(DOWNLOAD) "Rochdale Village and the Rise and Fall of Integrated Housing in New York City (Essay)" by Afro-Americans in New York Life and History # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Rochdale Village and the Rise and Fall of Integrated Housing in New York City (Essay)
- Author : Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 250 KB
Description
When Rochdale Village opened in southeastern Queens in late 1963, it was the largest housing cooperative in the world. When fully occupied its 5,860 apartments contained about 25,000 residents. Rochdale Village was a limited-equity, middle-income cooperative. Its apartments could not be resold for a profit, and with the average per room charges when opened of $21 a month, it was on the low end of the middle-income spectrum. (3) It was laid out as a massive 170 acre superblock development, with no through streets, and only winding pedestrian paths, lined with newly planted trees, crossing a greensward connecting the twenty massive cruciform apartment buildings. Rochdale was a typical urban post-war housing development, in outward appearance differing from most others simply in its size. It was, in a word, wrote historian Joshua Freeman, "nondescript." (4) Appearances deceive. Rochdale Village was unique; the largest experiment in integrated housing in New York City in the 1960s, and very likely the largest such experiment anywhere in the United States (5). It was located in South Jamaica, which by the early 1960s was the third largest black neighborhood in the city. Blacks started to move to South Jamaica in large numbers after World War I, and by 1960 its population was almost entirely African American. It was a neighborhood of considerable income diversity, with the largest tracts of black owned private housing in the city adjacent to some desperate pockets of poverty. In the late 1950s, there was an exodus of at least 25,000 whites from some of the few remaining mixed areas in South Jamaica. (6) Despite that, at least 80% of the original families in Rochdale were white, the overwhelmingly majority of those were of Jewish background. (7) I was a member of one of those Jewish families, and lived in Rochdale from 1964, when I was ten years old, until 1973.