Located on the grounds of the old Freedomland amusement park in the Bronx, Co-op City’s 35 towers and 236 townhouses have been an icon visible to anyone living nearby or travelling in the corridor for generations. In this new book of the same title, Annemarie H. Sammartino tells the story of those who built it and the hundreds of thousands who called it home. Co-op City was erected in 1965, planned as the largest middle-class housing development in the United States, and meant to solve the problem of affordable housing in America's largest city. While it appeared to be a huge success at first, tensions led residents to organize the largest rent strike in US history. Ten years after its construction, a coalition of shareholders took on the state and, against all odds, obtained control. But even this achievement did not halt rising costs and white flight. Nonetheless, the complex weathered the severe recessions and economic declines of the 1970s and 1980s, a monument to postwar liberal ideals, managing a hard-won stability by the end of the century. Freedomland chronicles those early decades, connecting economic and political history with the history of urban planning and race. The result is a fresh perspective on twentieth-century New York.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, author of a forthcoming study of the Ebbets Field housing complex in Brooklyn, joins in conversation with the author.