Page 29 - Sajo ENG

1927–1929

“THE COOPS”

UNITED WORKERS’ COOPERATIVE COLONY

2812–2870 Bronx Park East, The Bronx, New York City

The Coops complex was the result of a social and architectural experiment for
people who were unable to afford housing. The condition for becoming a resident
was to buy (cheap) shares in the United Workers’ Cooperative Organization. The
community was mainly joined by Jewish workers who immigrated to the US from
Tsarist Russia.

The project co-designed by Herman Jessor and István Sajó (Stefen S. Sajo)
was inspired by the Viennese Hof (residential blocks with gardens) and the
German Siedlung (a housing estate spotted with green areas) in the 1920s, when
attempts were made to implement the idea of social housing in an architectural
environment financed by speculative private capital. With their progressive
architecture Sajó and Jessor also sought to design healthy homes for workers.
They divided the building complex into units, with each one being restricted
to three or four apartments on one floor. The housing estate had a Yiddish
school, a 20,000-volume library and lecture halls as well as service rooms in the
basement.

This social experiment was not immune to the adverse effects of the Great
Depression but, despite such difficulties, The Coops operated until 1943, when
a bank seized the buildings: they were bought up by a private investor and
to this day are used as apartment buildings, rather than cooperative housing.
Yet, its residents still proudly call it “The Coop houses”, a reference to their
cooperative origin.

“The Coops” complex, built in the North German brick-expressionist style,
is a fine example of decorative brick architecture, in which the monotony of
the homogeneous clinker façade is offset by the playfulness of brick elements
projecting from the walls, such as pilasters, rows of vertically set bricks and
stepped gables. The triangular stone profiles of the decorative ledge above the
staircase entrances became Sajó’s ‘signature’ after his return to Debrecen.

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