Our neighborhood arose upon a vision.
Unlike
most neighborhoods in New York that simply evolved willy-nilly, where a few
immigrant families established a foothold and others of similar race, religion,
or ethnicity followed – only to yet again have the environment metamorphize
when economic conditions shifted and another wave of different faces speaking
different languages appeared – our neighborhood was truly the first intentional community in the five
boroughs. The vision of the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative was simple and
profound: create affordable housing that was cooperatively owned and
democratically managed.
The
post-World War I period was marked by droves of returning veterans and
thousands fleeing war-ravaged Europe. These conditions impacted all of New York
City, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, spawning a severe housing
shortage that initiated, and was in turn fueled by, rapacious speculation. The
nightmare slums of the Lower East Side, the capriciousness of avaricious
landlords, and the grim impossibility of ever being able to afford the
exorbitant costs of moving to a nicer neighborhood (much less buying a home of
one’s own), drove the mostly Jewish members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers
of America (ACWA) clustered in this area to demand a different world; they
looked to their labor associations for its realization. As a result, the
housing issue was a central topic at the ACWA’s 1924 convention.
Led by the Secretary-Treasurer of the ACWA’s
credit union, Abraham E. Kazan, and supported by Sidney Hillman, President of the
ACWA – as well as by people gathered around Forverts
(The Forward, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper) – a sparsely populated region
of the north Bronx became a living field of dreams. It seemed only fitting that
the formation of the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in 1927 (referred to
simply as “The Amalgamated”), was inspired by The Rochdale Society of Equitable
Pioneers in Rochdale, England, the birthplace of the modern cooperative
movement in 1844. Rochdale was England’s center for the burgeoning textile and
weaving industry; therefore, what better models for the ACWA visionaries than
these original “cooperators,” these kinsmen-by-trade. Further, the spirit of
the founding Rochdale Principles permeated the imaginations of these modern men,
especially the visionary Abraham Kazan who led the cooperative housing
revolution in New York – transforming these Bronx hinterlands into the nation’s
first cooperative project. It was as if simultaneous with the first
groundbreaking, the seeds of a modern Rochdale were also sown, providing these
earliest cooperative pioneers, now settling the Bronx, with a root system that
would blossom and guide them and this nascent community across the twentieth
century. Both the tangibles and intangibles within their founding principles
provided the cornerstone and the scaffolding for this project: voluntary and
open membership; democratic governance; surpluses belonging to cooperative
members; no social or political discrimination; education of members and the public
in the cooperative movement; cooperation with other cooperatives; and care for
the community. It was impossible to live in our neighborhood without both touching
and being touched by this progressive and communal spirit that seemed to be
everywhere.
