Cool book alert: "Just City" and the Upper West Side in the 1970s
How an online community helped Jennifer Baum write about affordable housing in New York
The housing crisis is prompting creative responses, including new legislation aimed at reviving New York’s postwar experiments with affordability and social justice. Jennifer Baum’s upcoming book from Fordham University Press homes in on exactly this topic, combining memoir and policy to make vivid the possibilities of subsidized housing. Here she shares perspective on writing Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right.
Big thanks to Jennifer for the guest post—don’t miss her New York launch event at Book Culture on April 4.
Monday’s news that the New York State Senate is taking up affordable housing, including an initiative dubbed “Mitchell-Lama 2.0,” should prompt renewed interest in the original Mitchell-Lama program. It was passed in 1955 and shaped the identities of countless New Yorkers, especially on the Upper West Side, where I grew up. The communities we formed—and which we continue to keep alive, in part through online spaces—show what’s made possible when the city embraces housing justice.
When I wrote my memoir Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right, I searched for others who, like me, grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in subsidized Mitchell-Lama housing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I wanted to find out if fellow residents also had positive experiences living in integrated semi-socialist housing, and if they lamented the lost collectivist values of that unique postwar time and place when such luminaries as Miles Davis could be spotted walking the streets or in the neighborhood’s many Cuban Chinese restaurants or revival cinemas. So I put out a call on the Facebook group “Growing Up on the Old Upper West Side.” Dominated by children of the sixties and seventies, though other generations chime in, this multiracial group reflects the diversity and tolerance that epitomized the Upper West Side of that era and provides a forum to keep alive urban memories and networks of our pre-gentrification neighborhood through photographs, anecdotes, writing, music, and art. Their input helped make Just City not just a personal memoir, but a memoir about a community.
There are two administrators of the Facebook group, Donica O’Bradovich and Ruben Iglesias, a white woman and a Latino man, who have been instrumental in facilitating discussion and exchange in our rainbow community. Thanks to them, almost 11,000 members have a means to express their yearning for a time when our beloved neighborhood was funky, affordable, bohemian, and communal. Many, like me, are left bereft, spiritually homeless, longing for the sense of community we once had. Our virtual community allows us to connect in a profound way.
I asked the founder, Donica O’Bradovich, why she started the group. “I created it sometime in 2013 or 2014 because I desperately missed the neighborhood of my youth in the ’70s, and I wanted a group to recreate it. Total time travel. Ruben Iglesias was very helpful in the beginning, so it was a natural fit that he became co-administrator. Little did I know that there were so many likeminded old Upper West Siders who missed our nabe as well.”
I felt this collective energy on the Facebook group and tapped into it, using it as a resource to find folks who had the same experiences growing up that I did. At the time, I didn’t know if others who grew up in Upper West Side Mitchell-Lamas would feel the way I did, but so many of them did. I was overwhelmed with the response.
I asked participants questions like: What were the demographics of your Mitchell-Lama building when you first moved in? Have they shifted over the years? What are your memories of the old neighborhood? How has the neighborhood changed over the years? Can you think of a few stories from your childhood that illustrate the community feeling of the building? Do you believe Mitchell-Lama housing should remain public or privatize? Under Mitchell-Lama housing law, after twenty years have elapsed, cooperators can vote to keep their buildings public and affordable to working and middle-income New Yorkers or to lose public funding and convert to market-rate housing. Privatization is an extremely controversial topic that divides current Mitchell-Lama residents.
The vast majority of folks I interviewed felt privileged to have grown up not only on the Upper West Side, but in clean, well-maintained subsidized housing where one paid according to one’s income, got an apartment according to family size, and had a backyard to play and relax in. Jill Bargonetti remembers being raised at 711 Amsterdam Avenue, a massive red-brick and cement middle-income co-op on Amsterdam between 94th and 95th, built in 1967:
My father is a first-generation Italian American, and my mother is descended from African slaves on both sides. There were beautiful, integrated playgroups. On Halloween, 27 floors of kids all trick or treated together, knocking on doors. I loved the neighborhood. It was contiguous with Harlem. It was great, not fashionable like it is today. Being mixed-race, growing up in Upper West Side Mitchell-Lama housing with other mixed-race families and attending public schools with diverse populations helped me navigate different worlds.
Bobby Broom grew up in Jefferson Towers, a concrete Mitchell-Lama co-op constructed in 1968 on Columbus Avenue between 94th and 95th Street, with terraces stacked like subway tiles. He came from a politicized family who sought integrated housing on the Upper West Side:
Both of my parents were Black and moved to New York City in the early 1950s, as part of the Great Migration. My dad especially was escaping the systemic codes that resulted in discrimination, poverty, and limited opportunities of America’s Deep South. Six months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. we moved to the Upper West Side. The Harlem race riots (1964, 1967, and ’68), the gradual, yet increasing deterioration of Harlem communities due to the infiltration of drugs into its neighborhoods, and my parents' desire to expose me to more diversity and opportunity, prompted my dad to find a more appropriate community for us to fulfill those desires. In 1968, we moved to Jefferson Towers, and I stayed until 1984.
One of my fondest memories was the neighborhood’s diversity. In my building alone were Blacks of Southern US and Caribbean descent, Whites of diverse European descent, Puerto Ricans, Asians. I was brought up with a realization of commonality instilled and fostered by my formative years on the Upper West Side.
I think that my building should remain in the Mitchell-Lama housing program. That sentiment is held over from my childhood. I know what the building meant for all of us growing up and that wouldn’t have been possible if not for its affordability. The opportunities that were provided for working families to raise their kids in a healthy, diverse, and safe environment were invaluable. I feel so fortunate to have grown up there and would consider raising a family in a similar situation.
Beth Rosenblum, raised by an affordable housing advocate mother, grew up at Strycker’s Bay Apartments on West 94th off Columbus Avenue, a Mitchell-Lama co-op also built in 1967:
My parents were both white, Jewish native New Yorkers; my mother was born on the Lower East Side, my father in Brooklyn. They saw a notice in the newspaper about the West Side Urban Renewal Area and the offer for affordable housing for families.
My mom was President of Strycker’s Bay Neighborhood Council, the organization formed in 1959 by St. Gregory’s Church Priest Father Henry J. Browne to ensure that those dislocated by the West Side Urban Renewal Area plan were provided the means to return to the neighborhood with an affordable apartment if they so wished. There were many court battles and disagreements over the number of new units to be set aside for low income folks. Originally, it was only going to be about 900, but they were able to raise the number to 2,500. In my building, 20-30% of the units were required to go to low income, and the rest to middle income. West 94th Street was co-named “Doris Rosenblum Way” about 10 years ago in honor of my late mother.
The building was extremely racially diverse and remains so today. It was primarily Blacks, Hispanics (Puerto Ricans mostly), definitely a few mixed-race couples and their kids, and Whites. Some of the brownstones on the side streets were converted to low-income housing and remain so today. It was a good mix of housing types; here the affordable units were integrated with middle and sometimes upper incomes in various kinds of housing.
When we first moved in, the area was sketchy, but as I was only a child, I was not overly aware of its dangers. I recall there were streets we avoided walking down, and there was always hushed talk about area crimes. As this was one of the earliest towers built, there were a lot of empty lots and ongoing construction. Once the buildings and the retail stores were occupied, the neighborhood became a great deal safer. Many of the kids were the same age in the building, and we played together. It had much more of a community feel back then. The neighborhood is cleaner, safer, less gritty, and unaffordable. I miss hearing children playing outside; I miss the local neighborhood stores; I miss the spirit.
My building remains committed to staying in the Mitchell-Lama program. I see no reason to privatize as we are benefitting from living in a great neighborhood in affordable housing in the midst of market-rate unaffordable housing. I worry that as the original tenants and old timers pass on, the newcomers will raise this topic again and force the privatization movement on us.
I wrote the bulk of Just City while living outside New York. Thanks to social media, I’ve found folks who confirm that my experience growing up in an Upper West Side Mitchell-Lama wasn’t a mirage. It was a unique, united existence, one that’s been almost impossible to replicate, at least in terms of housing. I’ve appreciated more than ever how social media made it possible for me to connect with my cohort.
I’ve reestablished old friendships, and made new friends, some of whom I’ve met in person, and some who remain virtual. I’ve been nourished emotionally, spiritually, and creatively by fellow Upper West Siders and Mitchell-Lama cooperators, which sustained and enabled me to write my book. This group also allows thousands of people to collectively recapture this sense of a time when we all cared about each other, about the collective interest, not the private interest, enabling our individual memories to become collective memories. Finally, our virtual community provides a powerful example of how communities sustain themselves over time and space using social media in a positive way.
Were there Mitcelll Lama housing proects in Brooklyn? I grew up in the Sheepshead Bay Batchelder-Nostrand projjects? I thought they were public housing projects especiagn ally built for WWII vets( my dad was a sergeant in an infantry unit under General Bradley in the North Africa campan and the invasion of Italy. I read/ heard somewhere that my childhood project had become one of the worst in the city although I also found out that the rents there START at three thousand dollars a month.