Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housing

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.

Genres: History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published November 18, 2010

Reviews

[Readersaurus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about the political, historical, and organizational aspects of Rochdale. On that level, it was very interesting. The history of Rochdale Village is intertwined with that of the labor movement, NYC housing policies, and the expansion outward towards Long Island.

Ours was one of the first families to move in, in December 1963. I wasn't alive yet, but my sister was a newborn and my parents used to make the trip from Sunnyside to stand outside the construction site and watch their new community take shape.

Rochdale Village was unique in that, as new affordable housing, it wasn't part of any 'slum clearances.' It was sited on the old race track, not in a neighborhood destroyed for new construction, as in Stuyvesant Town (and others) where the people who lived there were forced out and then, if black, excluded from moving in to the shiny new apartments. I was appalled to learn that Metropolitan Life was the driving force behind that exclusion; Grandma worked for them in the 1970s.

As a child living in Building 3, none of this made any dent on my consciousness. What I liked was living on the 13th floor with two other apartments filled with girls our ages; roller skating in the hallways; walking to the movies; and story time at the public library. Though, officially, Rochdale Village is seen as a failed attempt at integration, as a 3 year old in the Rochdale Village nursery school, I never knew that I was the only white kid until someone looked at the photos and told me. At the time, no one had talked to me about black and white. We had neighbors and friends. If it sounds naive, hey, I was a kid! I do think there's a lasting legacy of having started life in such a hopeful setting (even if it pans out to greater disillusionment now).

If anyone feels like writing a more personal book about Rochdale, with more interviews with a wider range of residents, I would love to read it!

p.46 The state legislature made segregated schooling illegal in 1900. And yet, in the mid 1970s, we in Rochdale were bused into another (white) neighborhood in an effort to integrate the schools.

p. 87 Despite being planned as an integrated neighborhood, few blacks were hired to work the construction. White union members were brought in from out of state, sparking protests.

p. 88-89 "The demonstrations were generally peaceful, and the local police were basically sympathetic to the protesters . . . The police detail prided itself on its sensitivity." Sigh. we could use some of that cooperation now.

p.120 "The commitment of the UHF to nurturing Rochdale's organizational life reflected . . . the anarchist conviction that with the proliferation of voluntary societies would come a withering away of hierarchy, and that in the future, everybody would get to be in charge of something and in that way, the very notion of power would be diffused an redefined. As one Rochdale resident said in 1966, 'the most miserable misanthrope, black or white, has the chance to be somebody here, to get himself elected in short order to a position where he can take charge of several hundred pepole.'"

p.122 "There was a feeling of security in being part of a community of identical apartments. . . once you knew one apartment and one building, you in effect knew them all."

p.131 Initially, no one needed to be bused into Rochdale to integrate the schools. later, that was not the case.

p. 186 Apparently pets were banned but we always had a parakeet or gerbils, and I know my sister had a bunny before I was born [!]

[Rachel Lichtman Castaño · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super interesting book about Rochdale Village and Southeast Queens and the 70s-80s in nyc in general. Definitely recommend!

[Joe Raskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lived in Rochdale for 23 years; Peter was my next door neighbor and my parents are featured in the book (I'm quoted as well). Those caveats aside, this is an excellent history of a community and the people who lived in it and still feel a strong attachment to it, regardless of where they now live.