====================================================================================== Session 40 Co-op History/Discussion Club Dec 16, 2012 ====================================================================================== [In the 1920s, another cooperative similar to the Amalgamated existed just south of here. The following is the story of the early days of the Shalom Aleichem Co-op. It is taken from two sources listed at the bottom.] The Early History of the Shalom Aleichem Houses The political climate of the 1920s encouraged a number of interesting experiments with cooperative workers' housing built by labor and other organizations. Some used the benefits of the 1926 Limited Dividend Law - like the Amalgamated Housing Corporation, organized in 1927. Other collectives were developed independent of government subsidy, for example, the Workers Cooperative Colony and the Yiddish Cooperative Heimgesellschaft (Shalom Aleichem Cooperative). Both date from 1926. All of these organizations built cooperative worker housing projects which served as important catalysts within larger socialist political movement. Most were located in the Bronx. Each cooperative had a well-defined ideology, related to the diverse currents in leftist Jewish politics. The first and largest of the cooperatives was the United Workers Cooperative, which completed its first building, the Coops, in 1927, designed by Springsteen and Goldhammer. Located in the Bronx, the six-story garden apartment covered a block bounded by Britten and Allerton streets, facing the Bronx Park. Next came the Shalom Aleichem Houses (Yiddish Cooperative Heimgesellschaft), completed in 1927 by Springsteen and Goldhammer for 229 families on a site overlooking the Jerome Park Reservoir at Giles Place, West 238th Street, and Cannon Place. The irregularly shaped perimeter enclosed a hilltop site, with a central garden and large fountain overlooking the west Bronx, evoking the character of a lofty urban oasis. The origins of Shalom Aleichem membership focused on the Workmen's Circle, where a year or so before a small group had formed a cooperative, based on shared ideals related to the preservation of secular Yiddish culture. They took the name of the famous Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem who spent much of his life in the Ukraine but eventually lived and died in the Bronx as a symbolic reference to their concern for Yiddish culture. Compared with the United Workers, the organization was much less avowedly political in the normal sense of the word. Its genesis arose from issues associated with the condition of second-generation immigrant culture and with assimilation. Beyond housing, these organizations offered such additional services as cooperative grocery stores, schools and daycare. At Shalom Aleichem several artists' studios were incorporated into the design, in order to encourage working artists to join the cooperative. The sculptor Aaron Goodelman and the painter Abraham Maniewich lived there for years. There was an auditorium for lectures, concerts, and dramatic productions [and a] cooperative 'cafeteria', which served various functions, from banquets to teas. The cultural activities were extensive, in keeping with the strength of that particular mandate within the organization. Shalom Aleichem like Amalgamated was placed on the urban periphery, among open fields and private single-family houses. A fundamental part of the cooperative's philosophy had to do with proximity and therefore lent itself to high-density living. The choice of 'neo-Tudor' for the style of Shalom Aleichem, and other similar complexes, appears unrelated to the political or cultural values promoted by the cooperative. Instead, it appears to relate to the general taste for neo-Tudor in residential architecture of all kinds, and is matched by the style of many of the houses in the surrounding streets. The Shalom Aleichem Houses experienced economic failure first, having passed into receivership of the bank in 1929. By 1931 it had been sold to a private landlord. Around June 1932 the tenants set up a rent relief fund and worked out a verbal agreement with the landlord to pay half of unemployed tenants' rents, with the remainder to be delinquent until each had found a job. In August, however, the landlord began evicting forty tenants anyway. One of New York City's most publicized rent strikes ensued. Within a week, forty of the tenants who refused to pay rent out of sympathy were also given eviction notices, and four tenants had already been removed from their apartments. The tenants claimed gross injustice, citing the cooperative character of the buildings. They argued that unlike other buildings emptied by the Depression, theirs remained occupied. They advertised for another building, threatening to move en masse. They picketed constantly while unsuccessfully taking their case to what they termed a 'capitalistic' municipal court. They fought the possibility of punitive loss of welfare assistance from the Emergency Home Relief Bureau because of their activities. The tenants were also addressed by Norman Thomas, Socialist candidate for President, who helped them fight a 'blacklisting' of the strikers, threatened to be circulated by the Bronx Landlord's Protective Association. Following a number of eviction orders, an agreement was finally reached directly with the landlord, who reduced rents by 5 percent, and placed 2 1/2 percent of rent totals in a fund for unemployed tenant arrears, with abandonment of all eviction proceedings. With this agreement, a truce was begun which lasted with frequent difficulties, until 1949, when the building changed hands. Like all of the cooperatives, the original communal ideals at Shalom Aleichem lasted through the differing economic circumstances until the founding generation began to fade. Over the years there were many crises, most prominently and inevitably ideological, between the socialist and communist factions. But the real political death knell came at the beginning of the 1950s, with the McCarthy-era political repression, when the elders of the cooperatives were old. Commitments of the second generation were tempered by the promise of the 1950s prosperity and by mainstream American values which by then had moved far from the urbane socialist vision in the Bronx. Like thousands of others, many moved to the new suburbs, which fit so well into this massive transformation of American culture. By the time of the third generation, there could be no question. By the late 1960s, those who could not make it to Westchester could leave for Co-op City, for an urbanism of very different ideological significance, and for a cooperative lacking ideology. At the Amalgamated, the economic advantages of cooperative life have somewhat survived, but the ideology has perhaps waned. All else of the other cooperatives has disappeared, except the buildings. At the Shalom Aleichem Houses, the Woman's Club was the last to go, having passed from the scene in 1979. [The sources for the above excerpts are A History of Housing in New York City by Richard Plunz, 1990 and Fort Independence Cultural Resource Survey, a 46 page report prepared for the Fort Independence Park Neighborhood Association. The report can be accessed at http://www.fipna.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Final-draft-of-Fort-Independence-1-13-2012.pdf ]