East of I-95 and west of the Hutchinson River Parkway, on 320 acres of marshy land that was once, briefly, home to a United States-themed (and United States-shaped) amusement park called Freedomland, stands Co-op City. Begun in 1966 and completed in 1973, its 15,372 units, containing approximately 45,000 people, make it the largest cooperative housing development in the world. Its size, scale, and geographical location often lead to Co-op City being characterized as “a city within a city.”
But Co-op City is not solely a world unto itself. This tension, between its unique and arguably anomalous character and the ways in which Co-op City directly reflects important trends in New York City history, is the subject of Annemarie H. Sammartino’s Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York. Sammartino, who lived in Co-op City as a child in the 1980s and early 1990s, offers a compelling story of Co-op City’s development, its financial struggles, its legendary rent strike (the largest rent strike in history),[1] and its ongoing but relatively successful struggle to maintain racial integration and affordability over the past half century.
Co-op City occupies a piece of land on the edge of the Bronx, and it was developed on the edge of an era; Sammartino describes it as Robert Moses’s last large project, noting its significance as a project developed and initially funded during the height of postwar liberalism in New York, but constructed and completed in the face of the fiscal crisis, white flight, and a growing ethic of austerity. Distributed throughout the book are compelling illustrations of how much had changed in New York between Co-op City’s initial development in 1965 and its completion in 1973. It was a contentious project in terms of its vision of resident governance, its ability to stay solvent and affordable over the long term, and its aesthetics—it reflects the massive “Tower in the Park” style of housing construction that was popular in New York from the 1940s to the 1960s, but the development was completed just as architectural and sociological critiques of that form were becoming dominant. Sammartino includes some scathing contemporary quotes about the appearance of Coop City, including Ada Louise Huxtable’s remark that United Housing Foundation (UHF), the nonprofit that developed Co-op City, was fueling “a bumper crop of human failures through environmental failure.” But Sammartino uses quotes from residents to challenge that “architectural determinism,” and argues that “high-rise architecture was no impediment to the development of community in Co-op City.”