Cherished by residents, 'utopian' co-op wins award

Since its founding, the Amalgamated Houses have undergone many changes. The co-op’s apartments now house a more diverse populace than its founder could ever have envisioned.

By Aliza Appelbaum

On October 31, 1927, Bea Simpson and her family became the first people to move into the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative.

More than 82 years later, she’s still living there.

“It was amazing to live here in the beginning,” said Ms. Simpson, 87. “It started as a community and it still is. My grandson asked me how I can still live here, and I said, ‘Why not? It’s better than ever!’”

The Amalgamated Co-op is New York’s oldest housing cooperative, and was founded in 1926 by Abraham Kazan, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.

The co-op was honored Dec. 3 at City Lore and Municipal Art Society’s second annual Places Matter awards as a Bronx landmark. More than 1,000 families still live in the Van Cortlandt Park-adjacent complex, sharing community amenities like a newsletter, nursery school and other public services and activities.

“It was offered to us to demonstrate that through cooperative efforts we can better the lot of our co-workers,” Abraham Kazan said in 1929. “It remains for the members of our Cooperative Community to exert their efforts to run this cooperative and make it more useful, and more interesting, for all who live in these apartments.”

Since its founding, the co-op has undergone many changes, including doubling in size in 1950. In 1970, older buildings were torn down to make way for new ones, and the co-op’s 1,500 apartments now house a more diverse populace than Mr. Kazan could ever have envisioned.

Michal Goldman, an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, immersed herself in the culture and history of the Bronx’s housing cooperatives for her 2008 documentary “At Home in Utopia.”

“The progressive political orientations of these communities helped them cohere,” Ms. Goldman said. “There were ideals and a culture that bound these people together and made them feel that they wanted to engage the world in a similar way.”

Ms. Goldman, who is based in Waltham, Mass. and is a member of Filmmakers Collaborative, said her film focused on the people who lived in the cooperatives, rather than the institutions themselves.

She was most interested in the political agendas of the people who founded the cooperatives, including Amalgamated’s Mr. Kazan, she said.

“They wanted to show the world how people could live and should live, and to create a new kind of mentality for working people,” Ms. Goldman said. “They weren’t ashamed. They didn’t think that just because they were poor and worked in factories they couldn’t take on agendas.”

Indeed, one of the reasons Amalgamated was able to succeed where other cooperatives, like the Bronx’s Shalom Aleichem Houses, did not, was because of the backing of the garment workers’ unions.

“The biggest reason we were able to survive was Abraham Kazan, who had the business sense of the toughest businessman around, with the heart of a socialist dreamer,” said Ed Yaker, president of Amalgamated from 1984-2007. “They were able to get concessions from the banks because they had the garment workers union behind them. Kazan made sure the bills got paid.”

Mr. Yaker has lived in the Amalgamated for most of his life. He was born in 1944 to garment workers — Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe — and except for what he said was a seven-year gap, he has called the co-op his home.

The co-op in modern times is committed to providing affordable housing to families. The apartments include studios, one-, two- and three-bedrooms, and even a few four-bedrooms. There is a waiting list to move in for the applicants who qualify.

And not everyone who may think they need affordable housing necessarily qualifies.

Families consisting of up to three people can’t earn more than seven times the annual rent of the apartment they’re being considered for; families of four can’t make more than eight times that amount, according to the co-op’s handbook.

But in the beginning, Amalgamated was mostly Jewish garment workers and their families, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe.

“The world was different then,” Mr. Yaker remembered. “The neighborhood was much more crowded, and more selfcontained … you did more within the neighborhood, you knew everyone. It was a very close-knit community.”

The co-op’s new multi-ethnic identity has forged a different kind of community, he said, but one which is true to the original founders’ intent.

“To me, the fact that we’re still a strong community and that we’re still providing quality moderate income housing more than 80 years after we started, that means something,” Mr. Yaker said.