Legacy is a fickle thing, as a cursory look at the life and work of New York architect Herman Jessor will show. From 1925 to 1974, he built some 40,000 homes, dispersed across fifteen union-funded complexes including the Workers Cooperative Colony—or the Allerton Coops as it’s colloquially known—and Twin Pines Village—aka Starrett City, aka Spring Creek Towers. (It seems only suitable that these massive developments, in The Bronx and East New York, respectively, resist singular identities.) At least initially, these vast acreages of common brick (Jessor’s preferred cladding material) were decommodified: Working-class New Yorkers called these places home and operated them cooperatively or through strong tenant control.
Despite his unparalleled curriculum vitae, Jessor does not enjoy a perch in the history the city tells about itself. Thank You, Herman Jessor, a laudatory exhibition mounted in the Third Floor Hallway Gallery at Cooper Union’s Foundation Building over the past month, seeks to rectify that error. Curators Zara Pfeifer and Daniel Jonas Roche are unabashed stans, flicking aside criticisms by figures like Jane Jacobs, a consistent bête noire of Jessor’s, and Ulrich Franzen, who disparaged the type of people he built for. Co-Op City, in the opinion of high-handed Yale architecture students, was “an example of the bleak, inhuman, uninhabitable masses of stone, the products of a society so distorted in its values that it can offer nothing but ugliness to its less fortunate members.” Pfeifer and Roche brandish their opprobrium as a point in Jessor’s favor.
Their reclamation operation comes amid calls to demolish or privatize public housing and social co-ops, most recently at NYCHA’s Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. (The co-op structures of the Allerton colony and Starrett City crumbled long ago; among the owners of the latter is one Donald J. Trump.) As a narrative counterweight, the exhibition text cites renewed interest in large-scale social housing production in the state, signaled by a bill currently being carried in the Albany legislature. Pfeifer’s photographs, depicting project exteriors, interiors, and inhabitants, are salutary; life in and among towers in the park is rarely shown to be this appealing. I spent the majority of my visit parsing the excellent map and chart (by Brad Isnard) detailing each and every one of Jessor’s buildings, their addresses and, yes, their unit counts. But if we are prepared to give the man his full due, one thing’s for sure: We’re gonna need a bigger hallway.
“A ****ing joy.”