Rochdale Village by Peter Eisenstadt

Rochdale Village by Peter Eisenstadt

From 1963 to 1965 roughly 6,000 families moved into Rochdale Village, at the time the world's largest housing cooperative, in southeastern Queens County. The moderate-income cooperative attracted families from a diverse background, white and black, to what was a predominantly black neighborhood. In its early years, Rochdale was widely hailed as one of the few successful large-scale efforts to create an integrated community in New York City or, for that matter, anywhere in the United States. Rochdale was built by the United Housing Foundation. Its president, Abraham Kazan, had been the major builder of low-cost cooperative housing in New York City for decades. His partner in many of these ventures was Robert Moses. Their work together was a marriage of opposites: Kazan's utopian-anarchist strain of social idealism with its roots in the early twentieth century Jewish labor movement combined with Moses's hardheaded, no-nonsense pragmatism. Peter Eisenstadt recounts the history of Rochdale Village's first years, from the controversies over its planning, to the civil rights demonstrations at its construction site in 1963, through the late 1970s, tracing the rise and fall of integration in the cooperative. (Today, although Rochdale is no longer integrated, it remains a successful and vibrant cooperative that is a testament to the ideals of its founders and the hard work of its residents.) Rochdale's problems were a microcosm of those of the city as a whole—troubled schools, rising levels of crime, fallout from the disastrous teachers' strike of 1968, and generally heightened racial tensions. By the end of the 1970s few white families remained. Drawing on exhaustive archival research, extensive interviews with the planners and residents, and his own childhood experiences growing up in Rochdale Village, Eisenstadt offers an insightful and engaging look at what it was like to live in Rochdale and explores the community's place in the postwar history of America's cities and in the still unfinished quests for racial equality and affordable urban housing.

Peter Eisenstadt makes a convincing case that Rochdale Village—which, when it opened in December 1963 was the largest housing cooperative in the world and possibly the largest integrated housing development in the United States—is a story that deserves to be rescued from obscurityEisenstadt has performed a service to scholars of race, housing, and New York City by shedding light on this understudied case.

* American Historical Review *

Peter Eisenstadt is editor of The Encyclopedia of New York State, associate editor of The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, managing editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City, and executive board member of the New York Academy of History.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780801448782
Titel	Rochdale Village
Autor	Peter Eisenstadt
Serie	American Institutions And Society
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Verlag	Cornell University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2010-09-27
Seitenanzahl	336
Preise	Winner of Winner of the 2011 New York City Book Award (New Y.
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.