967); Max Wolff with Alan Rinzler, The Educational Park: A Guide to Its Implementation (New York: Center for Urban Education, 1970). 66. Interviews with Herb Plever, Jack and Sue Raskin. 67. Wilkerson had been a well-known professor of education at Howard University before joining the Communist Party, leaving Howard, and becoming one of the most prominent African American Communists in the 1940s. For an important and widely circulated statement of his Communist beliefs, see Wilkerson, “Victory in War and Peace,” in Rayford Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 193–216. His commitment to Communism did not mean that he accepted unquestioningly all promulgations of the party line. In 1946, as a party member, he criticized the revival of the Communist Party’s far-fetched scheme for self-determination within a black homeland in the South, arguing that progress for black Americans was possible without the overthrow of capitalism. See Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 132–133. He left the Communist Party in 1958. 68. Interview with Herb Plever. 69. Interviews with Barbara Brandes Roth, Ursula Day. 70. “Queens Survey: White and Negro Parents Reveal Similar Aspirations,” NPC, August 14, 1965. 71. The area around JHS 8, according to a 1965 study of the school, had “the characteristics of a poorer section of the city,” with its population in private dwellings and low-rise apartment buildings. Its predecessor school, JHS 40, in the late 1950s, had had a transiency rate (students transferring in or out during the school year) of over 50 percent, the highest rate of any junior high school in Queens. Gertrude Downing et al., The Preparation of Teachers for Schools in Culturally Deprived Neighborhoods (Flushing, NY: Queens College, 1965), 16. 72. Richard S. Grossley (1885–1955), a prominent African American educator, served as president of Baton Rouge College (1914 –1916) and Delaware State College (1923–1943). In 1948 he was appointed to the faculty of Long Island University and moved to Jamaica, where he would be active in educational issues in southeastern Queens. 73. “NAACP bows to Segregated Site,” NYAN, April 2, 1960; “Leadership??” editorial, NYAN, April 9, 1960; William Booth, “NAACP Head Clears Up School Stand,” letter to the editor, NYAN, April 23, 1960; interview with Kenneth Tewel; Juliette Burnett, “School Report by Parents for Educational Progress,” Inside Rochdale, April 27, 1967. 74. “Fear Rochdale Will Swamp Local Schools.” 75. For background on JHS 8, see Downing, The Preparation of Teachers for Schools in Culturally Deprived Neighborhoods, 16; interview with Kenneth Tewel. 76. See letter by Marion Stern, Inside Rochdale, April 29, 1965; “Eighteen More Schools in Pairing Named,” NYT, February 25, 1964; Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 46–47. 77. “JHS 8 Utilization,” Inside Rochdale, September 1966. 78. See letter by Marion Stern, Inside Rochdale, April 29, 1965. 79. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. 80. “Letter of Rochdale Village Committee for Public Schools to Cooperators,” November 10, 1963 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 81. Ibid.; Rochdale Committee for Public Schools, “To Dr. Ryan, Mr. Booth, and Members of the Local School Board of District 50,” November 1, 1963, Subject Files, Integration, James B. Donovan series 321, Board of Education Records, Municipal Archives.

Notes to Pages 168–174

285

82. Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together,” New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1966. 83. Leonard Buder, “City to Transfer Pupils This Fall for Integration,” NYT, May 29, 1964; interview with Kenneth Tewel. 84. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” An accelerated track that combined seventh, eight, and ninth grades into a two-year program was introduced in the New York City public schools in 1922. In 1960 a new three-year enriched program was introduced, which educators thought would reduce some of the maturity problems with accelerated programs. In 1962, of 190,000 students in the city’s junior high schools, 11,000 were in the accelerated programs, and 14,000 were in the enriched programs. Both these programs were universally known as the SPs, or the Special Programs. “Principals Back Enriched Studies” NYT, July 25, 1962. 85. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. 86. Ibid. 87. Walter Woods, “The Tug of War,” Inside Rochdale, May 29, 1967. 88. Leonard Buder, “City to Transfer Pupils This Fall for Integration,” NYT, May 29, 1964; Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 89. “JHS 8 Utilization,” Inside Rochdale, September 1966. 90. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. 91. Interview with George and Beryl Korot. 92. Interview with Susan and Jack Raskin. 93. Interview with George and Beryl Korot. 94. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. 95. Interview with Adele Goret. 96. James F. Clarity, “Quality of Schools Varies Widely Under Local Boards,” NYT, February 21, 1971. 97. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 98. Marion Stern, Inside Rochdale, April 29, 1965. 99. Rochdale Forum, April 21, 2002. 100. Rochdale Forum, May 3, 1999. 101. Interview with Evlynne Braithwaite. 102. Interviews with Merrill Oliver Douglas, Joseph Raskin, Barbara Brandes Roth, Evlynne Braithwaite. 103. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. 104. Interviews with James Klurfeld, Vicki Perlman. 105. Rochdale Forum, May 1, 1999. 106. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. 107. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 511. 108. Larry Lapka, Rochdale Forum, August 2, 1999.

10. The Great Fear and the High-Crime Era 1. For a classic account of the Kitty Genovese murder see A. M. Rosenthal, Thirty-Eight Witnesses (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). For a revisionist account of the reaction of the potential witnesses to the murder, see Jim Rasenberger, “Kitty, 40 Years Later,” NYT, February 8, 2004. 2. Eric H. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8–9. 3. Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 144. Taxes, the rental market, schools, unemployment, the subways, welfare fraud, and traffic and parking all ranked higher. Race relations ranked tenth. 4. Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 59.

286

Notes to Pages 174 –177

5. Robert W. Snyder, “Crime,” in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Peter Eisenstadt, Charles Lidner, and Andrew Karmen, “Crime,” in Peter Eisenstadt, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005). For overviews of the high-crime era see Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 449–466. 6. For the debate over the Civilian Complaint Review Board see Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 232–251; Cannato, The Ungovernable City, 155–188. 7. Advertisements in Inside Rochdale, October 7, 1966. 8. “Jamaicans Demand Police Protection,” NYAN, March 11, 1939; “Jamaica Cops Nip Terrors,” NYAN, March 18, 1939; “South Jamaica Residents Protest Lawlessness: Demand More Police,” NYAN, April 4, 1941; “Negro Cops Are Assigned to South Jamaica Section,” NYAN, August 12, 1944; “NAACP Meeting to Protest Increasing ‘Police Brutality,’ ” NYAN, October 8, 1949. 9. Edward Carpenter and Jacquelyn Peterson, South Jamaica: A Community Study (New York: Queens College Children and Parents Center, 1966), 37. The rate increased in South Jamaica from 29.3 per 1,000 ( juvenile delinquents identified per 1,000 persons aged 7 to 20) to 66.4. The rate for Queens as a whole was 29.6. 10. Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan, Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1977, 504. 11. Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together,” New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1966. 12. Interview with Anita Starr. 13. Inside Rochdale, September 1968. 14. The best-known work is Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), and all this literature draws liberally on the insights of Jane Jacobs, for whom this was just one additional element in the design flaws of superblock housing. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 29–54. 15. Interview with Olga Lewis. 16. Rochdale Village Bulletin, June 1964, 1–2; “Rochdale FamiliesAirTheir Beefs,” LIP, February 16, 1964; “Rochdale Protests Protested by Protestors’ Neighbors,” LIP, February 21, 1964. 17. Inside Rochdale, April 15, 1965. 18. “SRO at Civic Ass’n Meeting,” Inside Rochdale, October 7, 1965. 19. “Petition to Mayor Wagner,” Inside Rochdale, November 15, 1965. 20. Maurice Cerrier, “Observations on House Congress,” Inside Rochdale, March 25, 1966. 21. “Boyers Outlines Plan to Halt Rochdale March of Crime,” LIP, March 23, 1966. 22. Ibid.; Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 23. Richard Patcher, “The Eye and Ear,” Inside Rochdale, December 18, 1967. 24. “The Star Poll,” Inside Rochdale, October 1968. 25. Anonymous letter, Inside Rochdale, February 1969. 26. Anonymous letter, Inside Rochdale, February 1972. 27. Eddie Abramson, “SOS,” Inside Rochdale, December 19, 1966. 28. Patcher, “The Eye and Ear.” 29. “Rapist Gets 25 Years,” NYT, January 28, 1972. 30. “Security Committee of the Board of Directors,” Rochdale Village Inc., March 9, 1972, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. 31. “Stabbed Rochdaler Complains of Management Indifference,” Inside Rochdale, July 1969. 32. Helen Katz, “When Will the Madness End?” Inside Rochdale, November 26, 1966. 33. “How to Protect Your Car From Thieves,” Inside Rochdale, November 1966. 34. Harold Ostroff to Executive Committee of Rochdale Village, Inc., February 17, 1971, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives.

Notes to Pages 177–181

287

35. For organized crime at Kennedy Airport, see James B. Jacobs, Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime (New York: New York University Press, 1999). For the ubiquity of professional car thieves in South Jamaica and Rochdale, see interview with Omar Barbour. 36. Harold Ostroff to Executive Committee of Rochdale Village, Inc. 37. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 38. Inside Rochdale, October 1968; Mrs. S. Gordon, “Takes Exception,” letter, March 18, 1972, Inside Rochdale; Rochdale Village Board of Directors, minutes from the Board of Directors meeting on April 18, 1972. 39. “Crime Plagues Local Stores,” Inside Rochdale, January 1970. 40. Ibid. 41. “Can Decay Be Stopped?” Inside Rochdale, July 25, 1970. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. For Victor Gruen, see M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 44. “Can Decay Be Stopped?” 45. “Crime: Rochdale Answers,” Inside Rochdale, May 1972. 46. Security Department, news release, April 1971, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. The report spoke of some serious incidents including eight involving thirteen- and fourteen-yearolds (six of whom were residents of Rochdale) who rode on the top of elevators pouring oil down the shafts, wanting to see sparks. 47. Security Department, news release, April 1971, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. According to one report, by January 1973, the per month cost of vandalism was $14,000. Hal Levenson to Jules Weinstein, Inside Rochdale, May 1973. 48. See papers of “Ad Hoc Committee Against Drug Abuse in Rochdale Village and Southeastern Queens” (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). The organization was founded in 1971 by Arthur Greene. 49. Interview with Omar Barbour. 50. Arthur Greene to Dorothy Brannum, June 8, 1971 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 51. Security Committee of the Board of Directors, March 9, 1972, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. 52. February 1972 anonymous letter to Inside Rochdale. 53. “SRO at Civic Ass’n Meeting,” Inside Rochdale, October 17, 1965. 54. Security Department, news release, April 1971, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. 55. Hal Levenson to Jules Weinstein, Inside Rochdale, May 1973. The NYPD statistics covered Rochdale and its immediate vicinity, a sector of the 113th precinct, an area about one and a third the size of Rochdale itself. 56. Inside Rochdale, September 1968. 57. “Crime Plagues Merchants,” Inside Rochdale, April 19, 1972. To the claims of the local police that Rochdale had “the lowest crime rate in the precinct,” a merchant responded, “That’s not much of a comfort when our precinct has one of the highest crime rates in the city.” 58. Jules Weinstein, “Message from the Manager,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, November 1971; Jules Weinstein, “Message from the Manager,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, May 1972; interviews with William Jones, Joe Raskin. 59. Citywide crime statistics for 1972 are available in Snyder, “Crime.” 60. Mrs. S. Gordon, “Takes Exception,” letter, Inside Rochdale, March 18, 1972. 61. Security Committee of the Board of Directors, Rochdale Village Inc., March 9, 1972, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives. 62. “SRO at Civic Ass’n Meeting,” Inside Rochdale, October 15, 1965. 63. “Boyers Outlines Plan to Halt Rochdale March of Crime,” LIP, March 23, 1966. 64. “103rd Precinct to Patrol Inside Rochdale,” Inside Rochdale, October 7, 1966. 65. Patcher, “The Eye and Ear.” 66. “Inquiring Photographer: This Month’s Question: What Would You Do to Increase Security at Rochdale and How Would You Suggest Improving Security?” Inside Rochdale, September 1968.

288

Notes to Pages 181–186

67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Security Committee of the Board of Directors, Rochdale Village Inc., March 9, 1972, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. 70. Rochdale Village Security Department, news release, April 1971, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. 71. Security Committee of the Board of Directors, Rochdale Village Inc., March 9, 1972, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. 72. Robert J. McCants, “Report on Security Department,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, March 1974. 73. “Co-operator Nabs Bicycle Suspect,” Inside Rochdale, October 15, 1965. 74. Sidney Rosenberg, letter, Inside Rochdale, January 15, 1968. 75. Interview with Adele Goret. 76. See papers of “Ad Hoc Committee Against Drug Abuse in Rochdale Village and Southeastern Queens.” 77. Interview with Cal Jones; “Black Dimensions,” Rochdale Black Society Newsletter, April 1972. 78. “Operation Blinker,” Inside Rochdale, June 27, 1967; “Operation Blinker,” Inside Rochdale, October 15, 1967; Jack Lehman, “A Partial Report on Operation Blinker,” Inside Rochdale, January 14, 1968. 79. Sidney Rosenberg, letter, Inside Rochdale, January 15, 1968. 80. Rochdale Board of Directors, “This Is Rochdale’s Situation,” Rochdale Board of Directors minutes, November 1970, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives. 81. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 82. “Co-operator Nabs Bicycle Suspect.” 83. “Boyers Outlines Plan to Halt Rochdale March of Crime.” 84. Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” 85. Patcher, “The Eye and Ear.” 86. “Crime Plagues Local Stores.” 87. Interview with Eddie Abramson. 88. Security Department, news release, April 1971, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives. 89. Maurice Cerrier, “Observations on House Congress,” Inside Rochdale, December 11, 1966. 90. Inside Rochdale, February 1969. 91. Interview with Evlynne Braithwaithe; Rod Smith, “Auxiliary Police Corner,” Rochdale Black Society: Black Dimension, January–February 1973; Lindsey Gruson, “Killings in Rochdale Village Cause Neighbor to Fear Neighbor,” NYT, September 4, 1982. 92. “This Is Rochdale’s Situation.” There were proposals to charge residents or their children for the costs incurred by acts of vandalism; Lewis Lubka and David Stoloff to Board of Directors of Rochdale Village Inc., November 24, 1970, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives. 93. “To the Parents in Rochdale Village,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, April 1974. 94. Anonymous letter, Inside Rochdale, July 1969. 95. Tom McMorrow, “Rochdale Co-opers Charge No Cooperation in Crime Fight,” Daily News, July 5, 1969. 96. Inside Rochdale, November 21, 1970. 97. “New Tenants Group Formed,” Inside Rochdale, March 1970. 98. Rod Smith, “Auxiliary Police Corner.” 99. Ibid. 100. “To the Parents in Rochdale Village.” 101. Anonymous letter, Inside Rochdale, February 1972. 102. Beverly Epstein to Rochdale Village Board of Directors, July 11, 1972, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid.; Security Committee of the Board of Directors, Rochdale Village Inc., March 9, 1972, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives.

Notes to Pages 186–194 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

289

Anonymous letter, Inside Rochdale, February 1972. “This Is Rochdale’s Situation.” Oscar Trager, “Mans Best Friend???,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, September 1972. Security Committee of the Board of Directors, March 9, 1972, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives. Robert B. Kaufman to Jules I. Weinstein, re: dog cases, October 16, 1974, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. Eddie Abramson, “SOS!” Eddie Abramson, editorial, Inside Rochdale, July 1969. Eddie Abramson, “Why I am Supporting Mario A. Proccacino,” advertisement, Inside Rochdale, September 1969. Inside Rochdale, October 1972. Nathan Glazer, “When the Melting Pot Doesn’t Melt,” NYT, January 2, 1972. Mario Cuomo, Forest Hills Diary: The Crisis of Low-Income Housing (New York: Random House, 1974), 93. Barbara Brandes Roth, Rochdale Forum, February 24, 2002.

11. The 1968 Teachers’ Strike and the Implosion of Integration 1. The literature on the 1968 teachers strike is voluminous. The most comprehensive and evenhanded account is Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 2. For Shanker’s membership on the UHF Board of Directors, see United Housing Foundation, Twenty Years of Accomplishment (New York: UHF, 1971), 30. 3. Interviews with Cal Jones, Jack Raskin. 4. Interview with Anita Starr. 5. Interview with Eddie Abramson. 6. Interview with Harold Ostroff. 7. Interview with Herb Plever. 8. Interviews with Anita Starr, Cal Jones. 9. Gene Currivan, “Parents Will Get City School Voice,” NYT, April 21, 1967. 10. For the difference between community control and decentralization, see Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 275–276; Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 162. 11. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 23; David Rogers: 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City Schools (New York: Random House, 1968), 266–323. 12. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street, 370–373. 13. Cannato, The Ungovernable City, 275–276. 14. For Parents and Taxpayers, see Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 23–30. 15. For a typical critique of the state of the city’s public schools by liberal integrationists, see Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 111–153. 16. See Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 71–102. 17. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 123. For similar accounts see Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 166; Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 37–38. 18. For attacks on Lindsay as a “limousine liberal” who “tolerated violence [and] explained away anti-Semitism,” see Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 112. 19. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 81. 20. Ibid., 42–47.

290

Notes to Pages 194 –200

21. For the IS 201 controversy in 1966–67 see Cannato, The Ungovernable City, 272–275, and Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 68–71. 22. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 71–102. 23. Ibid., 1–9, 103–115. 24. Ibid., 115–152. 25. Interview with Cal Jones. 26. Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground: An Inquiry into the Basis of Man’s Experience of Community (1971; repr., Richmond, IN: United Friends Press, 1986). 27. Most accounts of the strike are exercises in dichotomization, see Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 159–168; Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 93–124; Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (New York: Free Press, 1998), 175–220; Cannato, The Ungovernable City, 339–340. Even Podair underestimates the extent to which, in places like Rochdale, both strike supporters and opponents were deeply committed to the ideals of integrated schools. 28. For the African Teacher’s Association and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy, see Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 153–174. 29. “The Perfect School, A Problem,” Inside Rochdale, September 25, 1967. 30. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 160–164. 31. Emanuel Perlmutter, “Booth Questions Teachers’ Motives,” NYT, October 1, 1967. 32. Rochdale Forum, May 1, 1999; Rochdale Forum, May 2, 1999; interviews with Vicki Perlman, Sue Raskin, Freddy Eisenstadt. 33. Rochdale Forum, May 1, 1999. 34. Ibid.; Rochdale Forum, May 2, 1999. 35. Interview with Cal Jones. 36. Lenny Vaughan, Inside Rochdale, April 1966. 37. Eddie Abramson, “Rochdale Supports JHS 8,” Inside Rochdale, September 1966. 38. Juliette Burnett [president, PTA 116], “School Report by Parents for Educational Progress,” Inside Rochdale, April 24, 1967. 39. “IS 72 Proposals Draw Large Crowds,” Inside Rochdale, February 27, 1967. 40. “IS 72,” Inside Rochdale, January 21, 1966. 41. Mary Redic, letter to the editor, Inside Rochdale, March 13, 1966. 42. Eddie Abramson, “Integrated Schools,” Inside Rochdale, February 27, 1967. 43. “School Pairing Controversy Continues,” Inside Rochdale, June 1968. 44. Eddie Abramson, “Bundy School Re-Districting Plan,” Inside Rochdale, April 5, 1968. 45. Sue Raskin remembers a strenuous argument with a black official of the Transport Workers Union about the strike, she opposing the strike, he supporting it. (Their argument, like many held between people on the opposite sides of the strike, had the effect of cooling their friendship); interview with Sue Raskin. 46. Interview with Cal Jones. 47. Ibid. 48. Interview with Sue Raskin. 49. See the advertisements in the NYT of September 20, 1968, “Why Don’t They Want Our Children to Learn?” and “The Freedom to Teach.” Dwight McDonald originally signed the latter advertisement but later changed sides and engaged in a prolonged polemic with Michael Harrington, reprinted in Maurice R. Berube and Marilyn Gittell, Confrontation at Ocean Hill–Brownsville: The New York School Strikes of 1968 (New York: Praeger, 1969), 222–246. 50. Interview with Anita Starr. 51. Interview with Cal Jones. 52. Interview with Herb Plever. 53. “The Star Poll,” Inside Rochdale, November 1968. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Interview with Cal Jones. 57. Interview with Anita Starr.

Notes to Pages 200–207 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89.

291

Interview with Herb Plever. Interview with Cal Jones. Interview with Francesca Spero. Interview with Cal Jones. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. Interview with Cal Jones. Interview with Herb Plever. “Local Election Results,” Inside Rochdale, November 1968. “Lindsay in Rochdale,” Inside Rochdale, November 1969. “Anti-Semitism: Not as Bad as It Sounds,” Inside Rochdale, February 1969. Interview with Sue Raskin. Interview with Anita Starr. William H. Booth, “Racism and Human Rights,” in Nat Hentoff, ed., Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 117–128. Charles G. Bennett, “Booth Replaced in City Rights Job and Named Judge,” NYT, February 5, 1969. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 171–182. “Jamaica NAACP Supports PS 40 Principal,” NYAN, June 17, 1967. Interview with Herman Ferguson. Interviews with Cal Jones, Herb Plever. Interview with Sue Raskin. Interview with Cal Jones. There is a voluminous literature on black-Jewish relations. See Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jack Salzman and Cornel West, Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Maurianne Adams and John H. Bracey, eds., Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). “AJC Set to Launch Negro-Jewish Project,” Inside Rochdale, February 11, 1966; Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Harvey Swados, “When Black and White Live Together.” Bernard Seeman, “Reflections,” Inside Rochdale, September 25, 1967. Samuel Mandell, “Ezra Tobias, Man of the Month,” Inside Rochdale, June 26, 1967. Interview with Eddie Abramson. Kahane had already published a book calling on Jews to support the war in Vietnam. “Forum on Anti-Semitism,” Inside Rochdale, February 1969. “The Traditional Synagogue of Rochdale,” in Libby Kahane, Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought, vol. 1, unpublished manuscript in the author’s possession (now published, see bibliography). This book, by Kahane’s widow, is the most thorough and carefully researched study of Meir Kahane, and while sympathetic to its subject, is not unduly polemical; Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, from FBI Informant to Knesset Member (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990), is, as the title indicates, rather polemical, and is a work of journalism but forms a necessary supplement to Libby Kahane’s biography. Interview with Robert Lipsky. Campbell had read the poem of a student that began “Jewboy, Jewboy, yarmulke on your head/ Jewboy, Jewboy, I wish you were dead” on the Julius Lester program on WBAI on December 26, 1968, and not during the teachers’ strike, as is often assumed. Leonard Buder, “Board Is Asked to Oust Teacher over Poem Called Anti-Semitic,” NYT, January 18, 1969. Merton Chertoff claimed that the JDL, “by using violence . . . succeeded in denying” Leslie Campbell from speaking. Merton Chertoff, “Gertrude & JDL,” letter, NYAN, June 12, 1971. Libby Kahane, “The JDL November 1968–June 1969,” in Rabbi Meir Kahane; “Members of the JDL Picket at P.S. 30, Rochdale Village,” LIP, January 17, 1969. Libby Kahane, “The JDL November 1968–June 1969,” in Rabbi Meir Kahane.

292 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

Notes to Pages 208–212 “Decentralization Plan Rapped by Foes on Both Sides,” Inside Rochdale, January 1968. M. A. Farber, “Suit Charges Bias in Queens Schools,” NYT, March 3, 1970. Rochdale Village Black Society, Bulletin 1, no. 5, April 1972. Public Education Association and the League of Women Voters, “Inventory of Candidates Views: School Board Elections District 28—March 19, 1970,” UFT Papers, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. Rochdale Village Black Society Bulletin 1, no. 5, April 1972. James F. Clarity, “Quality of Schools Varies Widely Under Local Board,” NYT, February 21, 1971. Jimmy Breslin, “Plantation Days in South Jamaica,” New York Magazine (n.d. [Spring 1971]); “17 Queens Teachers Win Reinstatement at JHS 142,” NYT, March 25, 1971; James F. Clarity, “Quality of Schools Varies Widely Under Local Board,” LIP (n.d.); article from the Daily News (Spring 1971), UFT Papers, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Breslin, “Plantation Days in South Jamaica”; Rochdale Black Society Newsletter, February 1971. “Chamber’s Essay Contest Defended by School Board,” LIP, March 3, 1972. “The Perfect New School, A Problem,” Inside Rochdale, September 25, 1967. Interview with Anita Starr. Jerald Podair writes that IS 201, which opened in East Harlem in the fall of 1966, was “the last gasp of the integration impulse in the New York City public school system.” The Strike That Changed New York, 34. Perhaps this title might be more fairly awarded to IS 72, which opened a year later. Anita Starr said that the racial balance was slightly majority white when it opened; Nancy Brandon said it was about 60 percent black, 40 percent white; interviews with Anita Starr, Nancy Brandon. Interview with Sue Raskin. Ibid. Interview with Kenneth Tewel. Interview with Anita Starr. Interview with Ellen Page. Ursula Day, the black principal of PS 30, worked to minimize the lingering bad feelings and said that in the end the strike’s long-term impact was minimal (interview with Ursula Day). At Springfield Gardens HS, Kenneth Tewel and Robert Couche, leaders of the two factions, met repeatedly during and after the strike to minimize the bad feelings and set up a school trip to Nixon’s inaugural in January 1969 to try to further bury the hatchet (interview with Kenneth Tewel). Interview with Sue Raskin. Interview with Anita Starr. Interview with Nancy Brandon. Ibid. Interview with Anita Starr. Ibid. Interview with Lloyd Lawrence. Interviews with Eric Eisenstadt, Freddy Eisenstadt. Rochdale Forum, July 24, 1999. Rochdale Forum, July 26, 1999. Ibid.; Rochdale Forum, June 25, 1999. Rochdale Forum, June 16, 2000. Interview with Anita Starr. Interview with Ellen Page. Interview with Francesca Spero. Ibid. Interview with Nancy Brandon. Rochdale Forum, July 26, 1999.

Notes to Pages 212–218

293

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

Rochdale Forum, July 3, 1999. Interview with Lloyd Lawrence. Interview with Francesca Spero. Interview with Anita Starr. Ibid. Interview with Francesca Spero. Rochdale Forum, June 27, 1999. Interview with Francesca Spero. Rochdale Forum, June 27, 1999. Interview with Sue Raskin. Rochdale Forum, August 25, 1999; interview with Anita Starr. Rochdale Black Society, Newsletter, February 1971. Susan Raskin to Mrs. Helene Lloyd, Board of Education, June 19, 1970 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). The group called for school-based workshops with leading educators to improve the teaching levels, and called for the Board of Education to supply funds for these purposes. 140. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 30, 107. 141. Interview with Nancy Brandon.

12. As Integration Ebbed Epigraph. Rochdale Bulletin 9, no. 8 (October 1974). 1. The 51st State was aired on WNET from 1972 through 1976, nightly through the middle of 1973, and weekly thereafter. For a history of The 51st State and to find extant segments (which does not include the program on Rochdale), see http://www.thirteen.org/the51st State/index.html. 2. The program’s contents are reconstructed from Inside Rochdale, April–May 1973, and the May 1973 Rochdale Village Bulletin, which also contains all the responses quoted. 3. Inside Rochdale, April–May 1973; Rochdale Village Bulletin, May 1973. 4. Hal Levenson, letter, Rochdale Village Bulletin, May 1973. 5. Inside Rochdale, April–May 1973; Rochdale Village Bulletin, May 1973. 6. Inside Rochdale, April–May 1973; Rochdale Village Bulletin, May 1973. 7. Rochdale Village Bulletin, April 1973. 8. Lewis Lachman to Commissioner Charles J. Urstadt, May 15, 1972, State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal, New York State Archives. 9. Some would date it somewhat earlier. Arthur Greene stated that “by 1965, 1966, families were beginning to leave” (interview with Arthur Greene). No doubt this was true, but it was a trickle and difficult to distinguish from the inevitable Brownian motion of move-ins and move-outs one would find in any development. 10. Numbers on the white exodus need to be pieced together from many sources. In 1970, 447 families, representing about 7.6 percent of the apartments, left Rochdale; see Leonard Bridges to Rochdale Village Board of Directors, December 15, 1970, UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University. By 1973, 1,800 families, or about 31 percent of the families, are reported as having moved out over the previous three years; “Cooperation Means Responsibility,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, May 1973. Estimates of the black population of Rochdale include 50 percent in 1974, “Rochdale Village Preparing for 10th Anniversary Dinner,” LIP, January 6, 1974; 60 percent, Morris Milgram, Good Neighborhood: The Challenge of Open Housing (New York: Norton, 1977), 178; 70 percent in 1977, Murray Schumach, “If It Really Takes All Kinds, Queens Certainly Takes All Kinds,” NYT, March 2, 1977; and 85 percent in 1979, “A Vision of Utopia Fading at Rochdale,” NYT, June 8, 1979. The white population continued to decline, and by the early 1990s, Rochdale Village was 98 percent nonwhite, Diana Shaman, “Queens Co-op Working Out Problems,” NYT, March 12, 1993. Rochdale’s population was 98 percent nonwhite in the U.S. 2000 census.

294

Notes to Pages 218–223

11. Rochdale Village Forum survey, 2002–2003. 12. Thomas A. Johnson, “Racial Change: Two Queens Areas, Addisleigh Park and ‘Black Flight,’ ” NYT, May 9, 1976. 13. Leonard S. Bridges to Rochdale Village Board of Directors, December 15, 1970, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. 14. Interview with Jack Raskin. 15. Interview with Herb Plever. 16. Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 17. Larry L., Rochdale Forum, July 24, 1999. 18. Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 19. Interview with Cal Jones. 20. Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 21. Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 22. Interview with Herb Plever. 23. Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 24. Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 25. Rochdale Forum, June 1999. 26. Joe Raskin, Rochdale Forum, July 26, 1999. 27. David Bird, “Policy Against Park Fences Yields to Community Needs,” NYT, November 3, 1971; Michael Kaufman, “Residents Avoid Prize-Winning Park,” NYT, January 2, 1972; Benjamin Schlesinger Junior High School 72, minutes of conference held April 5, 1972, in UHF Papers, Kheel Center Archives. The security force complained immediately that the park was impossible to patrol. 28. Rochdale Forum, July 26, 1999. 29. Kaufman, “Residents Avoid Prize-Winning Park.” 30. Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 31. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 18; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 244; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 189–195; Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 32. Rochdale Village Bulletin, September 1974. 33. Richard Rogin, “John Henry Howell Makes It,” NYT, June 24, 1973. 34. Rochdale Forum, March 6, 2002. 35. Interview with Cal Jones. 36. Vicki Perlman, Rochdale Village Forum Survey. 37. Interview with Cal Jones. 38. Interview with Barbara Brandes Roth. 39. Interview with Anita Starr. 40. Rochdale Black Society Newsletter, November–December 1971; interview with Cal Jones. 41. William E. Dunlap to John J. Iselin, Rochdale Village Bulletin, May 1973. 42. Inside Rochdale, October 1972. 43. Inside Rochdale, November 1972. 44. Interview with Jack Raskin. 45. Milgram, Good Neighborhood, 178. Starrett City, which opened in 1974, had a quota system, a “managed waiting list” that limited the numbers of black residents to 30 percent. This was eventually challenged in federal court and rejected as illegal in 1977, and the percentage of blacks, many of them on public assistance, rapidly increased, though some effort was made to retain an informal quota system. In 2006 Starrett City was 67 percent black, and 33 percent white; see Janny Scott, “A Sweeping Housing Plan Bedeviled by Racial Quotas,” NYT, December 1, 2006.

Notes to Pages 223–227 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

295

Milgram, Good Neighborhood, 178. Rochdale Village Bulletin, April 1973. Ibid., November 1973. Interviews with Anita Starr, Sue Raskin, Harold Ostroff. Rochdale Village Board of Directors, minutes from the meeting of June 22, 1971, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. Rochdale Bulletin 9, no. 8, October 1974. Rochdale Black Society, Newsletter, November–December 1971. Jules Weinstein, “From the Manager’s Desk,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, November 1971. “A Vision of Utopia Fading at Rochdale,” NYT, June 8, 1979. Interview with Juanita Watkins. Jules Weinstein, “From the Manager’s Desk,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, November 1973; interviews with Cal Jones, Jack Raskin. Jack Raskin told me, “I don’t care what you heard elsewhere, I’m telling you, and I was on the Board of Directors for most of the 1970s, no one on welfare was ever admitted to Rochdale.” (As he explained further, this did not preclude individuals, perhaps because of a divorce or a reversal of economic fortunes, from going on welfare while living at the cooperative.) An extant memo from January 1971, as the white exodus was beginning its crescendo, shows no diminution in the care made in assigning apartments; see “Reuel Williams to Rochdale Village Board of Directors,” January 4, 1971, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. Interview with Lloyd Lawrence. Jules Weinstein, “From the Manager’s Desk,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, November 1973. Rochdale Village Board of Directors, minutes from the meeting of March 7, 1973, UHF Files, Kheel Center Archives. Jules Weinstein, “From the Manager’s Desk,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, November 1973. Inside Rochdale, November 1969 Interview with Jack Raskin. “Tenant Group Gets Man: Brown Quits as Manager,” Inside Rochdale, February 14, 1970; “Board Election Underway to 15 Member Board of Directors,” Inside Rochdale, October 1970; New York State Department of Housing and Urban Renewal, Memo of John O’Rourke and Melvin Julie, Meeting with RV Tenants Council, April 28, 1969, New York State Archives. New York State Department of Housing and Urban Renewal, Memo of John O’Rourke and Melvin Julie, Meeting with RV Tenants Council, April 28, 1969, New York State Archives. Rochdale Village management sometimes stopped political organizations from soliciting on its grounds, though it was inconsistent in this. In 1968 when the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party tried to collect signatures in the Rochdale Mall, it needed the help of the American Civil Liberties Union to do so; “Field Report on Rochdale Village,” September 1968, Department of Housing and Urban Renewal, New York State Archives. Harry Lopatin, “The Sounding Board,” Inside Rochdale, June 26, 1967. Inside Rochdale, December 1969, describing the December 1969 issue of Rochdale Bulletin, which is not extant. Leon Hess, letter, Inside Rochdale, January 1971. Interview with Hugh Williams. In looking back on it, Williams had a real sense that he had bitten off more than he could comfortably chew. “After I was elected to the board, it really scared me, because I felt that I was an X-ray technician, and my field was health, and I really didn’t know that much about housing.” To be fair, Williams was simply being more honest than most members of the board; relative ignorance of the intricacies of housing policy was not limited to members of the Tenants Council. Interviews with Cal Jones, Harold Ostroff, Herb Plever, Arthur Greene; author of the “commies” remark withheld. Interview with Cal Jones; interview with Herb Plever. Interview with Arthur Greene. Interview with Jack Raskin.

296

Notes to Pages 227–231

73. “The Financial Straits of the New York City Mitchell-Lama Program,” Report of the Economic Council of New York, January 1975; Joseph P. Fried, “Two Housing Projects Shaky Financially Levitt Says,” NYT, January 26, 1976. 74. Office of the State Comptroller, “Summary Results of Financial Operations for Nine Fiscal Years Ended March 31, 1974,” Audit Report on Special Review of Rochdale Village Financial Status (Albany, NY: Office of the Comptroller, 1974), appendix A. 75. “Rochdale Village Tenants Going to Albany to Protest Proposed 27.6% ‘Rent’ Increase,” NYT, April 14, 1974. 76. David Bird, “Rochdale Village Facing Cutoff of All Fuels by Thanksgiving,” NYT, November 14, 1973. 77. Audit Report on Special Review of Rochdale Village Financial Status. 78. Joseph P. Fried, “A New Court Battle at Rochdale Village,” NYT, November 17, 1974; “State Moves to Foreclose Mortgage on Co-op City,” NYT, August 5, 1974. The Co-op City residents arguably had a more substantial grievance than Rochdale residents, since average perroom carrying charges at Co-op City in 1974 rose to $53.50, in comparison to Rochdale’s per room average of $41.48, despite apartments that were very similar in layout and dimension. 79. Fried, “A New Court Battle at Rochdale Village.” 80. Joseph P. Fried, “Tenants Urged to Pay Arrears,” NYT, December 8, 1974. 81. Alfonso A. Navarez, “Cuomo Rejects Most Lobbyists,” NYT, March 11, 1975. 82. Joseph P. Fried, “Two Housing Projects Shaky Financially, Levitt Says,” NYT, January 26, 1976; “Rochdale Village Budget Balanced,” Rochdale Village Bulletin, February 1976. 83. Interview with Arthur Greene; “Rochdale’s Worst Threat,” Inside Rochdale, October 1975.

13. The Trouble with the Teamsters Epigraph. Florence Reece (1900–1986), “Which Side Are You On?” 1931. 1. Interview with Jack Raskin. Although I have no reason to doubt Jack Raskin, who heard the story from the union negotiator, I should note that he was an opponent of the Tenants Council. 2. When this transition happened is not entirely clear. Jack Raskin indicated it was probably in the early 1970s, but a monthly report on Rochdale prepared by a staff member of the Department of Housing and Urban Renewal reported in May 1967 that a majority of the maintenance men had voted to join the Teamsters; Monthly Report on Rochdale, May 1967, Department of Housing and Urban Renewal, New York State Archives. 3. Rinker Buck, “The Death of a Dream: Rochdale vs. The Teamsters,” New York Magazine, August 6, 1978; Sam Roberts, “Ousted Teamster: A Brash Mistake,” NYT, April 19, 1993. 4. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” 5. “Rochdale Village Strike,” NYT, December 11, 1976. Other estimates for the average wage of maintenance workers under the 1976 contract (none of them offered by partisans of the Teamsters’ cause) was $260 a week (annualized to $13,520), $270 (annualized to $14,040), and $294 (annualized to $15,288); Diane H. Jones, “Profile: The Committee to Save Rochdale Village,” source unknown; “Dollars and Sense,” flier by William Dunlap, ca. May 1979; Hassan Hakim and Major Robinson, “Rochdale Village: Long and Bitter Struggle,” NYAN, October 20, 1979. For background on Barry Feinstein, see Alan Finder, “A Union Chief Leaves Big Shoes to Fill,” NYT, April 13, 1993. 6. Arthur Greene and Frank McKanic to Joseph Goldman, deputy commissioner of housing, January 5, 1977 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). 7. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” 8. Office of the State Comptroller, “Summary Results of Financial Operations for Nine Fiscal Years Ended March 31, 1974,” Audit Report on Special Review of Rochdale Village Financial Status (Albany, NY: Office of the Comptroller, 1974), appendix A. 9. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” 10. Leo Mossman was a member of the Transport Workers Union, and Ray Johnson, the treasurer, was active in the Postal Workers Union and was president of the postal workers credit

Notes to Pages 231–236

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

297

union; Jack Raskin, the chief negotiator, was a longtime union activist. Interview with Jack Raskin. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Ibid.; interview with Jack Raskin. Interview with Jack Raskin; Hakim and Robinson, “Rochdale Village Long and Bitter Struggle.” Mel Tapley, “Violence at Rochdale Village,” NYAN, December 9, 1978. William Butler, “Union Leader Gives Rochdale the Bird,” Daily News, November 23, 1978. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Interview with Jack Raskin; Buck, “The Death of a Dream”; “A Vision of Utopia Fading at Rochdale,” NYT, June 8, 1979. Interview with Jack Raskin; “A Vision of Utopia Fading at Rochdale,” NYT, June 8, 1979. Mel Tapley, “Rochdale ‘Under Siege,’ ” NYAN, April 14, 1979; Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Jones, “Profile: The Committee to Save Rochdale Village.” Interview with Joe Raskin; flier for December 10 rally (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Tapley, “Violence at Rochdale Village.” Interview with William Greenspan. Interviews with Jack Raskin, Joe Raskin. Interview with Jack Raskin. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Bulletin from Rochdale Village Board of Directors, June 11, 1979 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt); Edmund Newton, “Rochdale Village Striker Shot,” Newsday, June 6, 1979; interview with Cal Jones. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Ibid. “Strange Bedfellows Local 80 and the United Shareholders,” April 1978, flier (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Tapley, “Rochdale ‘Under Siege’ ”; interview with Jack Raskin. Interview with Cal Jones. Bernard Rabin, “Rochdale Directors Split on Replacing Striking Workers,” Daily News, January 4, 1979; Bernard Rabin, “Feud on Rochdale’s Board Headed for Court,” Daily News, n.d.; “We Walked Out Because,” Daily News, November 30, 1978; Greene and McKanic flier, November 1978; “Friends, Neighbors, and Stockholders of Rochdale Village,” notice of special meeting of stockholders, April 5, 1979; Tabulation of Special Election, minutes for Rochdale Village Board of Directors meetings, April 29, 1978, and November 27, 1978. Minutes and flier (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). United Shareholders flier, November 1978; Samuel Rosen to James Cohen, March 1, 1979 (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Interview with Arthur Greene. Interviews with Jack Raskin, Cal Jones. Rabin, “Rochdale Directors Split on Replacing Striking Workers.” Interview with Jack Raskin. “A Vision of Utopia Fading at Rochdale.” Hakim and Robinson, “Rochdale Village: Long and Bitter Struggle.” “Peace in Rochdale,” Daily News, December 8, 1978, editorial and accompanying cartoon. Fliers (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). “Demonstrate Now!! Sunday Dec 10,” flier (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Bernard Rabin, “Rochdale Workers to Go to Court,” Daily News, May 23, 1979; Rochdale Board of Directors, April 6, 1979, flier (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Rochdale Board of Directors, May 10, 1979, flier (collection of Peter Eisenstadt). Bernard Rabin, “Slate, Rochdale Board to Talk,” Daily News, May 20, 1979.

298

Notes to Pages 236–243

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Hakim and Robinson, “Rochdale Village Long and Bitter Struggle.” “Rochdale Court Ruling,” NYAN, December 1, 1979. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Roberts, “Ousted Teamster: A Brash Mistake.” Jones, “Profile: The Committee to Save Rochdale Village.” Interviews with Cal Jones, Jack Raskin. Tapley, “Rochdale ‘Under Siege.’ ” The extensive coverage of the strike in the Daily News was, in the opinion of the Concerned Cooperators, something of a mixed blessing, since Arthur Greene of the United Shareholders had a contact at the paper, and some thought the coverage was too favorable to Greene’s position and to that of the Teamsters; interviews with Arthur Greene, Jack Raskin. 56. Buck, “The Death of a Dream.” Hakim and Major Robinson, “Rochdale Village: Long and Bitter Struggle.” 57. Hakim and Robinson, “Rochdale Village Long and Bitter Struggle.” 58. Interview with Sue Raskin.

Epilogue: Looking Backward 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Betti Logan, “Tenants Question Rochdale Firings,” Newsday, November 28, 1981. Interview with William Greenspan. Interviews with Hugh Williams, William Greenspan. Louis Winnick, “When an Apartment Fulfilled an Ideal,” NYT, July 22, 2000. Rinker Buck, “The Death of a Dream: Rochdale vs. the Teamsters,” New York Magazine, August 6, 1979; Ari L. Goldman, “Aid for Troubled Housing Project Voted as Legislature Ends Session,” NYT, November 24, 1980; interview with William Greenspan. Mary Reinholz, “Rochdale Village in Renaissance after Years of Social, Fiscal Ills,” Newsday, May 30, 1997. According to the 1987 agreement, there were scheduled carrying-charge increases of 18 percent in April 1987, 16 percent in April 1989, and 9.85 percent in April 1991; Diana Shaman, “Queens Co-op Working Out Problems,” NYT, March 12, 1993. Interview with William Greenspan. Ibid. Shaman, “Queens Co-op Working Out Problems.” The roof repairs cost $1.8 million, and repairing the underground pipes cost $10.57 million; Shaman, “Queens Co-op Working Out Problems”; interview with William Greenspan. “Youth, 18, Charged with Slaying of a Queens Woman and Her Son,” NYT, April 26, 1980. Lindsey Gruson, “Killings in Rochdale Village Cause Neighbor to Fear Neighbor,” NYT, October 4, 1982. Glen Fowler, “Queens 9-Year-Old Raped and Stabbed While in Her Home,” NYT, May 14, 1986; “Two Arrested in Slaying of Two Security Guards,” NYT, November 19, 1989; Robert D. McFadden, “On a Bus in Queens, Three Bandits Stage a Frontier Robbery,” NYT, July 31, 1993. Peter Kerr, “Submachine Guns and Unpredictability Are Hallmarks of Crack’s Violence,” NYT, March 8, 1988. George James, “Murders in Queens Rise 25%; Crack Is Key Factor,” NYT, April 20, 1988. George James, “49 Get Transfers in Police Bias Case in Queens Precinct,” NYT, November 1, 1988. Josh Barbanel, “More Students Are Violent at Young Age,” NYT, December 4, 1993. Corey Kilgannon, “For Deliveryman, Another Day of Low Pay and High Risk,” NYT, February 22, 2004. Interview with Jack Raskin. Interviews with Jack Raskin, William Greenspan.

Notes to Pages 243–249 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

299

Interviews with Ursula Day, Herb Plever, Hugh Williams. Interview with Hugh Williams. Ibid. Reinholz, “Rochdale Village in Renaissance.” Interviews with William Greenspan, Hugh Williams, Ursula Day. For an example of Rochdale’s latter-day problems with carrying charges, power plants, and politics, see Christopher Henderson, “They’re Fed Up,” Queens Chronicle, February 23, 2006. Interview with Harold Ostroff. Interview with Herman Ferguson. Interview with Herman Ferguson. “Herman Jessor, 95, New York Architect for Co-op Buildings,” NYT, April 10, 1990. Gerald Fraser, “City Witness Calls for Housing in Central Park and Cemeteries,” NYT, September 28, 1967; interview with Harold Ostroff. For the UHF’s Liberty City proposal, see Fred Ferretti, “20,000 Unit Co-op Urged in Jersey City,” NYT, March 9, 1972. For Moses’s proposal for Atlantic Village, a massive 40,000 unit cooperative in Breezy Point, Queens, see Peter Kihss, “Breezy Pt. Urged as National Park,” NYT, May 9, 1969; Robert Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 471–476. Moses wanted to develop Atlantic Village as a low- to moderate-income cooperative for residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and much like Harold Ostroff ’s 1967 plan for cooperative housing in Central Park, Moses’s plan for Atlantic Village was the first step in the redevelopment of Bedford-Stuyvesant as a whole; first moving people into new cooperative housing, and then razing and building new cooperatives in the former slums. Moses mentioned his Breezy Point plans at the groundbreaking ceremonies for Co-op City in 1968 and would later write of it that the “experienced United Housing Foundation, which has built comparable projects at Rochdale and Co-op City, would act as initial sponsor, train the new residents in cooperative management, and then turn over the management to them,” Public Works, 478. Moses’s Atlantic Village scheme was not well-received, and it (like Liberty Village in Jersey City) died a quick death. For Harold Ostroff ’s resignation from the UHF, see Harold Ostroff to Board of Directors, UHF and Community Services, Inc., December 10, 1975, UHF papers, Kheel Center Archives, Cornell University; interview with Ken Wray. Charles, or Charlie, Rosen inexplicably continues to enjoy good press for his leadership of the Co-op City rent strike, as a sort of David who slung his shot against the Goliath of the UHF, though he was only a small man who destroyed something far greater than himself. For Rosen, a one-time Maoist who had been active in the Progressive Labor Party, the UHF were “the same Social Democratic whores I’ve hated all my life”; Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New Press: New York, 2002), 121. Nonetheless, after campaigning against carrying-charge rises, the first act of his faction, on gaining control of the board, given Co-op City’s dangerous financial state, was to raise carrying charges. In 2006 he was convicted of a felony to defraud a Co-op City youth organization. While it is certainly true that the UHF’s record during the Co-op City rent strike was not without its mistakes and blemishes, the only lasting achievement of Charlie Rosen was to kill the possibility of building new affordable middle income housing in New York City for a generation; for a typical example of Rosen sycophancy, see Ian Frazier, “Utopia, the Bronx: Co-op City and Its People,” New Yorker, June 26, 2006. For Rosen’s conviction, see Sewell Chan, “Bronx Odyssey: From Rebel to Executive to Felon,” NYT, October 10, 2006. Winnick, “When an Apartment Fulfilled an Ideal.” Michael Powell and Janet Roberts, “Minorities Affected Most as New York Foreclosures Rise,” NYT, May 15, 2009. Rochdale Forum, July 22, 2004; Rochdale Forum, July 23, 2004. Interview with Arthur Greene. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill– Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 48–70.

300

Notes to Pages 250–251

40. Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, “Integration Exhaustion: Race Fatigue and the American Dream,” in Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, eds., The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities (New York: Routledge, 2010), 1–8. 41. See for example the faint praise for integration in the “Round Table: Brown v. Board of Education, Fifty Years Later,” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004): 19–118. 42. Sheryll Chasin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 42. 43. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.) 44. For other accounts of recent attempts to create or preserve integrated communities see Juliet Saltman, A Fragile Movement: The Struggle for Neighborhood Stabilization (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990); Phyllis Palmer, Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections During the Civil Rights Era (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008). 45. Interview with Cal Jones. 46. Interview with Herb Plever.

Selected Bibliography

Archival Collections Columbia University Oral History Collection, Reminiscences of Abraham E. Kazan Cornell University, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives United Housing Foundation Collection Municipal Archives, New York City Robert F. Wagner Papers, Subject Files—Housing—Rochdale Rochdale Village File, Department of Parks and Recreation Robert Moses Papers, Department of Parks and Recreation Max Rubin Papers, New York City Board of Education Records James B. Donovan Papers, New York City Board of Education Records New York Public Library Robert Moses Papers

302

Selected Bibliography

New York State Archives, Albany Subject Files—Housing—Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers New York State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal Collection New York University, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives United Federation of Teachers Collection Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division Local History Collections Personal Collections Ad Hoc Committee Against Drug Abuse in Rochdale Village and Southeastern Queens Papers, Arthur Greene Jamaica Branch NAACP Papers, Paul Gibson Rochdale Village Forum e-mails, Barbara Brandes Roth Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society/Rochdale Black Society Papers, Cal Jones Rochdale Village Public School Committee Papers, Jack and Sue Raskin, Herbert and Sylvia Plever Speeches on Housing Topics, Harold Ostroff United Shareholders Papers, Arthur Greene Interviews

(all conducted by the author) Abramson, Eddie, December 2004 Addabbo, Joseph Jr., February 2005 Barbour, Omar, November 2004 Booth, William, May 2005 Borovoy, Irene, May 2005 Brandes Roth, Barbara, February 2005 Brandon, Nancy, November 2005 Braithwaite Householder, Evlynne, March 2005 Chaleff, Norman, December 2004 Chertoff, Merton, March 2005 Day, Ursula, April 2005 Diaz, Clifton Stanley, March 2005 Eisenstadt, Eric, August 2005 Eisenstadt, Freddy, June 2005 Ferguson, Herman, January 2005 Gibson, Paul, May 2005 Goret, Adele, September 2004 Greene, Arthur, October 2004 Greenspan, William, March 2005 Gyory, Bruce, October 2005

Selected Bibliography

303

Gyory, Nicholas, November 2005 Hollie, Ron, April 2005 Kahane, Libby, April 2005 Jones, Cal, December 2005, February 2005 Jones, William Henry, April 2005 Korot, Beryl and George, January 2006 Klurfeld, James, February 2005 Lapka, Larry, June 2005 Lawrence, Lloyd, January 2006 Lewis, Olga, April 2005 Lipsky, Robert, April 2005 Oliver Douglas, Merrill, February 2005 Ostroff, Harold, September 2004 Page, Ellen, November 2004 Patcher, Richard, June 2005 Perlman, Vicki, February 2005 Plever, Herbert, September 2004, January 2005 Plever, Sylvia, September 2004, January 2005 Raskin, Jack, September 2004, February 2005 Raskin, Susan, September 2004, February 2005 Raskin, Joseph, March 2005 Schwartz, Sylvia, February 2005 Spero, Francesca, November 2004 Starr, Anita, November 2004 Tewel, Kenenth, March 2005 Watkins, Juanita, January 2005 Williams, Hugh, January 2005 Wray, Ken, September 2005 Yaker, Ed, April 2005

Books and Articles Abrams, Charles. Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955. Amalgamated and Park Reservoir Housing Cooperatives. Story of a Co-op Community: The First 75 Years. New York: Herman Liebman Memorial Fund, 2002. Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Ballon, Hilary, and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York: Norton, 2007. Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Booth, William. “Inside Story of the Rochdale Fight.” New York Amsterdam News, August 3, 1963. Brandes, Joseph. Immigrants to Freedom: Jewish Communities in Rural New Jersey since 1882. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1970. Buck, Rinker. “The Death of a Dream: Rochdale vs. The Teamsters,” New York Magazine, August 6, 1978.

304

Selected Bibliography

Cannato, Vincent J. The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York City. New York: Random House, 1974. Casin, Sheryll. The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Chen, Anthony S. “ ‘The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas’: Racial Conservatism and the Politics of Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941–1945,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1238–1265. Day, Lynda R. Making a Way to Freedom: A History of African Americans on Long Island. Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1997. Deutsch, Morton, and Mary Evans Collins. Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1951. Downing, Gertrude., et al. The Preparation of Teachers for Schools in Culturally Deprived Neighborhoods. Flushing, NY: Queens College, 1965. Eisenstadt, Peter. “Rochdale Village and the Rise and Fall of Integrated Housing in New York City.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 31 ( July 2007): 33–60. ——. “Mitchell-Lama Housing,” “Co-op City,” and “Rochdale Village.” In Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, edited by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, 305–307. New York: Norton, 2007. Fetter, Henry D. “Revising the Revisionists: Walter O’Malley, Robert Moses, and the End of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” New York History 89, no. 1 (2008): 55–76. Fraser, Steven. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. New York: Free Press, 1991. Freeman, Joshua. Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II. New York: New Press, 2002. Gutman, Marta. “Race, Place, and Play: Robert Moses and the WPA Swimming Pools in NYC.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 86 (December 2008): 532–561. Hentoff, Nat, ed. Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. Jamaica Branch NAACP. Fifty Years of Service. Queens, NY: Jamaica Branch NAACP, 1977. Jonnes, Jill. South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Kahane, Libby, Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought, vol. 1. Jerusalem: Institute for the Publication of the Writings of Meir Kahane, 2008. Milgram, Morris. Good Neighborhood: The Challenge of Open Housing. New York: Norton, 1977. Moreno, Paul. From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933–1972. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Moses, Robert. The Civil Service of Great Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1914. ——. “Plan and Performance.” In A Century of Social Thought: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Duke University during the Academic Year 1938–1939 As a Part of the Centennial Celebration of that Institution, 126–142. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1939. ——. Public Works: A Dangerous Trade. New York: McGraw Hill, 1970. ——. “Rochdale: Master Planner Moses Views a Master Housing Plan.” Long Island Press, December 1, 1963. ——. Theory and Practice in Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. ——. “What’s the Matter with New York?” New York Times, August 1, 1943. ——. Working for the People: Promise and Performance in Public Service. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956.

Selected Bibliography

305

[Mowat, William R.] An Experimental Ministry to a High-Rise Middle-Income Housing Complex. New York: Protestant Council of the City of New York 1967. Murray, Sylvie. The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens 1945– 1965. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003. New York City Market Analysis. New York: News Syndicate Company, 1943. Pitzer, Donald, ed. America’s Communal Utopias. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1997. Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Podair, Jerald E. The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill– Brownsville Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Rochdale Village 25th Anniversary Celebration, Sept 8th to 18th, 1988. Queens, NY: Rochdale Village, 1988. Rodgers, Cleveland. Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy. New York: Henry Holt, 1952. Rogers, David. 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City Schools. New York: Random House, 1968. Schwartz, Joel. The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 1993. Shapiro, Hal. “Why They Picket at Rochdale.” Long Island Press, August 8, 1963. Stern, Robert A. M., Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman. New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995. Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ——. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008. Swados, Harvey. “When Black and White Live Together.” New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1966. Taylor, Clarence. Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. United Housing Foundation. Rochdale Village: A New Concept in Community Living. New York: United Housing Foundation, 1967. ——. Rochdale Village: A Cooperative Housing Development. New York: United Housing Foundation, 1960. Wiltse, Jeff. Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. X, Malcolm. By Any Means Necessary. Ed. George Breitman. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970. Zeitz, Joshua M. White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Zipp, Samuel. Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Zukovsky, Jerome. “Rochdale Village—A Test of Race and Religion.” New York Herald Tribune, March 14, 1965.

Dissertations, Theses, and Unpublished Papers Botein, Hilary Ann. “ ‘Solid Testimony of Labor’s Present Status’: Unions and Housing in Postwar New York City.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005. Hazelton, Andrew. “Three Bronx Utopias: Pre-War Labor Housing Cooperatives and the Socialist Vision.” N.d.

306

Selected Bibliography

——. “Garden Courts to Tower Blocks: The Architecture and Social History of the Labor Cooperative Housing Movement in New York, 1919–1950.” N.d. Jones, Diane H. “Rochdale Village: An Arena for Black Politics.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University School of Journalism, 1984. Mennel, Timothy. “Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses’s New York.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2007. Ottman, Tod M. “ ‘Government That Has Both a Heart and a Head’: The Growth of New York State Government during the World War II Era, 1930–1950.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Albany, 2001. Purnell, Brian. “A Movement Grows in Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Northern Civil Rights Movement.” PhD diss., New York University, 2006. Schuman, Tony. “Labor and Housing in New York: Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Movement.” N.d. Wray, Kenneth G. “Abraham E. Kazan: The Story of the Amalgamated Houses and the United Housing Foundation.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1991.

Acknowledgments

As I mentioned in the preface, this book owes its existence to Barbara Brandes Roth, my sixth grade classmate who invited me to join a chat room of former Rochdale residents she had created. Without Barbara’s deep love of Rochdale, her appreciation of its uniqueness, and her passion for sharing it with others, this book never would have been written. I want to especially thank her for making the emails of the Rochdale chat room available. Almost all the Rochdalers I contacted in connection with this book have been gracious and wonderful, and above all, I want to thank, as profoundly as I can, the two-score-plus people who agreed to be interviewed for this volume. The interviews are the heart of this book, and this project would not have been possible without their assistance. I am especially grateful to have captured the stories of several people, crucial to this story, who are now deceased: Harold Ostroff, William Booth, George Korot, and Arthur Greene. In many cases those I interviewed shared not only their memories but documents of their Rochdale years. Much of the essential archives of Rochdale Village was to be found only in their attics and storage closets. I wish I could mention them all here (do peruse the interview list in the bibliography), but I do need to single out my old floormate, Joe Raskin (we of apartment 11A7G, he of 11A7E), who has put at my disposal his unflagging enthusiasm for this project and his encyclopedic knowledge

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Acknowledgments

of the unintuitive geography and politics of Queens and of just about everything and everyone connected to Rochdale, to my lasting benefit. Along the way I have been supported by grants from the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and especially the Jane DeLuca Fund for Advanced Historical Research. I have relied on the wisdom of archivists and librarians at the New York Public Library, the New York City Municipal Archives, the New York State Archives, the Long Island Division of the Queens Borough Public Library, the University of Rochester, and the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at the ILR School at Cornell University. The photo and image archivist Barb Morley of the Kheel Center came to my rescue on more than one occasion. I have presented portions of this manuscript, in earlier forms, at “Researching New York,” the annual conference on New York history; the Columbia University Seminar on the City; the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians; and before my friends at the Rochester United States Historians (RUSH) group. Hilary Ballon, a leader in the new scholarship on Robert Moses, invited me to speak on Robert Moses and Rochdale on several occasions, to participate in the conference “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” and to write on Rochdale and a few other topics for the accompanying book. Clarence Taylor has encouraged my work from its outset, and asked me to write on Rochdale for the journal Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, and I wish to thank him and the editors of the journal for granting me permission to reuse material from that article. Everyone I have worked with at Cornell University Press has been exemplary in support of this project, among them the series editors, Jonathan Zimmerman of New York University and Brian Balogh of the University of Virginia, and Michael McGandy, Emily Zoss, and Katherine Hue-tsung Liu in the press office. In the years this book has been in preparation, I have been sustained, supported, and nurtured in more ways than I can name, by my friends and family. Rob Snyder has been my constant sounding board, the reader of countless chapter drafts, the other side of myriad phone calls. Marc Korpus, a superlative cartographer and my very good friend, designed the wonderful maps. Dan Soyer, Tami Friedman, Julie Miller, Kai Jackson Issa, Quinton Dixie, and Aaron Braveman have been great friends. LauraEve Moss, my good friend and dear colleague from The Encyclopedia of New York State, has been my sharp-eyed, sure-footed, editorial conscience. As in the past, she has guided me past several swamps of potential errata. Other scholars who have encouraged me or shared research include Andrew Hazelton, Timothy Mennel, Marta Gutman, Brian Purnell, Robyn Spencer, Catherine Manning Flamenbaum, Marci Reaven, Tony Michels, and the late Joel Schwartz. I owe a special thanks to Harold Wechsler, who helped me develop this project during conversations held at dozens of Rochester Red Wings baseball games, and who played a crucial role in helping me to find a publisher. In many ways working on this project, at the intersection of my own life story with the broader historical forces that molded it, has been the most

Acknowledgments

309

Figure 14. Class 5-302, PS 30 Queens, 1965. I am sitting directly behind the class sign.

deeply rewarding of my career. I am sorry to take my leave of it, and to all those who in some way made it possible, a most heartfelt thank-you. Rochdale Village has three dedicatees. Over the past few years, during the parturition of this book, there have been good times and some not so good times. Without the constant love and companionship of my beautiful wife, Jane DeLuca, I never could have completed this book. Taking nothing away from Lou Gehrig, with you in my arms, Jane, I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth. My mom, Betty, lived with Jane and myself in Rochester in her last months, two ex-Rochdalers reunited. She greatly enriched our lives these past months, when I was also finishing the revisions on this book. I will always remember it as a special, cherished time because of her presence. Finally, this book is also dedicated to the memory of my beloved brother Freddy. Until his tragic and untimely death in December 2007, we had dozens of conversations about this book. Had he lived to see it completed, he would have been its biggest fan. Every day, for the rest of my life, will be another day without him. Passover 2010 Rochester, New York

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. The initials RV stand for Rochdale Village. Abrams, Charles, 12 Abramson, Eddie, 110, 115, 147, 150 –152, 183, 187, 192, 197, 198, 254 n33, 280 n101, 280 –281 nn97,103,110,111. See also Inside Rochdale Abramson, Karen, 154 Addabbo, Joseph, 149, 188 affirmative action, 92– 93 African Americans: black power movement, 204 –205; class differences among, 46, 47, 48, 51, 135, 146, 204, 212; crime within RV and, 174, 182, 183–184, 185; departures from RV, 218; excluded from Stuyvesant Town, 40; and history of cooperative housing, 15, 255 nn45,46; marketing RV and outreach to, 12, 14 –16, 255 nn48,49; migration of, 46, 50, 51; occupations of, as residents, 19; percentage of, as residents, 16 –17; reasons for moving to RV, 8– 9, 221; reluctance to move to RV, 15–16, 64, 255 nn46,49;

staying while whites left, 221; and teachers’ strike, 198–199, 290 n45 Allen, Woody, 192 Allen AME Church, 46, 96, 97, 239 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), 26 –27, 258 n21, 260 n31 Amalgamated Dwellings, 39, 40, 41, 107, 124 Amalgamated Houses, 12, 27, 28, 29 –30, 39, 112, 119 Amalgamated Warbasse Houses, 30, 43, 64 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 92, 295 n64 American Council for Judaism, 72 American Jewish Congress, 47, 93, 198, 205, 206 Am Olam (Eternal Life) movement, 23 anarchism and anarchists, 25–27, 29 –30, 108, 112, 120, 257 n9, 258 n31 anti-Semitism, 23, 67, 194, 196, 202–204, 207, 237, 291 n87

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anti-Zionism, 71–72 applications for Rochdale, 11–12, 16, 19, 62, 132, 175, 223, 224 –225, 255–256 nn44,52,55, 295 n56 Aqueduct (racetrack), 52, 53, 54 –55, 57, 58, 263 nn10,17 architecture and layout of Rochdale, 7–8, 12–13, 24, 28, 122–123, 254–255n34, 255n44, 256n72 Atlantic Village, 299 n32 Badillo, Herman, 59 Baraka, Amiri, 105 Barbour, Omar, 16, 51 Basil, Frank, 22 Battista, Vito, 61 Beame, Abe, 95 Becker, Myron, 16 Bedford Stuyvesant, 46, 299 n32 Bell, Tom (Thomas Hastie), 25–26, 29, 257 nn9,10,12 Belmont Park, 52, 53, 54 –55, 263 n17 Berrily, Bernard, 152, 280 n109 “Billy Banjo” mural, 103, 273 n100 black nationalism, 97, 101–105, 201, 204 –205, 245–246, 273 nn100,103, 278 n43 blackout of 1965, 144 –145 Black Panthers, 105, 201, 204, 207 Bloch, Stanley H., 196, 203, 209 –210 Bluestein, Abe, 29, 258 n31 Board of Directors of Rochdale Village, 112, 113, 225–227, 236, 244 Board of Education, 157–158, 159, 161–162, 164 –165, 192–193, 281 n8, 282 n39 Board of Estimate, 51, 55, 65, 66 – 67 Boas, Franz, 70 Booker, William, 230, 232 Booth, William, 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 101, 102, 105, 167, 196, 203, 204, 255n48, 271n43 Boucher, Norma, 244 Braithwaite, Evlynne, 8, 122, 136, 154 –155 Brandon, Nancy, 214 Breezy Point, 247, 299 n32 Brennan, Peter J., 91, 92, 272 n55 Breslin, Jimmy, 208–209 Brewer, Denise, 196 –197 Brewer, Guy, 95, 149, 150, 152, 280 n92 Bridges, Leonard, 138, 218–219 Brooklyn Dodgers, 56, 263 n6 Brown, Abe, 225 Browne, Kenneth, 150 Brown v. Board of Education, 157 Buckley, William F. Jr., 161, 282 n34 Building Services Union, 230

building trades unions, 85–86, 89 – 93, 105, 272 nn54-55 Burlingham, C. C., 77 Burnett, Juliette, 197 Burris, Lloyd, 95– 96 Cambridge, Edward, 154 Campbell, Leslie, 207, 291 n87 Carey, Hugh, 230 Cariello, Mario J., 141 Carmel, New Jersey, 23, 24 Caro, Robert, 36, 68, 71, 72, 73, 267 n9, 268 nn21, 23 Carpenter, Edward, 25 Carter, Elmer, 80 Cashmore, John, 56 Cellar, Emmanuel, 91 cemeteries, 246 Central Park, 246 –247 Cerrier, Maurice, 114 –115 children, 19, 119, 121–123, 136, 189, 226 Childs, Louis, 51 civil rights legislation, 35–36, 75–76, 77, 78, 79 –80, 84, 86, 91, 156, 198 civil rights movement, 47– 48, 74 –75, 78, 85–86, 93, 150, 205 civil service, 19, 70 –71, 193–194, 221 Clancy, John T., 267 n106 Clark, Kenneth, 157, 158, 159, 281 n8 Clarke, Henrik, 278 n43 Committee for Equal Opportunity ( Jamaica), 47, 49 Committee to Save Rochdale, 234, 236, 237 Communists and Communist Party, 27, 29, 47, 162, 258 n31 community: acculturation programs for newcomers, 225; adult clubs and associations, 119–121; children’s activities, 119, 121–123, 136; crime pulling apart, 184; decline of community life, 243–244; destruction of, in teachers’ strike and aftermath, 192, 195, 201, 202–204, 214, 290n45; integration of schools as creation of, 171–172; Jacobs and, 128–129; Kazan and, 32, 106–108, 128–129; organization prior to opening of RV, 119; separate black-focused organization formed, 138–139; size of development and cohesion of, 39, 106–108; UHF and creation of, 106–108, 118–119, 120–121, 276n55. See also demographics of Rochdale; integrated living in Rochdale; political culture, internal; white exodus Community Center, 7, 111, 146, 230, 232; auditorium, 7, 120, 133, 232

Index Community Services Inc. (CSI), 42 Concerned Cooperators, 116 –117, 185, 226, 227, 235, 236, 238, 241, 242, 243, 298 n55 Con Edison, 8, 28, 144, 176 construction-site demonstrations: background leading to, 83–87; and boycotts, 102, 103; Brooklyn Downstate settlement and, 91–92, 272 nn54-55; celebrated as RV history, 105; celebrities and, 88; cement truck sabotage, 98; coalition and, 93; as community-wide organizing effort, 88; cranes, immobilization of, 98–101, 99; goal of blocking deliveries, 83, 89; as interracial, 93; and March on Washington, 94, 100; number of African Americans working on site, 85, 87, 90, 271nn42-43; numbers of protesters, 87, 88, 271n16; police and arrests and, 86–87, 88–89, 97–98, 100, 271n16; press coverage of, 83, 86–87, 88, 92, 97, 98, 100; quotas/ proportional hiring and, 89–93, 272n55; Rochdale Movement and (see Rochdale Movement); sponsoring organizations of, 87, 94–96; UHF and, 90, 105, 271n43; white backlash and, 87, 89 consumer cooperatives, 26 –27, 28, 258 n18 Co-op City, 43, 59, 81, 82, 126 –128, 132–133, 163, 178, 228, 247, 296 n78, 299 nn32,34 Co-op Contact (UHF journal), 31, 161 cooperative commonwealth, 21–22, 32, 248 cooperative movement, 6 –7, 26 –27, 30, 36, 41– 42, 245–246, 258 n21 cooperatives: anarchism and, 25–26, 29; as answer for integration, 80, 82; as economic organization, form of, 5, 26 –27, 30, 31–32, 108; Jewish agricultural settlements, 23–24; Kazan’s early organization of, 26 –27; law on boards of, RV and, 241; political death of housing cooperatives, 246; political support and, 26 –27; privatization of, 244 –245, 247; services at Amalgamated Houses, 28; as social instrument, 108; unfamiliarity with, and financing difficulties, 65. See also consumer cooperatives cooperative supermarkets, 32, 53, 124 –125, 134, 135, 146, 186, 232, 243, 259 n39 cooperators, as term for residents, 6 Coordinated (or United) Clergy of Jamaica, 87, 95– 96, 102 CORE, Brooklyn, 91, 272 n54 CORE, Long Island, 87, 95, 102 CORE (national), 101 Couche, Robert, 201, 208, 292 n108 crack cocaine, 242, 243 credit unions, 26, 258 n18

313

crime: architecture and landscaping of RV and, 175, 177–178, 220; black residents and, 174, 182, 183–184, 185; buzzer and intercom system, 223; children’s perception of, 189; and civic virtue, lack of, 193, 194; class and, 184; as comment on integrated living, 188; continued problems with, into 1980s and 1990s, 242–243; dog harboring and, 186; fear of, 174, 176 –177, 186, 187, 189, 242; fear of pressing charges, 185; improvements to RV requested to prevent, 176, 177–178, 182, 223; internal politics of RV and, 184 –185; and lack of civic virtue, 173, 174; liberalism of residents and, 187–188; management of RV and, 180, 184, 185, 223; outsiders vs. insiders and, 183–184; parking lots and, 177–178; police presence in RV, expanded, 175, 176, 181; race as inextricable in debate over, 174, 185; ranking of concerns about, 173–174, 285 n3; resident involvement to prevent, 182–183; in schools, 211–213, 243; in shopping malls, 178, 183; as similar to NYC generally, 178, 180, 223, 287 n57; and “soft on crime” accusations, 174; statistics on, 174, 179 –180, 217, 243, 287 nn55,57; uniting/dividing people, 180, 183–184; and vigilantism, 187; white exodus and, 186, 188, 219 –220, 222, 223. See also crime types crime types: assaults, muggings, and physical attacks, 176 –177, 180, 184, 186, 219 –220, 222; bicycle thieves, 182, 183; car theft, 174, 176, 177–178; drug use and, 179, 182, 186, 242–243; gang violence, 175; murder, 174, 177, 242, 243; rape, 177, 183, 242; thefts and burglaries, 177–178, 242; vandalism, 47, 179, 184, 217, 223–224, 231, 232, 235, 279, 287 nn46,47, 288 n92 Crisona, James J., 61 Crotona Park East, 9, 10 Cruse, Harold, 50, 262 n47 Cuomo, Mario, 188 Davis, John W., 77 Day, Ursula, 210, 292 n108 Democratic Party, 119, 150 –151 demographics of Rochdale: ages of residents, 19; boroughs and neighborhoods moved from, 17; families with children, 19; income, 18, 230; Jewish population, 17, 133; occupations, 18–19, 221; race of applicants, 16, 256 n55; race of residents, 16 –17, 218, 293 n10; religious backgrounds, 17; study by UHF (1967), 17, 256 n61 dog harboring, 181, 182, 186

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Index

Donovan, Bernard, 163–164 Downstate Medical Center (Brooklyn), 86, 88, 91– 92, 101, 158, 272 nn54,55 Dubinsky, David, 26, 63, 258 n31 Du Bois, W. E. B., 70, 255 n45, 278 n43 Dunlap, William, 223–224 East River Houses, 42, 63 East Tremont, 9 –10 Eisenstadt, Peter, x; apartment of, 7, 240; bar mitzvah, 205; and blackout of 1965, 145; car of family, 177; on crime, 187–188, 189; current visit to RV, 239 –240; on dogs in RV, 186; education and, 154 –156, 167, 211, 213; integration into surrounding community, 146; and Jewish Defense League, 206; and Robert Kennedy, 150 –151; and King assassination, 196; on leaving RV, 222; parents’ occupations, 10; reasons family moved to RV, 9 –10 Elbertson, Don, 12 elevators, 176 Ellis, Richard, 94 eminent domain, 61 Emmanuel, Susan, 154 employment, nondiscrimination act, 77, 78, 79 –80 Epstein, Barry, 177 equality of opportunity, 74, 77, 89, 90 Essex, Rita, 152 Ethical Culture Movement, 71 Farband Cooperative, 27 Farmer, James, 88, 205 Farmer, Michael, 268 n25 Feinstein, Barry, 230 –231, 233–234, 235–237 Ferguson, Herman: background of, 96 – 97; black nationalism and, 97, 101, 102–105, 204, 245–246, 273 nn100,103; conspiracy charges, 104, 105, 194, 245, 273 n103; guerilla tactics of, 98–101; on police and arrests, 97– 98, 104; political candidacy of, 105; as resident and member of RV board, 245–246; and school decentralization, 104 –105, 194 The 51st State, 215–218, 225 fire departments, 7, 76, 85 Five Percenters, 201 Flynn, John, 56 Forest Hills public housing, 188 Frederick Douglas Realty Company, 46 – 47 Galamison, Milton A., 158, 163 Gaynor, James, 65

Geddes, Patrick, 28 Genovese, Kitty, 173, 174 gentrification, 129 Gibson, Paul, 95, 100, 102, 141, 239 Giuliani, Rudolph, 187 Glazer, Nathan, 188 Goldman, Emma, 25, 257 n9 Gordon, Edmund, 165 Grand Street Houses, 245 Greene, Arthur, 235, 236, 238, 241, 248–249, 293 n9, 298 n55 Greenidge, Dolores, 209 Greenspan, William, 241, 242, 243, 245 Gregory, Dick, 88 Grier, Eunice and George, 255 nn46,49 Grossley, Richard S., 167, 284 n72 Grossman, Pearl, 220 –221 Gruen, Victor, 7, 178 Gunning, Rosemary, 282 n34 Gutman, Marta, 139 –140 Halloween, 122, 189 Handlin, Oscar, 73 Harlem, 8– 9, 17, 46, 194 Harlem Renaissance, 76 Harriman, Averill, 57, 58–59 Harrington, Michael, 290 n49 Harris, Frank, 257 n12 Heydorn, Hugo R., 50 Hill, Herbert, 86, 88 Hill, John D., 177 Hill, Stanley, 198 Hillel, Rabbi, 205 Hillman, Sidney, 26–27, 41, 43, 258n21, 260n31 Hillman Houses, 40, 41 Hirschman, Albert O., 214 historic preservation, 126, 129 Hockert, Jenkin R., 66 – 67 homeownership, black, 46 –51, 94, 247–248 House Congress: abolishment of, 244; board members from, 115; and carrying charge increases, avoidance of, 115–116; community relations and, 147; elections for, 112–113, 114; enthusiasm for, 113, 114; factions and, 115; function of, 112–113, 114; interracial friendships through, 113; Operation Handshake program of, 225; and paternalism of UHF, 114 –115, 116; standing committees, 113 Howard, Ebenezer, 28 Howell, John Henry, 221 Hubert, James H., 47 Hughes, Langston, 171

Index Humphrey, Hubert, 202 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 127–128 ILGWU Houses, 124 –125 income: average, of residents, 18, 230; increase in, and departures from RV, 219; maximum, for Mitchell-Lama program, 18, 219; occupations of residents, 18–19, 221; public assistance, exclusion of those on, 224 –225, 295 n56 Inside Rochdale: advertisements in, 133, 151; cost of, 151, 280 n100; dedication of, 118; founding of, 151; names changes of, 149, 254 n33; quality of editorship, 280 n101; sale of, 254 n33, 280 n101. See also Abramson, Eddie integrated living in Rochdale: adult community activities and, 120, 130; black adjustment to Jewish culture, 133–136, 138, 278n26; and children’s activities, 121, 130, 136; class differences and, 135–136, 278n26; dating and intimate relationships, 136–137; derogatory language, 134, 146; friendships and, 113, 136–137, 196–197, 211; Kazan on goal of, 130–131; passive vs. active engagement with, 137–138; philo-Semitism, 136; teenagers and, 134–135, 136–137; “the stare” and, 134–135. See also Rochdale Village relations with South Jamaica; schools and Rochdale integration: African American reluctance to move to RV, 15–16, 64, 255 nn46,49; changing laws and minds and, 78; collapse of ideals of/end of support for, xi, 193, 203–204, 207–209, 221, 249 –250; concerns that whites would be reluctant to move to RV, 64, 175; of construction-site demonstrations, 93; as failure, perception of, 248–251; as inevitable in RV, 69; Jacobs’s critique of, 125; justification for, 80; and low rental rates, 64; and morality, legislation of, 78–79; national statistics on, 250; natural, 131–133, 137, 198; of police and fire departments, 76; possibility of, as political question, x, 156; of public housing, 49; social engineering and, 78; of South Jamaica, 49 –50; as term, 78; voluntary, Moses and, 36, 80 –81. See also Moses, Robert, and integration; schools and integration “integration exhaustion”, 249 –250 internal politics. See political culture, internal International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), 24 –25, 26, 29, 63, 258 n31

315

IS 72, 195–196, 197–198, 203, 209 –214, 223, 292 nn101,102, 293 n139; violence in, 196, 211–213, 219, 243 IS 201, 194, 292 n101 Isaacs, Edith, 81 Isaacs, Stanley, 81 Italians, 9, 47 Ives-Quinn Act (1945), 77–78, 79 –80 Jacobs, Jane: and community, 128, 147, 225; and crime, 286n14; critique of urban renewal and superblock housing, 121, 123–129; and Kazan, 124, 125–126, 127, 128–129; and left/liberal neighborhood organizations, 283n42; Moses and, 35, 38, 124; on need for dignified public/private footing, 137 Jamaica, 17, 46, 47– 48, 149 –153, 280 nn92,109 Jamaica Avenue stores, 102, 103, 146, 151 Jamaica Racetrack: closing, as idea, 52, 54 –55, 57; consolidation of track ownerships, 55, 263 n17; funding for project, 22, 65– 67; location in South Jamaica, 53–54, 64, 263 n9; middle-income cooperative housing chosen for, 57– 61; Moses and negotiations for, 5, 55–58, 62– 63, 64 – 67, 267 n106; opening and history of track, 52, 53–54, 65, 263 nn1,6,10; options considered for, 55–57; popularity of horseracing, 53, 54, 263 n6; size and scale of, 62; and Tammany Hall, 52, 263 n1; tax abatement for, and resistance to, 60 – 61, 65, 66 – 67; tenant relocations not required for, 61– 62, 64, 81; Title I and, 56, 58, 60, 61. See also Mitchell-Lama housing law; Rochdale Village Jamaica Swimming Pool Committee, 140, 278–279 n54 James, Henry, 38 Javits, Jacob, 58, 91 Jessor, Herman, 7, 40, 116, 126 –127, 246 Jewish Defense League ( JDL), 206 –207 Jewish labor movement, 5, 29, 69, 116, 133, 245, 246 Jewish religious institutions, 118, 119, 133, 140, 205, 206–207 Jews: agricultural settlements in the U.S., 23–24; anti-Zionism, 71–72; and civil rights movement, 47, 93, 150, 205; ethnic pride of, 205–206; housing cooperatives built by the left, 27; internal politics of RV reflecting politics of, 227; Kazan’s background, 23–24, 37; as majority culture in RV, 133–136; migration from Russia, 23; Moses’s background, 37, 69, 71–73; Old Left/social

316

Index

Jews (continued) democrat sparring, 116 –117; philo-Semitism, 136; population of, in RV, 133; reasons for moving to RV, 8, 9 –10; secular, 71, 119, 133; teachers’ strike and, 201, 203, 205–207; Yiddish language, 133, 134, 257 n10 JHS 8, 167–171, 196 –198, 208, 210, 284 n71, 285 n84 JHS 40, 284 n71 JHS 217, 208 John F. Kennedy International Airport, 2, 145, 177 Johnson, James Weldon, 76 Johnson, Lyndon B., 150, 155, 235 Johnson, Ray, 296 –297 n10 Jones, Cal, 8– 9, 113, 114, 116, 118, 120, 135, 136, 138, 147–148, 192, 195, 199, 200, 201, 204, 219, 221, 222, 237, 250 –251 Jones, William, 93 Jones Beach, 36, 268 n21 Jordan, Louis, 178 juvenile delinquency, 173–174, 175, 268 n25, 285 n3, 289 n9 Kahane, Meir, 206 –207 Kahn, Herbert, 140 Kallen, Horace M., 21 Katz, Craig, 154 Katz, Helen, 177 Kazan, Abraham: and Amalgamated Dwellings, 107; and Amalgamated Houses, 27–29; anarchism and, 25–26, 29 –30, 108, 112, 257n9; business sense of, 21; and community, 32, 106 –108, 128–129; and constructionsite demonstrations, 90, 105, 271 n43; and consumer cooperatives, 26 –27, 28; and Co-op City, 59; and crime, 175; death of, 246; and financing of RV, 22, 62– 63, 64, 65; health, failing, 108, 274 n6; and ideology of cooperation, 109 –110; as inspiration for RV, 5; and integrated housing, 4, 16, 64; and Jane Jacobs, 124, 125–126, 127, 128–129; and Jamaica Racetrack site, 55–56, 57, 62, 63, 66; Jewish background of, 23–24, 37; as labor organizer, 24 –25, 26; and MitchellLama law, 58, 61; and Moses, relationship of, 36 –37, 39, 40 – 41, 42– 43, 63– 64, 266 n85; on Moses’s contributions, 33; personality of, 22, 30, 42; and politics as futile diversion, 26–27, 30–31; and power plants, private, 7–8, 28, 144; and public housing, 108; on quotas, 256 n55; and Rockefeller, 65; and scale of cooperation, economies of, 31–32; as selfeducated, 37; and the self-employed/small

shopkeepers, 19, 26, 126; and size of project, for community cohesion, 39, 106 –108; and slum clearance, 39, 40, 43, 126; and the state/government, working with, 26 –27, 30; and swimming pool, desire for, 139, 142–143; and tenant relocations, 62; and Title I, 41, 58, 61, 62; and union members, reserved apartments for, 41; and urban pastoral, 24; utopianism of, 21, 32, 109 –110, 250. See also United Housing Foundation Keating, Kennth, 91 Kennedy, John F., 92– 93, 103 Kennedy, Robert, 150 –151, 155, 197 Kimmins, William, 88–89 King, Martin Luther Jr., 88, 94, 95, 155, 170, 196 –197, 213 Klurfield, James, 171 Koch, Ed, 187 Korot, George, 168, 169, 170, 210 Kropotkin, Peter, 25, 28 Ku Klux Klan, 48, 73, 82 Lachman, Lewis, 215, 218, 222, 223, 225 La Guardia, Fiorello, 37, 39 – 40, 49, 52 landscaping and grounds, 7; as anti-slum, 28; children’s activities and, 121; crime and layout of, 177–178, 220; dog spoor and, 186; lawns and paths, 7, 123, 181, 226; left to later day, 140; park benches, 7, 134, 216; park/public garden, 220, 240, 294 n27; proposed athletic center and pool, 140 –144, 278 n52; recreation, 121, 136, 145, 182; street lighting, 176; yelling between grounds and apartments, 123. See also architecture and layout; Community Center; power plant; shopping malls Lapka, Larry, 110, 172 Laurelton, 206 Le Corbusier, 38 LeFrak City, 17 Lehman, Herbert, 39, 75 Levenson, Hal, 215–218, 225 Levitt, Arthur, 58, 228 Lewis, John, 88 Lewis, Olga, 8, 50 Liberty Village, 299 n32 Liebman, Herman, 119 Limited Dividend Housing Companies Law, 39 limited-equity cooperatives: African American reluctance to participate in, 255 nn46,49; defined, 5– 6; as past vs. the future, 247–248; preference of RV residents to remain, 245; Title I projects of Moses, 41

Index Lindsay, John V., 37, 95, 150, 193, 198, 202, 203, 280n97 Lomax, Louis, 101 Long Island Railroad (LIRR), 48, 54, 56, 220, 233, 263 n1 Lowell, Stanley H., 92 low-income housing, 40, 41, 59 Lynch, Lincoln, 89, 95 Lyons, James J., 67 Mackell, Thomas, 174 maintenance workers, 184, 229 –230, 296 nn2,5. See also Teamsters’ strike Malcolm X, 97, 101, 102–104, 105, 155, 159, 246, 281 n14 manager and management: board choosing, 112; crime and, 180, 184, 185, 223; dog policy, 186; first successful challenge to, 142–143; paternalism of, 111, 114 –115, 116; and renaissance of RV, 244; and schools, 163; separate black organizations discouraged by, 138; staff of, 230; Tenants Council and, 225, 241; unresponsiveness of, 117, 276 n38 March on Washington (1963), 94, 100 Marrero, Victor, 236 Matusow, Harvey, 282–283 n40 McCloy, John J., 63 McCoy, Rhody, 104, 194, 199 McDougall, Hugh, 208 McGovern, George, 187 McKanic, Frank, 236, 241 Meany, George, 91 Merrick Park Gardens, 46 Merritt, Arnold, 112, 163 Metropolitan Life, 40, 76, 77, 79, 269 n55 middle-income housing, 40, 41, 56, 58–60, 78, 79 Milgram, Morris, 223 Mitchell-Lama housing law, 9 –10, 18, 43, 58, 66, 115, 219, 227–228, 241–242. See also tax abatements (Mitchell-Lama law) Moon, Henry Lee, 80 Moore, Gary, 154 morality, legislation of, 78–79 Morris, Newbold, 141, 142–143 Morris, William, 25 Moses, Robert: as anti-utopian, 38–39; career of, 33–34, 37, 39 – 40, 67, 77, 81; and cities, fate of, 73, 81–82; and civil rights, 35–36; on civil service, 70 –71; and class, 69, 71; and the common good, 35, 249; conservatism of, 36, 37–38, 69 –71, 75–76, 81, 267 n9; and Co-op City, 43, 59, 81, 82; on cooperative movement, 36; death of, 246;

317

on definition of middle-income housing, 60; on difficulty of housing development, 34; education of, 37, 38, 69, 70; and FDR and the New Deal, 74 –75; and government seeking cooperative assistance, 30; importance of involvement with RV, 33, 65, 67; and Jane Jacobs, 35, 38, 124; and Jamaica Racetrack negotiations, 5, 55–58, 62– 63, 64 – 67, 267 n106; Jewish background of, 37, 69, 71–73; and Kazan, relationship of, 36 –37, 39, 40 – 41, 42– 43, 63– 64, 266 n85; and middle class, need for, 58; and Mitchell-Lama law, 58, 60, 61; and naming of RV, 6; and “ownership society”, 248; and recreational facilities, 49; and reformers, 37–38, 71; scandals and, 64, 266 n85; and significance of RV, 35–36, 64, 259 n3, 266 n86; and slum clearance, 35, 40, 43, 67, 76, 81, 299 n32; and swimming pools, 73–74, 139 –140, 268 nn23,25, 278 n49; and tenant relocation, 34 –35, 61– 62, 63, 64, 69; and Title I projects, 41, 42– 43, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62; on union officials as housing developers, 42; and urban planning, 38, 41 Moses, Robert, and integration: anti-Zionism of, 71–72; and bigotry, personal outrage at, 72–73, 74, 82; and business, desire to avoid racial issues, 76–77, 269n42; change of mind/accommodation, 79–81, 269n55; civil rights legislation, opposition to, 35–36, 68, 74, 75–78, 80, 268n36; cooperation as answer, 82; and equality of opportunity, 74, 77; and government, role of, 69–71, 74, 75; and gradualism, 76, 79; Jones Beach controversy, 268n21; and morality, legislation of, 78; Palestinian refugees incident, 72; prejudice against poor and non-white, 68–69; pride in and support of RV, 69, 80, 81–82; and quotas, 77, 269n46; racial and social attitudes, 69–71, 73, 75–78, 79, 268nn21,36; and segregation of public swimming pools, 73–74, 268n23; and Stuyvesant Town’s exclusion of African Americans, 40, 69, 76–77, 79, 81, 268n36, 269n55; voluntary integration, 36, 80–81 Mossman, Leo, 224, 235, 296 –297 n10 Muhammad, Elijah, 103 Mumford, Lewis, 38 NAACP, Jamaica branch: and black nationalism, 101; Black Panthers rivaling, 204; and boycotts, 102; construction-site demonstrations and, 87, 93, 94 – 95, 96, 98, 102; Coordinated Clergy as alternative to, 95; desegregation work by, 47– 48; and

318

Index

NAACP, Jamaica branch (continued) education, 167; founding and growth of, 47; and integration, giving up on, 208; and interracial public housing, 49; and local politics, 149, 280 n92; and police brutality, 175; police protection demanded by, 49, 175; political careers of leaders of, 95; on school conditions, 160; and schools, white leadership of, 204; on swimming pool issue, 141; and teachers’ strike, 198. See also Booth, William National Maritime Union (NMU), 96, 97– 98 Nation of Islam, 97, 101, 102–103 Neighbors for Understanding, 202–203 newspaper delivery, 145 New York City Housing Authority. See public housing New York Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools, 158 New York Racing Association (NYRA)/Greater New York Association, 55, 57–58, 65–66 New York State: Constitutional Convention (1938), 75–76; desegregation of schools, 46, 261n7; employment nondiscrimination act, 77, 78, 79–80; and financial difficulties of RV, 218, 227–228, 241–242, 298n7; funding of RV by, 5, 66; housing antidiscrimination act, 79; the Teamsters’ influence and, 230, 236, 238 Nickerson, Eugene, 236 Nixon, Richard, 202 Old Left, 116 –117, 162, 163, 225 Oliver, C. Herbert, 199 O’Malley, Walter, 56 “Operation Blinker”, 182 Operation Uproar, 116 Ostroff, Harold, 59; and ambitions of UHF, 246 –247; and anarchism, 29; career after leaving UHF, 133; control of UHF passed to, 108, 274 n6; on cooperatives, importance of, 120 –121; on economic buy of RV, 13; and education, 160, 162, 163, 164; on education of residents, 110; influence of, 225; on Jacobs’s architectural determinism, 128; on Jewish culture of RV, 133; and Kazan, 15, 29, 43; leaving UHF, 247; on natural integration, 132; on political culture of RV, 112, 115; position in UHF, 13, 15; on quotas, 255–256 n52; on reluctance of families to move to RV, 15, 255 n38; on size of developments, 107, 108; on teachers’ strike and destruction of community, 192; on transition to black community, 245 Owen, Robert, 6, 276 n55

Panuch, J. Anthony, 61, 62 Parents and Taxpayers (PAT), 160 –161, 193 Parents’ Workshop, 162–163, 165 Passikoff, Alexander, 98 Paterson, Basil, 235, 238 Peace and Freedom Party, 105, 295 n64 Penn Station South, 42, 63, 117, 258n31, 259n3, 275n38 People’s Songs, 282 n40 Perlman, Vicki, 154 Pesotta, Rose, 29, 258 n31 Plever, Herb, 114, 162, 163, 164, 166, 192, 199 –200, 202, 204, 244, 251, 282 n40 Podhoretz, Norman, 159, 281 n14 police: attitude toward white crime victims, 219; auxiliary group, 119, 185; and construction-site demonstrations, 86 –87, 88–89, 97– 98, 100, 271 n16; crime statistics from, 179 –180, 287 nn55,57; expanded presence at RV, requests for, 175, 176, 181; and KKK claims of brutality, 48; minority calls to, as double-edged sword, 175; murder of, 242; racial disharmony among, 242–243; segregation and integration of departments, 76, 85; and South Jamaica, lawlessness in, 48– 49 political culture, internal: black leadership, transition to, 238; crime and, 184 –185; decline of, 243–244; and democracy, 112–115, 117–118; factional fighting and self-government of RV, 115, 225–228, 235, 236, 241, 242, 295 n68; as integrated despite struggles, 202, 227; and management, complaints about, 117, 275 n38; Old Left and social democrat divisions, 116 –117; teachers’ strike and, 202; Teamsters’ strike and, 235–236, 238, 240 –241, 298 n55; and tendency for members to rebel against founders, 117; utopianism and, 6; vitalization of, 225; and white exodus, 222–223 Pope, Alexander, 71 Potofsky, Jacob, 41, 59, 274 n6 Powell, Adam Clayton Jr., 101 power plant, 7–8, 28, 144 –145, 227, 230, 231, 232, 234, 239 –240, 242, 245 Primus, Pearl, 88 privatization, 244 –245, 247 Procaccino, Mario, 187 progressives, 29, 52, 54 prostitution, 48 PS 30, 162, 164 –165, 197, 198, 201, 207, 210, 239, 282 n39, 292 n108 PS 40, 160, 204 PS 48, 160

Index PS 80, 164–165, 197, 199, 200–201, 243, 282n39 PTA, 148, 164, 197 public housing: antidiscrimination law for, 78; considered for Jamaica Racetrack site, 56; construction site demonstrations at, 86; crime and resistance to, 188; Kazan’s opposition to, 108; middle-income, 56; references to RV as, 224 –225; resemblance of RV to, 15; South Jamaica and, 49, 51, 56; Title I projects and: Moses and, 41; united RV and South Jamaica to prevent, 148–149 quotas and racial percentages: affirmative action, 92–93; application process and suspicions of, 16, 255–256nn52,55; construction-site demonstrations and, 89–93, 272n55; Moses and, 77, 269n46; pressure to adopt, on UHF, 132; proportional hiring, 77, 91–93, 269n46, 272n55; Starrett City and, 223, 294n45; white exodus and consideration of, 223 Rabinowitz, Aaron, 39 Rabinowitz, Barbara, 185 race traitors, 203 racial epithets, 134, 146, 204, 243 Raskin, Jack, 8, 227, 229, 231, 233–234, 238, 295 n56, 296 –297 n10, 296 nn1,2 Raskin, Joe, 8 Raskin, Sue, 8, 163, 199, 203, 204, 209 –210, 213, 229, 238, 249, 290 n45, 293 n139 recreation and recreational facilities, 49, 121, 136, 139, 145, 182 Redevelopment Companies Law, 40 Redic, Mary, 148, 198 redlining, 49 red scare and red-baiting, 162, 166, 226, 282–283 n40, 284 n67 rents. See Rochdale Village: carrying charges rent strikes, 115–116, 228, 247, 299 n34 Republican party, 70, 119 restrictive covenants, 47, 50 Reynolds, John J., 66 – 67 Reynolds, Lee, 16 Robert Owen Houses, 62 Robinson, Jackie, 88 Rochdale Community Singers, 120 Rochdale Defense League, 235 Rochdale Freedom Singers, 88 Rochdale Movement, 96–101, 99, 102–105, 204, 245–246, 273nn100,103 Rochdale Pioneers, 6 –7, 32, 36 Rochdale Village: aerial views of, 2, 84; black racial self-determination, transition to,

319

238, 245–246; carrying charges, 13–14, 18, 59 – 60, 115–116, 227–228, 241, 242, 244, 247, 265 n46, 298 n7, 299 n34; as “city within a city”, 31; cooperative ventures at, 32, 259 n39; current status of, 5, 239 –240, 240; down payments, 18, 66, 228; finances of, 218, 227–228, 231, 237, 241–242, 298 n7; foreclosure proceedings, 228; funding of, 5, 65– 67; groundbreaking ceremony of, 32; ground-level views of, 107; historians largely ignoring, 4; ideals behind, 4; and insider/outsider distinction, 183, 248; labor troubles as demarcating major transitions in, 229; land and opening negotiations (see Jamaica Racetrack); maps of, 3, 45; marketing of, 10 –16, 11, 13, 255 nn48,49, 256 nn52,55; naming of, 6 –7, 32; plan for, 109; renaissance of, 244; size and scale of, 2, 4, 31, 62, 108; as stable housing for black middle class, 221; and staff, number of and payroll costs, 230, 296 n5. See also applications; architecture; community; landscaping and grounds; maintenance workers; manager and management; security force of Rochdale Village; United Housing Foundation Rochdale Village Athletic League, 145 Rochdale Village Black Society: and crime prevention, 182, 185; on participation by new residents, 224; and school decentralization/ teachers’ strike, 208, 209; as successor to RVNCS, 139, 208; on white exodus, 222. See also Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society Rochdale Village Bulletin, 179, 216, 218 Rochdale Village Civic Association, 179 Rochdale Village Day Camp, 145 Rochdale Village Democratic Club, 197 Rochdale Village Inc., 42, 112 Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society: on active integrated living, 138; dances of, 139; formation of, 138–139, 238 n43; and meeting to examine race relations, 205; and natural integration, 132; and teachers’ strike, 198–199. See also Rochdale Village Black Society Rochdale Village Public School Committee (RVPSC), 156; and black community surrounding RV, 164; Board of Education pressured by, 164; formation of, 162–163, 283 nn41-42; guerilla tactics of, 163–164; innovative program for education, 165–166, 283 n62; stalwart defense of integrated schools, 165; UHF confronted by, 163–164 Rochdale Village Reform Democratic club, 119, 151, 198, 280 n103

320

Index

Rochdale Village Regular Democratic Association, 151–153, 280 n92, 281 n111 Rochdale Village relations with South Jamaica, 139; attempts to make connections, 147–148; boundaries and barriers and, 144 –146; and central meeting place, lack of, 146 –147; and community feedback, lack of, 147; drugrelated issues and, 182; expressway extension, united defeat of, 148–149; as failure, perception of, 248–249; gift of schools and, 159 –160, 161, 164; limiting contact, belief in, 141–142; and local politics, 149 –153, 280 nn92,109; mutual suspicions and doom of, 143–144; and name changes to Inside Rochdale, 149; public housing proposal, united defeat of, 148–149; swimming pool controversy, 139 –144, 278–279 nn49,52,54. See also schools and integration Rockefeller, David, 63 Rockefeller, Nelson, 5, 6, 21, 32, 34, 37, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 86, 91, 92, 100, 272 nn54-55 Rodger, Cleveland, 79 Rogers, David, 164 –165, 171 Roman Catholics, 17 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 80 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 39, 74 –75, 91 Rosen, Charles, 299 n34 Rosen, Samuel, 231 Ross, Robert, 95 Rubin, Richard, 152 Russia, 23, 25 Rustin, Bayard, 159 Rutgers Houses, 86 RVPSC. See Rochdale Village Public School Committee Sanders, Betty, 282–283 n40 Schlesinger, Benjamin, 26 school decentralization and community control: William Booth and, 203; business community and, 193; empowering minorities as goal of, 193, 199, 204, 208–209; Ferguson and, 104 –105, 194; as impetus for teachers’ strike, 191, 192–194; and integration, lack of support for, 193, 203–204, 208–209; and “neighborhood school” as term, 161; Parents and Taxpayers (PAT) and, 160 –161, 193; perception of, in RV, 198–199, 200; UFT control of, in strike aftermath, 208–209, 210 schools and integration: as the art of the possible, 169; both sides of teachers’ strike

as committed to, 195, 290n27; boycotts, 158–159, 168, 198, 281n14; busing of students, 157, 168, 169, 197, 198, 208, 223; collapse of ideals of integration, 193, 203–204, 207–209; and common desires of parents, 167, 213; as community creation, 171–172; countervailing forces, 157–158, 160–161, 166, 168, 193, 281–282nn8,32,34, 284n67; de facto segregation, 156–157; fragility of, 172; and full inclusion of minorities in society, 159; gift of Rochdale schools, 159–160, 164; inferior status of minority schools, 159; innovative program and training, 165–166, 283n62; leadership of schools and, 169–170, 209–210; pairing of schools, 157, 168, 197– 198, 208; quality of education and success of, 156, 213, 223; RV as test case for, 165, 192; South Jamaica schools, state of, 160, 282n22; tracking and, 166, 167, 168–169, 210, 285n84; white student exodus, citywide, 156; wooden schoolhouses, 160, 165, 282n22. See also school decentralization and community control; schools and Rochdale schools and Rochdale: assassination of MLK and, 196 –197; class differences and, 212; compromise and, 166 –167, 171, 195; elementary schools, 161–167, 168, 282 n39; enthusiasm for, 169 –170; guerilla tactics for action on, 163–164; junior high school (integration of IS 72), 168, 195–196, 197–198, 203, 209 –214, 293 n139; junior high school (integration of JHS 8), 167–171, 284 n71, 285 n84; junior high schools, proposed pairing of, 197–198; lack of progress in building schools, 161–162, 282 n39; in 1990s, 243; open during teachers’ strike, 200 –201; temporary buildings, 164, 168; UHF and, 161, 163; violence in, 196 –197, 211–213, 219, 243; white exodus and poor quality of, 213, 217, 219, 223. See also teachers’ strike Schulberg, Peter, 93 Schwerner, Nathan, 120 Scott, Marian, 242 security force of Rochdale Village: authority of, 181, 185; on crime rates in NYC, generally, 180; criticism of, 180 –182; fair wages, RV commitment to, 229 –230; internal politics of RV and, 184 –185; negative comparisons to NYC police, 180 –181; number of, 230; and park as not policeable, 294 n27; parking lot patrols, 177; and teenagers, harassment of, 181; union representing, 230, 296 n2; vandalism statistics, 179,

Index 287 nn46-47. See also construction-site demonstrations; Teamsters’ strike Seeger, Pete, 120, 282–283 n40 Seeman, Bernard, 13, 205 segregation: de facto, 73, 156; de jure, 156, 157; Eleanor Roosevelt’s article against, 80; of schools, de facto, 156 –157; of swimming pools, Moses and, 73–74, 268 n23 senior citizens: black discomfort in clubs of, 134; and crime, fear of, 189; demographics of, 19; Jewish sunbathing, 134; as resistant to exodus, 217, 220 –221, 228; and swimming pool issue, 141; Teamsters’ strike and, 234 Seward Park Houses, 36, 42, 62, 109 Shalom Alechem Houses, 27 Shanker, Albert, 191–192, 193, 194, 196, 202, 209 shopping malls, 7, 122, 178, 183, 187, 207. See also cooperative supermarkets Shorr, Saul, 154 Silberman, Charles, 159 Six-Day War, 205–206 slum clearance, 35, 39, 40, 43, 49, 67, 76, 81, 126, 299 n32 Smith, Alfred E., 33–34, 37, 39, 48, 71, 73, 74, 82, 268 n21 Smith, Cleo, 235–236 social engineering, 78, 79 socialism, 25, 29 Socialist-Zionism, 27 Southeast Queens Interfaith Committee, 140 South Jamaica: average income in, 18; black homeownership and, 46 –51; as black neighborhood, 4, 46 –51, 64, 239, 250; and class, 46, 47, 48, 51, 56; and employment, discrimination in, 85, 102, 103; expanding boundaries of, 51, 54, 263 n9; gang violence in, 175; history of neighborhood, 44 –51, 262 n47; and housing crash of 2007, 248; interracial housing and, 49 –50; Ku Klux Klan and, 48; lawlessness and police protection and, 48– 49; map of, 45; poverty and slums of, 48– 49, 51; public housing and, 49, 51, 56; and recreational facilities, 49; renters and, 46; residents of RV coming from, 17; and schools, white leadership of, 204; and slum clearance, 49; as “South Side”, 262 n40; white exodus from, 47, 51. See also Jamaica Racetrack; Rochdale Village relations with South Jamaica South Jamaica Community League, 49 South Jamaica Houses, 49 –50, 78–79 South Jamaica Property Owners Association, 47

321

Spain, Minta, 155, 156 Spero, Francesca, 9, 201, 211–212, 213 Spock, Dr. Benjamin, 105 Springfield Gardens, 54, 94, 148–149, 263 n9 St. Albans, 48, 50 Starr, Anita, 93, 110, 192, 199, 200, 203, 209, 210 –211, 212, 222 Starrett City, 223, 228, 247, 294 n45 State Commission Against Discrimination, 79 –80 State Employees Retirement System, 66 State Teachers Retirement System, 66 Stein, Annie, 163, 165, 166 Stewart, Merle, 102 Stuyvesant Town, 40, 69, 76–77, 79, 81, 254n30, 268n36, 269n55 suburbs, 12, 76 –77, 254 n30 Sullivan, Timothy “Big Tim”, 52, 263 n1 Sumner, William Graham, 69 –70, 78–79 superblock projects, 35, 121, 123–129, 175, 286 n14 supermarkets. See cooperative supermarkets Swados, Harvey, 1–2, 9, 14, 16, 19 –20, 113, 119, 134, 135, 136, 156, 168, 169 –170, 175, 183, 255 n38 swimming pools, public, 73–74, 139 –144, 268 nn23,25, 278–279 nn49,52,54 swingers club, 119 synagogues. See Jewish religious institutions Szold, Robert, 59 Tammany Hall, 37, 52, 263 n1 tax abatements (Mitchell-Lama law): carrying charges and changes to, 115, 116; Jacobs’s critique of, 124; law specifying, 58; renewed complaints about, 227; rent rates and, 60; and resistance to middle-income housing, 60 – 61, 65, 66 – 67; Rockefeller securing, 65; struggles in 1980s and 1990s and, 241. See also Mitchell-Lama housing law Taylor, Gardner C., 88, 90 teachers: accused of racial epithets, 204; innovative program and training, 165–166, 283n62; racial percentages of, 159; strike of 1967, 195–196, 209; threats to, by students, 211; white, controversy of teaching black students, 204, 210–211. See also teachers’ strike (1968) teachers’ strike (1968): assassination of MLK and aftermath in leadup to, 196 –197; attempt by RV to get exemption from strike, 191–192; black-Jewish relations in leadup to, 205–206; choosing up of sides, 191, 198–201, 290 nn45,49; and destruction of

322

Index

teachers’ strike (1968) (continued) community and integration in RV, 192, 195, 201, 202–204, 214, 290 n45; and differences magnified into chasms, 195; and integration, end of support for, 203–204, 207–209; Jewish Defense League and, 206 –207; and Ocean Hill–Brownsville Community School Board controversy, 191, 192–194; open schools of RV during, 200 –201; proposed pairing of IS 72 and JHS 8 in leadup to, 197–198; Rochdale’s IS 72 and aftermath of, 209 –211, 292 nn101,102,108; teachers’ strike of 1967 and, 195–196, 209; timeframe of, 194; UFT as victors, 201–202; white exodus in aftermath of, 192 Teamsters’ strike (1978): aftermath of, 240 –241; and arbitration, conflict over, 235–236; breaking union, 231, 236 –237; cleanup by residents, 234; commercial traffic into RV shutdown, 232; and co-op supermarkets, court order protecting, 232; cost of fighting, 235; court decisions settling, 236; as defining moment for RV, 237; Barry Feinstein and, 230 –231, 233–234, 235–237; and finances of RV, 241; garbage problems and, 232, 233, 234; internal politics of RV and, 235–236, 238, 298 n55; lawyer for RV Board, 231; as longest-running major strike in NYC history, 231; no rehire for strikers, 231, 235, 237; police protection and, 232, 233; and power plant, 230, 231, 232, 234; press coverage of, 237–238, 298 n55; pressure on unions of RV negotiators, 233–234; previous strike and settlement, 230 –231; race and, 237–238; regrets about, 236 –237; replacement guards for strikers, 231, 232, 233; self-defense by residents, 235; snow removal issues and, 232, 233; and UFT, 237–238; unity of residents and, 234 –235; vandalism by Teamsters, 231, 232, 235; violence and physical intimidation, 232–233 Teamsters union, and construction-site demonstrations, 89 teenagers, 134 –137, 145, 146, 173–174, 175, 177, 181, 182, 183–184, 189, 206, 207, 211, 212–213, 219, 268 n25, 285 n3, 289 n9 tenant relocations/removals, 34–35, 40, 61– 62, 63, 64, 69, 81, 124 Tenants Council/United Shareholders, 115–117, 184 –185, 225–228, 229 –230, 236, 241, 245, 295 n68, 296 n1, 298 n55 Tewel, Kenneth, 170, 171, 201, 203, 209, 210, 214, 249, 292 n108 Thanksgiving Eve Massacre, 241

Thomas, Norman, 108 Thurman, Howard, 195 Title I (National Housing Act of 1949), 36, 40, 41, 42– 43, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62 Torrey, Raymond H., 72 Trotsky, Leon, 26 Trump, Fred, 63– 64 United Federation of Teachers (UFT), 191–192, 193, 194, 196, 202, 208–209, 210, 237–238. See also teachers’ strike (1968) United Housing Foundation (UHF): ambitions of, 246 –247, 299 n32; and community, creation of, 106 –108, 118–119, 120 –121, 276 n55; in complex business arrangements, 42; Concerned Cooperators and, 226 –227; and construction-site demonstrations, 90, 105, 271 n43; decline of, 227, 246, 247, 299 n34; end of operations, xi, 22–23; finances and financing of, 62– 63, 66; founding of, 5, 22, 41; interracial housing, concerns about, 64; Kazan’s personality and, 22; and labor movement, 41– 42; “low and moderate cost” as description of housing, 59 – 60; and natural integration, 131–133; as nonideological, 108–110; as nonprofit, 43; outspokenness against segregation, 80; selfemployed frowned upon by, 19, 26, 126; and size of communities, 106 –108; tenant relocation and controversial developments, 62; Tenants Council and, 225; Title I projects of, 36, 40, 42, 62; total number of housing units built by, 5, 22; union members/ partners of, 42, 43, 63, 64, 90, 260 n26. See also Board of Directors of Rochdale Village; manager and management; Rochdale Village United Shareholders. See Tenants Council/ United Shareholders United Workers Cooperative (the Coops), 27 upper-income housing, defined, 59 Urban League, 46, 47, 102, 283 n41 urban renewal, 34 –35, 121, 123–129, 139 –140, 283 n42 Urstadt, Charles J., 218 utopias and utopianism, 6, 13–14, 21, 25, 32, 38–39, 109 –110, 125, 126, 250 Van Arsdale, Harry, 63, 64, 91 Vaughn, Lenny, 148 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 77 Wagner, Robert F. Jr., 22, 37, 56, 58, 61, 66, 67, 92, 100, 141–142, 143 Warbasse, James Peter, 30

Index Washington, Booker T., 103 Washington, Irving, 113, 115 Watkins, Juanita, 147, 149 –150, 151–153, 198, 224, 280 n110 Watts, Stephen, 154 Weddington, Rachel, 165 Weinberger, Sidney, 115 Weinblatt, Howard, 154 Weinstein, Jules, 180, 223, 224, 225, 295 n56 Weinstein, Moses “Mo”, 150 white backlash, 87, 282 n32 white exodus: attempts by residents to address, 222–225; beginning of, 218, 293 n9; black departures, 218; crime and, 186, 188, 219 –220, 222, 223; disappointed idealism and, 221; ease of leaving, 220 –221; ebbing of, 228; emotions about, variety of, 221–222; and financial troubles of RV, 218; and leadership vacuum, 244; reasons for, 218–221; recognition of the problem, 222–223; and school quality, 213, 217, 219, 223; senior citizens as resistant to, 217, 220 –221, 228; from South Jamaica, 47, 51;

323

statistics on, 218, 293 n10; in teachers’ strike aftermath, 192, 214 Whitfield, Oscar, 231, 232–233 Wilde, Oscar, 25, 257 n12 Wilkerson, Doxey, 165, 166, 167, 283 n62, 284 n67 Wilkins, Roy, 88, 97, 194, 239 Williams, Hugh, 15, 16, 50, 113, 114, 116 –117, 226, 241, 243–244, 295 n68 Wilson, Fred, 233, 236 Winnick, Louis, 241, 247 women and work, 18, 19, 219 Wood, Edith Elmer, 28 Woodward, C. Vann, 250 Woolf, Max, 165, 166 Workmen’s Circle, 27, 196 World’s Fair (1964), 34, 36, 72, 86, 259 n3 Yanovsky, Saul, 257 n10 Young, Andrew, 98 Young, Whitney, 97, 194 Zukin, Sharon, 129