267px, Hillman Housing buildings on Grand Street as seen from the East River towers. Amalgamated Dwellings is seen between the second and the third tower
Cooperative Village is a community of
housing cooperatives on the
Lower East Side of
Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
,
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
. The cooperatives are centered on
Grand Street in an area south of the entrance ramp to the
Williamsburg Bridge
The Williamsburg Bridge is a suspension bridge in New York City across the East River connecting the Lower East Side of Manhattan at Delancey Street with the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn at Broadway near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressw ...
and west of the
FDR Drive. Combined, the four cooperatives have 4,500 apartments in twelve buildings.
The cooperatives were sponsored, organized and built by
trade union
A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and benefits ...
s, the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was a United States labor union known for its support for "social unionism" and progressive political causes. Led by Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, it helped found the Congress of Indus ...
and
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), whose members were employed in the women's clothing industry, was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membe ...
, as well as the
United Housing Foundation {{unreferenced, date=September 2019
The United Housing Foundation (UHF) was a real estate investment trust in New York that constructed numerous cooperative housing projects, including Rochdale Village in Queens and Co-op City in the Bronx.
Pu ...
, a development organization set up by the unions in 1951.
The cooperatives followed strict
Rochdale Principles, with one vote per member, irrespective of the nominal value of his
shares. Resale of shares was restricted; members moving out of the apartments had to sell their shares back to the cooperative at the buying price, minus a
flip tax. After the original financing structures governing the apartments were phased out, beginning in 1986, the shareholders of each cooperative decided, in separate votes in 1997 and 2000, to abandon the
limited equity rules and free the resale of shares, in some cases increasing the value of apartments fivefold. To keep the maintenance fees low for original tenants, many of them retirees, a high flip tax is charged, up to 25% of the gross sales price for "first sales" and up to 15% for "second sales". In a similar instance, the shareholders at the
Penn South
Penn South, officially known as Mutual Redevelopment Houses and formerly Penn Station South, is a limited-equity
on the ...
sister cooperative in the
Chelsea
Chelsea or Chelsey may refer to:
Places Australia
* Chelsea, Victoria
Canada
* Chelsea, Nova Scotia
* Chelsea, Quebec
United Kingdom
* Chelsea, London, an area of London, bounded to the south by the River Thames
** Chelsea (UK Parliament consti ...
section of Manhattan voted to continue operating under limited equity rules.
Amalgamated Dwellings
The Amalgamated Dwellings, one of the oldest housing cooperatives in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
, was the second cooperative sponsored by the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was a United States labor union known for its support for "social unionism" and progressive political causes. Led by Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, it helped found the Congress of Indus ...
, after the successful
Amalgamated Cooperative Apartments in
the Bronx
The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New Y ...
. The six-story
Art Deco
Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...
building with 236 apartments was designed by the architects
Springsteen &
Goldhammer and was completed in 1930 at the site of a former printing plant. The building covered one city block, with a protected garden in the center. The design was intended to provide direct
sunlight to all rooms, something that was missing from the typical Manhattan
tenement
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...
s. The cooperative also had a
library
A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...
, an
auditorium
An auditorium is a room built to enable an audience to hear and watch performances. For movie theatres, the number of auditoria (or auditoriums) is expressed as the number of screens. Auditoria can be found in entertainment venues, community ...
, a
nursery, and a
gym
A gymnasium, also known as a gym, is an indoor location for athletics. The word is derived from the ancient Greek term " gymnasium". They are commonly found in athletic and fitness centres, and as activity and learning spaces in educational i ...
. The apartments were priced at $500 a room, with monthly maintenance fees, including repayment of the mortgage, at $12.50 a room.
Hillman Housing Corporation
The Hillman Housing Corporation was the third cooperative sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The cooperative, located on Grand Street between
Kazan
Kazan ( ; rus, Казань, p=kɐˈzanʲ; tt-Cyrl, Казан, ''Qazan'', IPA: ɑzan is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia. The city lies at the confluence of the Volga and the Kazanka rivers, covering an ...
Plaza and
Lewis Street
''Lewis Street'' is the third extended play from American rapper J. Cole. It was released on July 22, 2020, by Dreamville Records and Roc Nation. It contains the dual singles " The Climb Back" and "Lion King on Ice". The two singles were to serve ...
on two sides of the Amalgamated Dwellings buildings, consists of three twelve-story buildings with 807 units. A garden links Hillman Houses to each other and to the Amalgamated Dwellings.
Construction was begun in November 1947 and was completed by 1950 at a total cost of $9.1 million. The design is attributed to Springsteen & Goldhammer, with
Herman J. Jessor responsible for much of the work. Four slum blocks with 65 tenement buildings were torn down to clear the site for the development. As banks were unwilling to provide loans to the cooperative, financing was provided by the
Mutual Life Insurance Company.
The cooperative is named after
Sidney Hillman
Sidney Hillman (March 23, 1887 – July 10, 1946) was an American labor leader. He was the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor' ...
, founder and first president of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was a United States labor union known for its support for "social unionism" and progressive political causes. Led by Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, it helped found the Congress of Indus ...
. Each of the three Hillman houses is named after a cooperative or labor leader:
*
Edward A. Filene
Edward Albert Filene (September 3, 1860 – September 26, 1937) was an American businessman and philanthropist. He is best known for building the Filene's department store chain and for his decisive role in pioneering credit unions across the Un ...
, father of the
credit union
A credit union, a type of financial institution similar to a commercial bank, is a member-owned nonprofit financial cooperative. Credit unions generally provide services to members similar to retail banks, including deposit accounts, provisi ...
movement
*
Meyer London
Meyer London (December 29, 1871 – June 6, 1926) was an American politician from New York City. He represented the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was one of only two members of the Socialist Party of America elected to the United States Congre ...
, socialist member of the
64th United States Congress
The 64th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, DC from March 4, 1915, to M ...
*
Louis D. Brandeis,
U.S. Supreme Court Justice
East River Housing Corporation
![East River Housing Corporation towers in Coop Village](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/East_River_Housing_Corporation_towers_in_Coop_Village.jpg)
The East River Housing Corporation was one of the first
developments of the newly formed
United Housing Foundation {{unreferenced, date=September 2019
The United Housing Foundation (UHF) was a real estate investment trust in New York that constructed numerous cooperative housing projects, including Rochdale Village in Queens and Co-op City in the Bronx.
Pu ...
and was financially sponsored by the
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), whose members were employed in the women's clothing industry, was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membe ...
. A mortgage loan was insured by the
Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency. Construction work was begun in November 1953 and completed in 1956. The cooperative has 1,672 apartments in four 20- and 21-story towers on an open lot facing the
East River
The East River is a saltwater tidal estuary in New York City. The waterway, which is actually not a river despite its name, connects Upper New York Bay on its south end to Long Island Sound on its north end. It separates the borough of Quee ...
.
The project was designed by
George W. Springsteen and his new associate,
Herman J. Jessor, who would go on to design many other UHF projects, including
Co-op City
Co-op City (short for Cooperative City) is a cooperative housing development located in the northeast section of the borough of the Bronx in New York City. It is bounded by Interstate 95 to the southwest, west, and north and the Hutchinson River ...
. The buildings followed the ''"
towers in a park The Ville contemporaine (, ''Contemporary City'') was an unrealized utopian planned community intended to house three million inhabitants designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1922.
Plan
The centerpiece of this plan was a group of ...
"'' concept introduced to the U.S. in the late 1930s by the
Castle Village towers in
Hudson Heights in upper Manhattan. The Castle Village layout, with cross-shaped towers placed diagonally to the cardinal directions optimized to give each apartment a maximum view, was used by most post-war
social
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives from ...
and
affordable housing
Affordable housing is housing which is deemed affordable to those with a household income at or below the median as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. Most of the literature on af ...
in New York City. Springsteen's derivation, used already at Hillman Houses, connects three of these towers side by side. The East River towers also share the
reinforced concrete construction and red brick
facade with Castle Village. At the time of construction the 21 story towers were the highest reinforced concrete buildings in the U.S.
Each of the four East River houses is named after a labor leader:
*
Morris Hillquit
Morris Hillquit (August 1, 1869 – October 8, 1933) was a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America and prominent labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side. Together with Eugene V. Debs and Congressman Victor L. Berger, Hil ...
, a co-founder of the
Socialist Party of America
*
Morris Sigman, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU)
* The Erlich-Alter Building, named after
Henryk Erlich and
Victor Alter, leaders of the
Polish Bund
*
Benjamin Schlesinger, three-time president of the ILGWU
Seward Park Housing Corporation
![Sp-0326](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Sp-0326.jpg)
Seward Park Housing Corporation is located in the triangle between Grand Street and
East Broadway, and abuts the New York City
public park
An urban park or metropolitan park, also known as a municipal park (North America) or a public park, public open space, or municipal gardens ( UK), is a park in cities and other incorporated places that offer recreation and green space to r ...
that shares its name. The buildings, designed by
Herman Jessor,
share the general design of the East River Houses, with four towers facing the Lower East Side. Each of the twelve semi-attached towers has seven or eight apartments on each floor around a central stairwell and corridor.
Construction work was begun in 1957 and finished in 1959 at a total cost of $23,258,392.75.
A mortgage loan from
Bowery Savings Bank
The Bowery Savings Bank was a bank in New York City, chartered in May 1834. By 1980, it had over 35 branches in the New York metropolitan area. In 1992, it was sold to H. F. Ahmanson & Co. for $200 million.
The bank's first branch at 130 Bowe ...
and
pension funds of the United Hatters, Cap & Millinery Workers, International Union as well as Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America covered $18 million, with about 25% of the costs paid as equity by the 1,728 cooperative members.
In January 1999, in the wake of a collapse in the parking garage, New York City building inspectors suspected there could be a potential flaw in Jessor's "honeycomb" design of the massive garage roof. The roof had been built to support a vast playground/park above, with trees and grass upon hundreds of thousands of pounds of soil. After the collapse on Friday night, January 15, 1999, the
New York City Department of Buildings
The New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) is the department of the New York City government that enforces the city's building codes and zoning regulations, issues building permits, licenses, registers and disciplines certain construction ...
opened an investigation into other Jessor projects to test for durability.
[Bagli, Charles, V. "Spotlight on Architect's Work In Wake of a Garage Collapse"](_blank)
''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'', January 19, 1999 The investigation did not turn up any major design flaws, and cited convergence of many elements including several days of warm rain, followed by quick freezing, thawing, and refreezing, along with a stoppage in the drainage system combined with minor cracking of the concrete in the roof and the immense weight above. After a four-year lawsuit, the Greater New York Insurance Company, insurer for Seward Park Housing, lost their nonpayment case to the cooperative, and $18 million for the damages. After the insurer won a subsequent appeal, the insurer and coop settled in 2010 with the coop returning $3.25 million to the insurer.
The buildings are known for their murals by
Hugo Gellert
Hugo Gellert (born Hugó Grünbaum, May 3, 1892 December 9, 1985) was a Hungarian-American illustrator and muralist. A committed radical and member of the Communist Party of America, Gellert created much work for political activism in the 1920s ...
in a
socialist realist
Socialist realism is a style of idealized realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and was the official style in that country between 1932 and 1988, as well as in other socialist countries after World War II. Socialist realism is ...
style. Each of the murals depicts a "
progressive" hero with an associated quote:
*
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was previously the natio ...
: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." (
Declaration of Independence
A declaration of independence or declaration of statehood or proclamation of independence is an assertion by a polity in a defined territory that it is independent and constitutes a state. Such places are usually declared from part or all of th ...
)
*
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation thro ...
: "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free." (1862
Annual Message to Congress)
*
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
: "Freedom of Speech • Freedom to Worship • Freedom from Want • Freedom from Fear" (
1941 State of the Union Address)
*
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
: "A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels." (1946 telegram on behalf of the
Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists)
In popular culture
Frances Madeson’s 2007 comic novel ''Cooperative Village'' is set in the co-operative.
[Madeson, F. ''Cooperative Village'', 2007, Carol MRP Co, ]
See also
*
Amalgamated Housing Cooperative
Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, originally the Amalgamated Cooperative Apartment House, is a pioneering American limited-equity cooperative apartment complex organized under the provisions of the ''Private Housing Finance'' (PVH) law, article IV ( ...
*
Co-op City, Bronx
Co-op City (short for Cooperative City) is a cooperative housing development located in the northeast section of the borough of the Bronx in New York City. It is bounded by Interstate 95 to the southwest, west, and north and the Hutchinson River ...
*
Essex Crossing
Essex Crossing is an under-construction mixed-use development in New York City's Lower East Side, at the intersection of Delancey Street and Essex Street just north of Seward Park. Essex Crossing will comprise nearly of space on and will cos ...
*
LeFrak City
LeFrak City (originally spelled Lefrak and pronounced ) is a 4,605-apartment development in the southernmost region of Corona and the easternmost part of Elmhurst, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It is located between Junct ...
*
Mitchell Lama
Mitchell may refer to:
People
*Mitchell (surname)
*Mitchell (given name)
Places Australia
* Mitchell, Australian Capital Territory, a light-industrial estate
* Mitchell, New South Wales, a suburb of Bathurst
* Mitchell, Northern Territo ...
*
Parkchester, Bronx
*
Parkfairfax, Virginia
Parkfairfax is a neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, United States, located in the northwestern part of the city near the boundary with Arlington County. Nearby thoroughfares are Interstate 395 (Shirley Highway), State Route 402 (Quaker Lane), ...
*
Parkmerced, San Francisco
Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Thomas Dolliver Church in the early 1940s. Parkmerced is the second-largest single-owner neighborhood of apartment blocks west of the Mississi ...
*
Park La Brea, Los Angeles
Park La Brea ( Spanish: ''La Brea''—"The tar", after the nearby La Brea Tar Pits) is a sprawling apartment community in the Miracle Mile District of Los Angeles, California. With 4,255 units located in eighteen 13-story towers and thirty-one ...
*
Penn South
Penn South, officially known as Mutual Redevelopment Houses and formerly Penn Station South, is a limited-equity
on the ...
*
Riverton Houses
The Riverton Houses is a large (originally 1,232 unit) residential development in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City.
Ownership
The project was proposed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1944, and largely served an African American p ...
*
Rochdale Village, Queens
Rochdale Village (pronounced ) is a housing cooperative and neighborhood in the southeastern corner of the New York City borough of Queens. Located in Community District 12, Rochdale Village is grouped as part of Greater Jamaica, corresponding t ...
*
Southbridge Towers
__NOTOC__
Southbridge Towers is a big housing cooperative development located in the Civic Center neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City. The complex was built between 1961 and 1971 by Tishman Realty & Construction as a subsidized co-op ...
*
Starrett City, Brooklyn
Starrett City (formally known as the Spring Creek Towers) is a housing development in the Spring Creek section of East New York, in Brooklyn, New York City. It is located on a peninsula on the north shore of Jamaica Bay, bounded by Fresh Creek ...
*
Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village
Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, sometimes shortened to StuyTown, is a large post–World War II private residential development on the east side of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The complex consists of 110 red brick apartment b ...
References
Notes
Further reading
Labor and housing in New York CityAmalgamated Housing: The History of a Pioneer Cooperative 1927(1961) by
Abraham E. KazanReport on ILGWU Cooperative Village(1957 report on the building of what is now East River Housing Corporation)
External links
Official sites
Hillman Housing CorporationEast River Housing CorporationSeward Park Housing CorporationSPBuzz shareholder-run news and discussion site for Seward Park Shareholders
Photos
Flickr photo group for Cooperative Village
Other
Buildings by Herman Jessorat
Emporis Buildings
Emporis GmbH was a real estate data mining company that was headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. The company collected data and photographs of buildings worldwide, which were published in an online database from 2000 to September 2022.
On 12 Sept ...
{{Manhattan
Apartment buildings in New York City
Condominiums and housing cooperatives in Manhattan
Grand Street (Manhattan)
History of labor relations in the United States
Lower East Side
Residential buildings in Manhattan