Growing Up in the “Just City”
In the 1950s and ’60s, New York City’s cooperative housing embodied the egalitarian dream of modernist architecture.
Jennifer Baum teaches composition at Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. She has been published in the Village Voice, Guernica, Newfound, Mutha, HipMama, and Canadian Jewish Outlook. This essay is a drawn from a full-length memoir she is writing about growing up in subsidized housing on the Upper West Side in the ’60s and ’70s.
In the 1950s and ’60s, New York City’s cooperative housing embodied the egalitarian dream of modernist architecture.