From 1963 to 1965 roughly 6,000 families moved into Rochdale Village, at the time the world's largest housing cooperative, in southeastern Queens, New York. 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.

Clarence Taylor is Professor of History and Black and Hispanic Studies at Baruch College and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. --Book Jacket.

One of the nation’s foremost urban historians traces the history of cooperative housing in New York City from the 1920s through the 1970s As World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. Working-Class Utopias tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later. Robert Fogelson brings to life a tumultuous era in the life of New York, drawing on a wealth of archival materials such as community newspapers, legal records, and personal and institutional papers. In the early 1950s, a consortium of labor unions founded the United Housing Foundation under the visionary leadership of Abraham E. Kazan, who was supported by Nelson A. Rockefeller, Robert F. Wagner Jr., and Robert Moses. With the help of the state, which provided below-market-rate mortgages, and the city, which granted tax abatements, Kazan’s group built large-scale cooperatives in every borough except Staten Island. Then came Co-op City, built in the Bronx in the 1960s as a model for other cities but plagued by unforeseen fiscal problems, culminating in the longest and costliest rent strike in American history. Co-op City survived, but the United Housing Foundation did not, and neither did the cooperative housing movement. Working-Class Utopias is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the housing problem that continues to plague New York and cities across the nation.

Town and Gown is the story of the birth in the 1960s and survival through the 1970s of an inner city college, York College of the City University of New York, in Jamaica, Queens. Created as a liberal arts college to provide increased access to minority students, it was placed in a mainly minority neighborhood, where it received exceptionally strong support from a middle class African American community seeking access to quality higher education for its children and a business community striving to overcome the effects of "white flight." Operating in rented quarters without a permanent campus and regarded as academically illegitimate owing to its location, the college was regarded as expendable in hard times. From 1971 to 1979 critics both inside and outside of the City University, such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor Edward Koch, questioned the school's right to exist, especially during the New York City and State Fiscal Crisis of 1975 and 1976. Undaunted, the college and its diverse supporters rallied and won. An amazing groundswell of support from Southeast Queens, and intense political pressure, saved it. Though the fight was often bitter, York College and Jamaica would not be denied. The college moved onto its permanent campus as a new Jamaica Center emerged.