The Co-op: On Urban Planning and Socialist Dreams
Kriegel, Leonard
ON A COLD WINTER afternoon in 1960, my wife and I pored over blueprints in the Grand Street office of the United Housing Federation, a nonprofit foundation created after the war with...
...We still are, now that we are "senior citizens" worried over aching joints and the young people threatening to crowd us out of a city we love...
...History is personal to the dying remnants of the labor movement...
...As its concrete skeletons rose and Penn South began to take shape, urban renewal began to come under fire...
...But it wasn't the threat of violence alone that made us wonder whether we should stay...
...In the century of total war perhaps all hatreds were intimate...
...In our absence, friends with schoolage children had left the co-op for the suburbs...
...Among his books are Working Through and Falling Into Life...
...How could I have known on that May morning in 1962 that the co-op was a commitment of a lifetime...
...The cries of children float like feathers from below...
...For me it held, like that other bete noire of so many intellectuals, the big American car, a promise of possibility...
...Penn South was to be a union co-op, but although the union's members had first shot at purchasing apartments, any New Yorker able to afford the $650 per room price tag was eligible to buy...
...In the Bronx, I never knew anyone who would cross a picket line, but here the young mothers push past the pickets, irritated...
...Penn South never lacked the amenities Jane Jacobs thinks of as the glue of a healthy urban community...
...he laughs...
...New York has always been dirty, if not drab...
...If in the rest of New York co-op prices are now the stuff of dreams, Penn South has remained loyal to the socialist ideas of the English Rochdale Movement of the 1840s...
...In annual election contests for the Board, the co-op is still spoken of in tones of proprietary reverence that are among the more irritating aspects of the rhetoric of the left in America...
...A week before we moved to Penn South, Harriet learned she was pregnant...
...The co-op offered a chance to live in the real city THE CO-OP not only to us but to garment workers, furriers, teachers, artists, and small businesspeople who wanted to remain in New York, not because it was the world's center but because they felt it was their center...
...Had we not found Penn South, Harriet and I would have joined the exodus to suburbia...
...A decade after Penn South, UHF was destroyed by the spiraling costs of the gigantic cooperative complex it built in the North Bronx...
...Swallowing up the Village of coffee houses and bookstores, encrusted by their own fury, they followed us to MacDougal Street with screechy promises of "good shit...
...pENN SOUTH breeds the past...
...HOW LONG IT can continue to do so is open to question...
...DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 57...
...I see now that Harriet and I were already as much a cliché as those couples fleeing the city for the suburbs...
...True, a proposed UHF middle-income co-op south of Cooper Union had encountered so much opposition that it was killed in the City Council, and the campaign against the Cooper Square Cooperative was led by wellorganized businessmen...
...The architect responsible for its design, Herman Jessor, had based that design on plans he had developed for similar co-ops built by the UHF...
...If Penn South's red-brick uniformity wasn't "totalitarian," to use Mailer's word, it was certainly dull and familiar...
...No matter how determined we were to remain here, that "here" was already a far different New York from the city we remembered...
...When we moved here in our late twenties, most of the other young couples we met were as eager as we to raise families in the city...
...A move two avenues west and three blocks north was, we felt, our reward for those exhausting hours spent apartment hunting in Manhattan, the borough that outer-borough New Yorkers like us called "the real city...
...His guiding idea was affordability for ordinary working people...
...This city is the measure of the real and the unreal for me, where a crack in a sidewalk unseen for fifty years is as vivid in the mind's eye as the face of the first girl I ever kissed...
...But were we to leave, we would receive only our equity investment over the past forty-four years (assessments in equity over the years now make that approximately $30,000), less deductions for painting, re-sanding the floors, and restoring the apartment to its original condition...
...An old friend, a writer returning to the states after decades abroad, stares down from our living room window at the thickening trees and manicured lawn...
...I am to meet my wife for an early dinner a block from the studio, now undoubtedly an expensive pied a terre apartment, in the city we both still love...
...Michael Bloomberg's New York is far removed from the city in which I came of age...
...I swore I wouldn't go back until he died," he laughed...
...Neither Jacobs nor Mailer had Penn South in mind, but its uniform twenty-one-story red-brick buildings exemplified what they disliked...
...Is this what we dreamed of...
...If the city is less magical today, it probably is also less ordinary...
...I was a twenty-nine-year-old English instructor with a pregnant wife when we moved to Penn South...
...Yet geography shouldn't sustain the identity of a man of seventy-two...
...Inside, well-lit displays of organic produce testify that Chelsea, no longer home to the fashion industry, is now fashionable beyond the wildest expectations of those who built Penn South...
...I push to the corner, to read of how Whole Foods has refused to negotiate with the union...
...Small, neatly dressed, his anarchism as much a uniform as his shiny black suit, he was old and fragile when we moved into 355 Eighth Avenue in 1970...
...It exudes the desire for simple comfort, even as men like my uncle's friend and the old anarchist on the twenty-first floor dreamed the dreams of the "new man...
...Among the attractions of Penn South was that the old wars of the left still raged here...
...Still, it's not bad, is it...
...After Chelsea showed signs of becoming fashionable once again, the hotel was converted to a market-priced co-op— in a city destined to fill up with similar co-ops...
...Even if the pragmatic idealism that built Penn South coexisted with an affluent postwar America seduced by suburban dreams, it was a statement about what New Yorkers still considered important...
...The co-op's architecture, its population, even the smells in the hallways—pedestrian describes them all...
...A Fulbright year in the then-quiescent Netherlands was a welcome rest from the turmoil of the city...
...Communist, socialist, anarchist, reform Democrat, libertarian— each and all insisted on being heard...
...Backed by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the UHF had recently begun building a large co-op in Chelsea...
...Our two sons were born and raised here, and the younger now lives in an apartment a block from where he was born (we put his name on the applicants' list when he was two...
...And while nothing happened, for the next two months Harriet and I spoke of little other than whether we, too, should leave the city...
...It is how he can serve out his time...
...Failing public schools, spiraling crime, growing racial tension—the sense of imminent disaster toned daily life in a city engaged in a war even if no one knew who the enemy was...
...Jacobs preferred small-scale urban density, and her influential book criticized high-rise architecture as a reflection of a marked decline in urban sensibility...
...If anything, it suffers from an excessive sense of its own significance...
...The apartment we now live in has three bedrooms, a large living room, an eat-in kitchen (a strong selling point of real-estate advertisements 54 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 in the Sunday Times), large walk-in closets, and two bathrooms...
...The city that made a junkie out of this Bronx boy isn't likely to be resurrected in a Chelsea now far from seedy...
...ON A COLD WINTER afternoon in 1960, my wife and I pored over blueprints in the Grand Street office of the United Housing Federation, a nonprofit foundation created after the war with the support of organized labor to build middleincome cooperative housing in New York City...
...ARMED WITH MEMORY, I push down gentrified Seventh Avenue, eyeing the people rushing into the Whole Foods THE CO-OP Supermarket on Twenty-Fourth Street, where the VA Hospital stood...
...0 RGANIZED LABOR in general and the ILGWU in particular were powerful forces in the New York of the 1960s, and that power was evident on an April day a month before we moved, when Harriet and I and a thousand other cooperators attended the dedication of Penn South...
...In the heady air of New York real estate, even socialists have learned the language of profit...
...And what is sterile or totalitarian to some is liberating to one who walks with twelve pounds of aluminum, steel, and leather strapped to his legs...
...This Chelsea is as much a state of mind as it is a neighborhood...
...Garbage disposal, electrical co-generationevery issue was political...
...LEONARD KRIEGEL is an author and essayist...
...And in that city, on a September Sunday, my family and I went down to Greenwich Village...
...I had never deluded myself about the co-op's "radicalism...
...Many of those who moved here in the 1960s already possessed faith in the co-op's—and, by extension, in their own—singularity...
...Since the 1970s, the church has housed a soup kitchen for the city's homeless...
...The decay of its housing stock wasn't the only reason for the flight of the middle class from New York, but it undoubtedly figured in the city's decline...
...Yet few recognized that the New York they had fallen in love with, the city of the forties and fifties, already was fragmented beyond recognition...
...Organic food is politically correct in today's New York, particularly to those who proclaim their dedication to the environment...
...In today's New York, it would command a price of at least a million dollars...
...Changes made over the years to make our apartment more accessible would probably add $50,000 to $100,000 to its market-value price...
...A family left for Great Neck, and in January 1970 we were offered their apartment...
...You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs...
...It seemed capable of erupting at any moment...
...It isn't his place in history that concerns him...
...Forty-three years later, I find it difficult to recapture our joy on that May morning in 1962 when we left a small studio at 166 West Twenty-Second Street to take possession of Apartment 9B...
...I had certainly inherited mine, from a father whose faith in labor was exceeded only by his faith in the Rebonoshelolam (Lord of the World) and an uncle whose faith was in labor alone...
...City life is anything but theoretical, and high-rise communities, it turns out, also evolve into neighborhoods...
...it is just as far removed from the city of the 1960s and 1970s...
...All you got to do is read their constitution...
...For Norman Mailer, the high-rise embodied a stifling mind-set that threatened America with soullessness...
...Lifetime commitments should be to places that have been in the family for generations, not to a middle-income co-op...
...I am irritated by what I have seen at Whole Foods, angry about how organized labor is dying in the city, upset with a populace for whom crossing picket lines has become as natural as shopping for organic food...
...The difference was that the co-op froze to the left...
...And that is somehow fitting, for a housing cooperative is not an idea but a place—and in the case of Penn South, a place that is a community both by choice and by evolution...
...The Soviet Union is not antiSemitic, Lennie...
...This is not some academic justifying the unjustifiable in the name of a future that will never come but an old man waiting to die and trying to hold on to belief...
...Penn South emerged from the same pragmatic idealism that created the Tennessee Valley Authority during the New Deal...
...I still don't know whether the anarchist was Spanish or Italian...
...And yet, in the midst of it all, I am suddenly overwhelmed by joy...
...Not that the co-op was where the "new man" of socialist dreams was supposed to emerge...
...And why not...
...As the sixties came to its turbulent end, the city's drift grew...
...And yet, nothing happened...
...The core of its appeal was its location and its low rents ("rent" was transformed to "carrying charges" in the bill slipped under the door each month...
...Belief subsumed by myth, the last stand of memory merging with self, it is class-consciousness that made his life meaningful...
...For born-and-bred New Yorkers, geography is destiny...
...In Penn South, though, politics was religion...
...Was the co-op's architecture any worse than what one saw in the expensive apartment houses of Fifth Avenue...
...It is certainly absent in this city, where nonprofit housing is now an anachronism...
...Because my wife and I are so exclusively products of this city, no investment has affected our lives as much as our decision to borrow $3,250 from the Amalgamated Bank on Union Square, the city's labor bank, to buy that apartment in Penn South...
...Yet here I am, and here I expect to remain until I die, still a New York junkie craving his urban fix...
...In the mind's storm, mounted cops still bear down on furrier strikers...
...Trapped in front of the cream cheese bin, irritated with illusion, I cannot resist feeling a certain grudging admiration for him...
...How appropriate...
...It's so pedestrian...
...The Village had always been a circus...
...This co-op has, after all, achieved what it was designed to achieve: it provides decent middle-income housing that reflects the kind of social consciousness so conspicuously absent from today's America...
...They viewed Penn South as a nonprofit Mecca in crass Manhattan...
...The Yom Kippur War is raging, and he has cornered me in the dairy section, this aging acolyte of history, demanding my "take on the events...
...Not that the city was drabber or dirtier...
...I suspect that they neither know nor care that Whole Foods has leased this space from Iranian investors who converted the VA Hospital into a posh Chelsea condo with a rooftop penthouse rumored to have sold for five million dollars...
...Its landscaping was certainly far more attractive than the small shrubs that breathed the moneyed air of the Upper East Side...
...WE STAYED...
...Almost a full year would pass before all ten co-op buildings were occupied...
...And he already had what neither of his parents had ever had growing up in this city, a bedroom of his own...
...The ILG built Penn South in the heart of the garment district to serve the union's subway constituency...
...DISSENT / Spring 2006 • 53 THE CO-OP On May 9, 2005, Harriet and I celebrated our forty-third year in Penn South...
...If most left reluctantly, they still left...
...When plans for the co-op were announced, "urban renewal" was not yet a term of opprobrium...
...But now violence gathered like acne in the sour adolescent faces herded before Orange Julius...
...By 1960, the city's apartment shortage seemed permanent, and Harriet and I had borrowed the $500 deposit needed for the privilege of studying blueprints and selecting an apartment...
...Yet most New Yorkers were less interested in what was being knocked down than in what was being built in its place...
...yET I WAS NOT ONLY a man in love with this city but a cripple...
...Like the rest of the city, the co-op was overflowing with tension...
...Life in Penn South had shrunk...
...As other UHF co-ops "go private," Penn South clings— perhaps desperately—to its original vision...
...New Yorkers talk of co-op apartment prices as did millionaires in Twain's Gilded Age...
...United Housing built its cooperatives to meet the needs of men and women for whom the idea of having a stake in where they lived was foreign...
...I couldn't afford to view the elevator as incarnate evil...
...On a sunny October in 1973, we stand face-to-face in the supermarket...
...Even co-op politics, once a source of pleasure to me, now seemed petty...
...Like so many of the aging trade unionists in the coop, his mind is glued to strikes or lockouts deep in shadow, Trojan Wars of myth breeding myth...
...To this day, that afternoon frames our memory...
...From a dais constructed on what would be the co-op garage, politician after politician lauded the ILG for what it had built...
...Every brownstone and tenement, from Twenty-Third to TwentyNinth Streets, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, was leveled—and then replaced with ten high-rise buildings containing 2,820 apartments...
...He devoured the Times the same way my Yiddish-speaking grandmother devoured the Vorwarts, searching not for truth but for affirmation...
...The picket looks as if he would like to attack my wheelchair, but when I take the paper from his hand he smiles...
...it is a Mecca for the buffed and sculpted, gay and straight, who roam its streets in search of adventure...
...The co-op's official name is the even more prosaic Mutual Redevelopment Houses, Inc...
...The most notable of the churches saved from the wrecker's ball was Holy Apostles, a nineteenthcentury Episcopalian gem with superb stained-glass windows that seemed to deny the reality of the neighborhood...
...The gulag frames Eliot's "cunning corridors," yet old men still dreamed not only of grand gestures and large visions but of decent housing...
...The Hague had been oppressively smug and echt bourgeois, but it hadn't been filled with the edginess we felt in New York...
...Today, I live in the trendiest of neighborhoods in a city that worships the trendy...
...We returned as strangers to New York...
...I had never felt more alien to this city...
...Whole Foods is the most talked-about supermarket in the city, its organic tomatoes the love apples of the young mothers pushing their strollers through its substantial aisles as they prowl the produce bins just as their liberated mothers prowled the he-she bars of Sheridan Square thirty years ago...
...I would usually meet him in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, perhaps returning from the newsstand on the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Eighth...
...And the ILGWU possessed enough political clout so that construction of Penn South began a year after the co-op was proposed...
...I put the paper in my fanny pack and push across Twenty-Fourth and Seventh, toward the Venetian restaurant with the hand-lettered orange awning on Twentieth Street that Eric Asimov favorably reviewed in the Times...
...Yet puffery is understandable when one considers that Penn South exists in a nation increasingly given over to a "get what you can and get it now" philosophy...
...In a city plagued by an apartment shortage, the dedication was cause for celebration...
...However undistinguished its architecture, I relished Penn South's elevators, just as I did having an apartment large enough to raise a family in...
...A woman I know from the co-op, the daughter of an ILG organizer, walks into the supermarket, ignoring the pickets...
...Imagination seizes upon the word "pedestrian...
...A rhetoric stolen from a mythical past hummed in the hallways...
...The co-op never became wholly part of Chelsea, but it is a neighborhood within a neighborhood...
...A few years ago, its dwindling membership combined with the membership of the other needle trade unions and the hotel workers into an entity called UNITE...
...We finally settled on Apartment 9B at Penn South, 365 West Twenty-Fifth Street, and, a year and a half later, moved into a master bedroom of eighteen by twelve, a second bedroom of fifteen by eleven, an L-shaped living room, a small entrance foyer, a bathroom, a kitchen "big enough to eat in," and a terrace from which, a minute after we walked inside, we stared at an ocean liner, its long grace framed between massive Eleventh Avenue warehouses, as it sailed down Paul Goodman's "lordly Hudson...
...Most young people we met here had inherited their politics...
...We walked down Eighth Avenue, turned east at Greenwich, crossed at Eighth Street—and the tension in the air was palpable enough to touch...
...Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published as the co-op neared completion, took a dim view of the urban high-rise...
...A month after Franco's death, I met him in the elevator, dressed in his black suit, neatly knotted red tie, and starched white shirt, frayed leather case in one hand, an umbrella in the other...
...And as the original cooperators die off, they are replaced by people who have little allegiance to organized labor or to nonprofit cooperative housing...
...Yet he 56 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 lived another decade, a man who had fought Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco for so long that he spoke of them as intimate enemies...
...After Bruce's arrival in February 1967, we applied for a three-bedroom apartment...
...I am, after all, son and brother, father and grandfather, husband, teacher, writer, cripple...
...From August 1968 to August 1969, my family and I lived in The Hague...
...Living here all these years has fed my growing skepticism about urban planning and design...
...By then, our son Mark was four months old...
...Only nothing defines me as accurately as New Yorker...
...It's not what Proust had in mind, but like the church in Balbec it will woo memory until consciousness dies...
...His forefinger tapping my chest like a mallet, his nose reshaped by some cop's billy in the fur strike of 1926, he is an old friend of my Uncle Moe, whose nose was also reshaped in that strike...
...The supermarket's success is attested to by the five pickets huddled in front of the entrance, near the same corner where the noses of my uncle and his friend were altered—only these pickets speak Spanish rather than Yiddish...
...For a city junkie, New York has never seemed more inviting...
...Only now its physical condition was less significant than the fear that it inspired...
...Other than a hotel on Twenty-Third Street and four churches scattered through the area, the blocks were completely leveled...
...In a free-market America in which soaring co-op prices are a conversation staple even in such liberal bastions as Chelsea and the Upper West Side, Penn South seems almost quaint...
...A picket thrusts a piece of paper at me...
...Today, it exists in name only, as does the idea of creating middle-income housing cooperatives in this city...
...Gushing over "our beautiful co-op" has become almost as de rigueur as the refreshments promised to all who attend the election-day meeting...
...Politics was important in this city...
...But if five years of transforming living-room couch to bed each night hadn't soured us on the city, preg52 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 nancy wasn't going to either...
...Few of those who live here have ever heard of the ILGWU, which, like most New York unions, is a ghost of the power that sponsored Penn South...
...It was its ordinariness that made our New York, the New York of the forties and fifties, magical...
...If Proust could reconstruct the past with a cookie, why can't a city junkie pledge sidewalk, subway, and street to memory...
...As the idea of the collective good wanes, Penn South's rejection of privatization may still prove short-lived...
...As the rest of America grew conservative, as fear spread through the outer boroughs of the city, Penn South, too, felt under siege...
...The flyer urges me to shop at one of the unionized markets in Chelsea...
...Conceived as Eisenhower's presidency drew to a close, its goal of providing decent affordable housing to ordinary working people was an idea that was at its core socialist—and that idea has disappeared from the America of George W. Bush (as, to be fair, it had from Bill Clinton's America...
...As DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 55 THE CO-OP familiar with my rhetoric as I am with his, he berates me...
...Money measures "the quality of life" in this city...
...And now he's dead and I'm going to Spain...
...Anarchic and rudderless, it floundered in a rage of rhetoric and race...
...Now in its middle age, the co-op still celebrates its union origins with an embarrassing self-indulgence...
...At the playground in Washington Square Park, scowling parents stood guard over their children, an angry militia...
...President John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor Robert Wagner, and "master builder" Robert Moses, among others, beamed down at our sweating ranks, storing up credit with David Dubinsky, the ILG presiTHE CO-OP dent, who sat on the podium like some regal bantam with Abraham Kazan, the head of UHF, who had been building nonprofit housing co-ops in the city since 1927...
...No co-op designed to serve a union constituency has been built for decades and one suspects it is not by accident that the demise of the middle-income co-op has been matched by the demise of organized labor as a force in the life of this city...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
