The Coops

In the 1920s several left-wing organizations built cooperative housing in the Bronx. The housing was still in existence in 1946 but some had been sold to private landlords after suffering financial difficulties in the 1930s. They were:

• The "Coops" on Allerton Avenue built by a Communist Party affiliate and known as Little Moscow to the cops.

• Farband Houses built by the labor Zionists.

• The Sholem Aleichem Houses built by Yiddish-speaking Socialists.

• The Amalgamated Houses, the most successful of the bunch, built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America who also had a coop project on the Lower East Side.

A recent PBS documentary focused on the history of the Allerton Avenue Coops which had a 20,000-volume library, co-op stores and youth groups but fell apart financially in the 1940s when the stiff-necked residents refused a modest monthly rent increase to cover the complex's debt. Consequently it was sold in 1943 to private interests.

Bess Myerson, Miss America 1945, grew up in Sholem Aleichem Houses, built to preserve Yiddish culture. It went bankrupt and was sold to a private landlord in 1931. In its early pages, Susan Dworkin's bio of Myerson, Miss America 1945, deals with life in the complex in the 1930s when residents divided into pro-Communist IWO members and anti-Communist trade unionists. The former read Der Freiheit and The Daily Worker while the latter read The Jewish Daily Foward and The Day (Der Tog). Dworkin wrote that a small contingent of anarchists also made their home there. Most members of all groups were non-observant secular Jews. Some accounts said members of the competing groups did not speak to each other.