Co-op City
Two connected sites between I-95, Bartow Avenue,
Hutchinson River Parkway, Boller Avenue, and the Hutchinson River
Architect: Herman Jessor
Landscape architects: Zion and Breen
1966-1973
Coop City, finished in 1973, was the last and most ambitious project of New York City’s union-funded cooperative housing movement. Like the first of the “limited-equity” coops, the Amalgamated Houses of 1927, it was an effort to reduce a shortage in middle-income housing by building low-cost, well-designed apartment houses in the open spaces of the north Bronx. But there was a vast difference in scale. The still-thriving Amalgamated Houses, begun with 300 units, has eventually expanded to 1,400. Coop City has a staggering 15,300 apartments. Housing more than 50,000 people, it is equivalent to the tenth largest city in New York State.
The “garden apartments” of the original coops had been continuous five-story “perimeter” buildings surrounding courtyard plantings. But the only way to build economically for a population this large was to build vertically. Coop City opted for the configuration, derived from utopian proposals by the French architect Le Corbusier, known as “tower in park,” a radical rebalancing of structure and nature. 35 megaliths, from 24 to 33 stories high, have been positioned on 300 acres of former marshland along the Hutchinson River. The “towers” occupy only 20% of the landscaped “park.” But unfortunately, open ground isn’t easily visible outside the development, from where the slabs and boxes appear as densely grouped as an urban downtown. Worse, the buildings are monotonously alike, all high-shouldered rectangles without setbacks, clad in combinations of red brick and concrete, with only the stacks of balconies and perfunctory white band molding to suggest organization on the facades. Drivers on I-95 easily mistake Coop City for a gigantic version of the discredited public housing projects of the fifties.
Close up, things look somewhat better. There are actually distinct building types, logically deployed. Outermost are the ten "Chevrons,” 24-story linear slabs which try to disguise their great length by folding backward at the center in a wide V. Stationed at intervals around the edges of the sites, these wall-like structures usefully screen off the racket of two heavily-trafficked highways. Several of the peaceful zones behind them shelter open-ended grass quadrangles, formed between parallel “Triple Core” buildings. These are about the same size and shape as Chevrons, but composed of three cruciform units joined in a line (+++), with separate entrances leading to elevator “cores.”
Architect Herman Jessor favored their cross-shaped floor plans, not as a variation in design, but for contributing to the livability of his apartments. The outside corners of the cross captured ventilation and sunlight for bedrooms at the ends of the arms; living rooms and eat-in kitchens got extra space by wrapping around the inside corners. Such emphasis on interior space and light was a cooperative housing tradition, going back to the earliest buildings, designed for families who had just escaped airless tenements. As one official of the sponsoring United Housing Foundation specified, Coop City was “oriented inward, toward the interior, where people live.” Which helps to explain why persistent criticism of the architecture’s external banality met unapologetic responses from Jessor and his employers.
Coop City has its own peculiar and functional street system. A peripheral boulevard circles the main site, from which four “loop” roads cut cusps toward and back from the interior. Inside the loops stand the low-rise garages that rescue the development from the curse of asphalt parking lots, and small shopping/community centers; outside are the Chevrons and Triple Cores. The loops thus serve to corral an overbuilt land parcel into neighborhood “sections”, each with a similar variety of building types. (One pleasant and well-known idiosyncrasy is the alphabetical ordering of these section loops—Asch, Bellamy, Carver, Dreiser, and, at a second site, Einstein —with side roads similarly declaring their location: e.g., Debs, Darrow, Donizetti, De Kruif. Characteristic of the cooperative movement’s unionist origins, the street names are a veritable catalogue of liberal culture heroes of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties. How many of today’s residents recognize Eugene V. Debs or Clarence Darrow, to say nothing of the science popularizer Paul De Kruif?)
The loops, lined by Chevrons and Triple Cores, have the familiar appearance of Bronx apartment house blocks. But where are the arcadian “towers in a park” ? Coop’s 33-story “Towers” make their appearance in gangs of three, at the end of cul de sacs jutting from the loops. Loitering at the edges of a central meadow, the bulky single-cruciforms overshadow the greensward in a sadly clumsy rendition of the Corbusian ideal. Which makes all the more surprising the discovery nearby of clusters of simple three-story “Townhouses,” embedded in shrubbery, supplying a desperately-needed return to human scale. There are 236 of these scattered around Coop City, mainly along the tree-lined open space called the “Greenway,” part of excellent landscaping which transformed mud and sand-fill into undulant play spaces and riverside parks.
Although most of its vociferous critics eventually came to terms with Coop City, accepting it (in the words of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown) as “ almost all right,” time has been less forgiving. ‘Seventies inflation sent construction, fuel and maintenance expenses far above estimates, and the early residents found carrying costs more than doubled by 1975. The impetus for the original Bronx cooperatives of the ‘20s had come from tenant groups formed during a series of rent strikes on the lower East Side. Now their rebellious spirit seemed to revive, improbably, among middle-class, often more than middle-aged residents of Coop City, who launched what became the largest and longest tenant strike in the country’s history. But this time the “landlord” was New York State and the UHF, still headed by 86-year-old Abraham Kazan, father of the 1927 Amalgamated Houses and twelve subsequent union cooperatives. The pyrrhic thirteen-month strike led to his resignation, and withdrawal of the UHF from further construction projects. Twenty-five years later, Coop City was again in dire financial condition as it struggled to keep up with apparently endless structural failures, the result of shifting landfill and poorly-supervised building practices.
In 2002, to accommodate thousands of cars when six of the eight garages were found to be unsafe, the heart of the development, its Greenway, had to be covered in asphalt.
(A new mortgage was negotiated in 2004. The arrears owed the State were paid off in 2008. Paving is gone from the Greenway and the grass is growing again.)
David Bady