Frances Goldin and the Moses Threat to Cooper Square

By Katie Heiserman

“When Robert Moses came to the Lower East Side, we were really ready for him. Boy, did he pick the wrong neighborhood.” – Frances Goldin

When Robert Moses’ Slum Clearing Committee developed a plan in 1959 to level a dozen city blocks from East 9th Street to Delancey Street, a community-led opposition movement sprang up. The demolition of 2,400 housing units became the primary focus of the anti-slum clearance activists. [1] At the head of the organizing effort stood Frances Goldin, a spirited Queens-born literary agent who, at age 21, moved to 11th Street and, at 26, ran for state senate on the American Labor Party ballot, sharing the 1950 ticket with W.E.B DuBois. [2]

Frances Goldin in her apartment on the Lower East Side in 1983, photograph by Chester Higgins Jr, New York Times.

The fight at Cooper Square wasn’t Goldin’s first battle with Moses’ urban renewal programs. She had been involved in unsuccessful efforts to stop demolitions at Lincoln Center and Seward Park and brought lessons from these past defeats when she established the Cooper Square Community Development Committee and Businessmen’s Association, later renamed the Cooper Square Committee (CSC). In her previous housing battles, she had focused primarily on halting Moses’ bulldozers, but this time she proposed a community preservation effort that embraced building development and prioritized tenant protection from displacement. As Goldin put it: “We learned that you don’t go in and fight and say, ‘go away, go away, bad, bad, bad.’ We went in and we said, ‘We want urban renewal, but we want it to benefit the neighborhood, not victimize them.’” [3] Sharing this view, CSC’s founding members included tenant organizer and Communist Party member Esther Rand, community planner Walter Thabit, social worker Staughton Lynd, and Director of the Church of All Nations Thelma Burdick. [4]

Shortly after CSC’s first meeting in 1959, Thabit surveyed residents of Cooper Square’s old-law tenements and small-scale lofts, asking tenants if they would be able to afford Moses’ housing plan. The survey found, stunningly, that 93% of residents would not be able to pay the new rents or co-op buy-ins planned for Cooper Square. [5] Drawing on Thabit’s expertise as a planner, CSC prepared “The Alternate Plan for Cooper Square'' and delivered lithograph-printed copies to the New York City Planning Commission and other city agencies in 1961. [6] The document outlined a way to rebuild Cooper Square’s deteriorating tenements without displacing tenants. In Goldin’s words,  

Cover of An alternate plan for Cooper Square, Columbia University’s Seymour B. Durst Old York Library Collection.

This plan will basically ‘take care of the people who live here.’ And that's what made it different from any other plan. You might be relocated from the front of the building to the back while the front was being renovated, but you were not out of the neighborhood. You might have gone from this building to one next door while yours was being renovated, but you would not go out of the neighborhood. And we kept that promise. Anybody who lived there still lives there or died there. [7]

The Alternate Plan cleverly proposed a checkerboard method; as a new building went up, an old one would come down or undergo renovation, and the tenants would promptly be moved into the new development. The plan was to begin with construction of public housing on a vacant lot on Houston Street, where tenants of the to-be-demolished building would be relocated. The system was praised not just locally but city-wide. The president of the NAACP’s Greenwich Village-Chelsea Branch commended the plan for providing “on-site new housing for the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Italians and other poor people displaced by Urban Renewal in this area.” [8]

Initially, the City responded to the Alternate Plan with radio silence. Moses did, however, fight back, attempting to sell the Houston Street lot to the San Gennaro Association to scuttle the plan. [9] CSC fought adamantly and successfully, employing community-centered organizing tactics – attending public hearings, leading demonstrations and rent strikes, and capturing media attention. Actions on the street were attention-grabbing and often resulted in arrests. One such protest involved organizers gluing the locks on city offices so that doors had to be removed. [10] Beyond such stunts, CSC drew crowds at rallies both by appealing to the local community’s interest in protecting themselves from displacement and by ensuring political actions doubled as recreational events. A CSC flier from August 1970 stated, “Come to a block party and rally. Tenants bring your friends! Home cooked food.” [11] Goldin knew well that effective grassroots efforts relied on people's power, sustained through community-building, often more than political appeals. “Food is so important. It’s a wonderful organizing tool.” [12] Beyond organizing street-level actions, Goldin brought the issue up to the state level by lobbying weekly in Albany.

“Come to a Block Party And Rally” flier distributed by the Save our Homes Committee in 1970, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

In 1970, the City accepted the Alternate Plan, though it quickly stalled when President Nixon’s administration instated a federal moratorium on new section 8 housing construction, leaving CSC without the support of anticipated federal funds. [13] New York subsequently fell into a financial crisis and municipal funding dried up. CSC had succeeded in stopping Moses’ plan to demolish Cooper Square, but the Alternate Plan had yet to be realized, and the Moses threat was soon supplanted by an upswing in real estate speculation.

Two decades after the Moses era, CSC confronted this new menace. They developed a new Alternate Plan to protect low-income residents not from urban renewal but from gentrification. After surveying and consulting the majority of Cooper Square’s tenants, CSC published The Cooper Square Plan: Report for Discussion, October 15, 1986, which outlined land use proposals that aimed to secure long-term affordable, safe, and sanitary housing for all current residents. [14] It proposed the conversion of Cooper Square’s vacant in rem buildings into affordable housing and the rehabilitation of occupied tenements under a mutual housing association. To offset renovation costs, it proposed construction of mixed-income housing on city-owned vacant lots and required at least 30% of  units to be set aside for low-income households. [15] In 1990, the Dinkins administration accepted the terms of the 1986 plan. [16] A year later, the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association (CSMHA) came to fruition and has since maintained low-cost housing units and commercial space in 19 buildings through a limited-equity model that places caps on the profitability of renting or selling. [17] Beyond forming CSMHA, CSC has continued to preserve and develop affordable housing and community spaces across the East Village and the Lower East Side, operating out of an office on East 4th Street. 

Frances Goldin holding a protest sign "Affordable Housing for Everyone" ca. 1990-2000, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

Less remembered than her West Village counterpart Jane Jacobs, Frances Goldin deserves attention and further study as a model of both forceful and joyful neighborhood organizing. An activist with a distinctive style, she brought the community together and sustained engagement over many years. In her 2014 oral history interview with Village Preservation, Goldin highlighted the egalitarian, community-centered approach at the core of her work with CSC: “Fifty-nine years ago, dues were a dollar a year, and today, dues are a dollar a year.” [18]

Katie Heiserman is a public historian whose research focuses on New York City housing, activism, and public memory. She is a contributing author to Remembering and (Re)remembering Social Justice in the 21st Century (Facet Publishing, forthcoming) and received her Master’s degree in Archives & Public History from NYU.

[1] Marci Reaven, “Neighborhood Activism in Planning for New York City, 1945-1975,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 46 issue 6, (November 2020): 1261–1289,  https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217705446.

[2] Francis Goldin, interview by Liza Zapol, Greenwich Village Society for History Preservation, April 2, 2014, accessed January 18, 2024, https://media.villagepreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/15035045/Goldin_FrancesTranscriptFinalWebsite-1.pdf.

[3] Kathryn Barnier, Ryan Joseph, and Kelly Anderson, dirs, Rabble Rousers: Francis Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square, New York, NY: Realistic Pictures, 2022.

[4] Walter Thabit, "Cooper Square Committee Chronology: A listing of Cooper Square events and activities - including victories and defeats - from March 1959 through March 2005" (2005), Cooper Square Committee, accessed January 18, 2024, https://www.coopersquare.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2005_CSC_Chronology.pdf.

[5] Barnier, Joseph, and Anderson, Rabble Rousers.

[6] Goldin, interview.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Marci Reaven, “Citizen Participation in City Planning: New York City, 1945-1975,”  PhD diss., (New York University, 2009), accessed January 18, 2024, https://www.proquest.com/openview/2ea0b361dd6521f01a9bd56d74cf2792/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750.

[9] Thabit, "Cooper Square Committee Chronology,” 2005.

[10] Barnier, Joseph, and Anderson, Rabble Rousers.

[11] “Come to a Block Party And Rally” flier distributed by the Save our Homes Committee, 1970; Cooper Square Committee; TAM.356; box 5; folder 9; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

[12] Barnier, Joseph, and Anderson, Rabble Rousers.

[13] Reaven, “Neighborhood Activism in Planning for New York City, 1945-1975,” 34.

[14] Brian Rose, Ad Hereijgers, Yvon van der Steen, and Brian Sullivan, "The Cooper Square Plan: Report for Discussion, October 15, 1986," Cooper Square Committee (October 1986), accessed January 18, 2024, https://coopersquare.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/1986-RevisedPlan-Part1.pdf.

[15] Thabit, "Cooper Square Committee Chronology,” 2005; Rose, Hereijgers, van der Steen, and Sullivan, "The Cooper Square Plan,” 22.

[16] Cooper Square Committee, “Con Edison Settlement Fund Proposal by the Cooper Square Committee HDFC Greening Project: $65,000 Grant Request,” Fall 2011, accessed January 18, 2024, https://www.nyc.gov/assets/manhattancb3/downloads/conedison/Cooper-Square-Committee-ConEdProposal.pdf.

[17] Tom Angotti, “Community Land Trusts and Low-Income Multifamily Rental Housing: The Case of Cooper Square, New York City” (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2007), accessed January 18, 2024, https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/angotti-wp07ta1.pdf.

[18] Goldin, interview.