ThoughtGallery.org > The Allerton Coops: An Interracial Utopia?

The Allerton Coops: An Interracial Utopia?

Address:

The Van Cortlandt House Museum
6036 Broadway, Van Cortlandt Park The Bronx, NY 10471

Event:

In this lecture, Director of The Bronx County Historical Society Dr. Steven Payne will discuss some little-known aspects of the history of the United Workers Cooperative Colony—better known as the Allerton Coops—in The Bronx. Along with Amalgamated Houses, Sholem Aleichem Houses, and the Farband Houses, the Allerton Coops are one of four co-operative housing complexes built in The Bronx in the late 1920s by working-class Eastern European Jews. The Coops was an outlier at the time for being one of the first interracial housing complexes in The Bronx, with evidence of African-American residents as early as 1930, almost four decades before this was the case in many other housing developments in The Bronx. (Parkchester, for instance, was almost entirely white in its tenancy until 1968, when New York State intervened.) Dr. Payne’s talk will analyze the reasons for this unique yet complex history at the Allerton Coops while recovering the lives of some of the earliest African-American and multiracial residents during the 1930s–1960s, drawing on oral histories, documents, photographs, and other items from the collections of the Historical Society.











When: Thu., Dec. 12, 2024 at 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Address:

The Van Cortlandt House Museum
6036 Broadway, Van Cortlandt Park The Bronx, NY 10471

Event:

In this lecture, Director of The Bronx County Historical Society Dr. Steven Payne will discuss some little-known aspects of the history of the United Workers Cooperative Colony—better known as the Allerton Coops—in The Bronx. Along with Amalgamated Houses, Sholem Aleichem Houses, and the Farband Houses, the Allerton Coops are one of four co-operative housing complexes built in The Bronx in the late 1920s by working-class Eastern European Jews. The Coops was an outlier at the time for being one of the first interracial housing complexes in The Bronx, with evidence of African-American residents as early as 1930, almost four decades before this was the case in many other housing developments in The Bronx. (Parkchester, for instance, was almost entirely white in its tenancy until 1968, when New York State intervened.) Dr. Payne’s talk will analyze the reasons for this unique yet complex history at the Allerton Coops while recovering the lives of some of the earliest African-American and multiracial residents during the 1930s–1960s, drawing on oral histories, documents, photographs, and other items from the collections of the Historical Society.

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