- Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher
“I can’t believe he’s going to feature our crummy little office,” Rozaan Boone, the editor in chief of the Co-op City Times, says to one of her colleagues as she gives me the grand tour of their basement home. It takes maybe five minutes. And it is indeed crummy. The walls are either white gypsum or CMU blocks painted the same. There is a drop ceiling punctuated by sprinkler heads, ventilation shafts, and fluorescent lights. Thick, duct-taped tubes snake out of the ceiling and into R2-D2-sized ventilation units: one perched on a little podium made from a wood laminate that does not match the wood laminate on the floor; another on top of an overturned egg crate; and still another standing like a sentinel inside the kitchenette, guarding a closet holding a complete set of archives dating back to 1966—along with a box of plastic flowers and an aluminum ladder. Boone explains to me that future renovation ambitions include a dedicated space for the archives, one that does not share a room with the coffee maker. There are windows, but as we are underground, they all look onto colleagues’ offices. Their blinds are drawn.
It is clearly a working newspaper. The production manager, Ralph Henriquez, sits with Adobe InDesign open on his computer, flanked by a squadron of empty Gatorade bottles. The managing editor, Danielle Cruz, makes phone calls. A printed sign on a bulletin board warns:
We ask you please be considerate of our deadlines. No “social visits” during “Production Time.” Thank you.
A weekly, the Co-op City Times closes every Thursday. I was visiting on a Thursday afternoon. I kept my visit brief.
Co-op City—as a little poster in the office celebrating its fiftieth anniversary notes—is the world’s largest cooperative housing development. Designed by Herman Jessor and built in just seven years (between 1966 and 1973) by Abraham E. Kazan’s United Housing Foundation with subsidies from New York state, it contains 15,372 apartments across 236 town houses and thirty-five towers. Its population is 42,771. Sited along the Hutchinson River on the northern edge of the Bronx and surrounded on its other sides by I-95 and the Hutchinson River Parkway, its array of monolithic chevron towers is a familiar sight to anyone who has driven in or out of New York City from the north.
It is a nice place to live. It has the lowest crime rates in the Bronx. There are no window-unit air conditioners, as the apartments have central heating and cooling. Of its 320 acres, 80 percent remain open space, much of it forming a park filled with meandering pathways, trees, and lawns. There is a waiting list for units thousands of families long.
Without a newspaper, the cooperators would be defenseless against the disinformation that underpins privatization campaigns.
The first issue of the Co-op City Times dates from October 1966, just one year after plans for the complex were announced. The United Housing Foundation was its original publisher, eventually passing control to the cooperative, called the Riverbay Corporation. The newspaper began as a four-page quarterly full of drawings, construction updates, and explainers about cooperative life, with aspirations to become longer and more frequent as the community it served grew. It listed as its initial address the sales office in Manhattan, 309 West Twenty-Third Street, because the publication predates the construction of Co-op City. That is to say, the same architect who created 15,372 units full of light and air, most with balconies overlooking verdant trees, put the newspaper in the basement intentionally.
The newsroom sits near the end of a long corridor that burrows underneath a split-level shopping center. The corridor, called the Bartow Center, acts as a sort of social condenser, containing administrative offices for the management company, the public safety headquarters, event spaces, and even a framing shop. The entrance is on grade, and the rooms on one side sport windows into sunken courtyards. After a ninety-degree turn, the Bartow Center becomes fully subterranean. The Co-op City Times is at the very end—to go through the black doors beyond it is to enter long, mechanical hallways lined with pipes and conduits. Why did Jessor put the journalists (not to mention so many cooperative employees) in the basement?
Seeking answers, I attend a forum for the Riverbay Corporation’s annual board election. A table at the entrance of the auditorium is stacked high with campaign materials, voting information, and copies of the Co-op City Times. Boone and other staff members are on hand with a video crew, as six candidates— most of the men in suits and ties—sit down at a long table emblazoned with the Co-op City logo before an audience of about a hundred, the curtain behind them festooned with red, white, and blue bunting. The moderator opens the forum: “The governing of your building rests upon your shoulders.”
“We are a city, so the board is a city council,” Rod Saunders, its president, tells me. Saunders—who is not up for election this year and therefore not participating in the forum—is standing in the lobby outside talking with a staffer for congressman George Latimer when I approach him for an interview. Indeed, the fifteen-person, all-volunteer board oversees not just the maintenance and upkeep of thousands of apartments but Co-op City’s own park system, internal police department with ninety-three officers, power plant, and two shopping centers—with an annual budget of $279,409,000. That information is readily available because the Co-op City Times publishes it all, mixing in articles, reports from management and the president, dispatches from churches and community groups, and opinion columns from different board members.
All those threads come together in the annual board elections: The Co-op City Times prints candidate statements, runs television feeds, reproduces edited transcripts of each of the three forums, and publishes much of the information that provides a framework for accountability. Candidates form alliances and slates, a practice dating back to the awakening act of Co-op City’s polis: the rent strike of 1975. Shoddy construction and corruption had left the first set of cooperators (as Co-op City calls its residents) holding the bag on vast numbers of necessary repairs. Rather than pay, they withheld their maintenance fees and dared the state to evict them, which forced New York to the bargaining table. As part of the agreement reached, the cooperators gained full control of their board. The leaders of the rent strike handily won the first election. By 1980, however, a new faction ousted them. Today, new coalitions continue to form: In this election one slate is called Team Unity, another Stronger Voices. Neither of them mentions the basement office in their candidate statements.
“No better outlet for the pulse of the culture, education, and practice of architecture—in and beyond New York.” — John Hill
I asked a range of historians and urbanists if they knew why the office was in the basement, including Annemarie Sammartino, who is the author of Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York. None of them did, though Tony Schuman, who once helped the rent strikers by hauling several garbage bags full of checks to Con-Ed, wrote to me that, “I shudder to think that any architect would consign human beings to work in a windowless space.”
President Saunders tells me he moved into Co-op City two years after the rent strike. Does he work with local politicians? “Every single one of them is on speed dial,” he says, beginning to list them off. “I am on a first name basis with all of them.” Does it yield results? Saunders said Co-op City received about $50 million last year from the state to subsidize its decarbonization efforts. Does he know why the office of the Co-op City Times is in the basement? No, he does not: “the Co-op City Times staff has not requested a ‘room with a view’, nor has it come up during my ten-year tenure.”
Saunders does talk about traffic jams. Car dependency is the original sin baked into Co-op City’s design: The complex’s amenity-filled acreage includes no subway stops, instead relying upon eight gigantic garages containing a total of 10,500 parking spots. One of these garages in fact stands directly opposite the entrance to the corridor that leads to the offices of the Co-op City Times. It has no basement level. (As the garage is seven stories tall, some of the cars even enjoy pretty good views.) I had earlier asked Boone if the cooperative would consider simply converting a few* parking spots into a nice office for the newspaper: “I don’t think that would ever work,” she told me, as cooperators “value their parking spaces.”
The same architect who created 15,372 units full of light and air, most with balconies overlooking verdant trees, put the newspaper in the basement intentionally.
Back at the forum, Daryl Johnson, a serving board member up for reelection, concludes his candidate statement with a plug for his column: “You will see my thoughts in the newspaper! Look in the newspaper.” Standing near the entrance, I had asked cooperators as they came into the auditorium about the Co-op City Times. Nobody knew why it was in the basement, but they all knew it was important. “I’m in it this week!” said Francine Jones, opening up the current issue to show a photo of herself. How long has Jones lived here? “Since the place opened.” That is, fifty-four years.
A member of the audience, Kelly Saunders (Rod Saunders’s daughter), asks the last question of the forum: To provide funding for much-needed youth centers, what part of the budget would the candidates cut? With a weekly print run of 18,000 and a full-time staff of seven, plus two part-timers, the current annual budget of the Co-op City Times is $1,092,000. In the past, revenue from advertising and even issue sales (in 1980 an issue cost fifteen cents) covered most of the paper’s costs. Today, the Riverbay Corporation picks up the tab, setting back each unit about $60 a year. None of the candidates saw it as a source of potential savings. In fact, one cooperator, John Gale, made the case to me that the Co-op City Times may in fact save cooperators a lot of money in the long run: “Here we are still fighting privatization, and the newspaper is instrumental in that.” He was referring to the Mitchell-Lama program, of which Co-op City is a part. The program prevents the prices of apartments from appreciating, but that protection could go away if the residents vote to demutualize, a choice that would pose an existential threat to Co-op City remaining an affordable place to live. How affordable? As of 2022, the purchase price for an apartment ranged from $22,500 to $48,750. Without a newspaper, the cooperators would be defenseless against the disinformation that underpins privatization campaigns. “Keep it good and cheap, cheap and good,” Gale said, summarizing the aims of the polis.
As New York aspires to build affordable housing that stays affordable—and do so at the massive scale Co-op City represents— maybe we should mandate that future developments bake a newspaper subscription into their maintenance fees, treating local news as a social good, right up there with insulation and fire egress requirements. And we can make sure to put aside a few choice square feet—with windows—to provide their staffs a decent office.