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VIA EXPRESS BUS Co-op City’s 55,000 residents have easy access to movie theaters, restaurants, day care centers, a high school, retail shops and sports facilities, and on weekdays they have an express bus route into Manhattan.
Everything You Need, in One Giant Package
IF Arthur Taub had to do it over, he says, he wouldn’t think twice about moving again to Co-op City, a sprawling, densely populated complex of high-rises on 338 marshy acres next to the Hutchinson River. Thirty-eight years ago, Mr. Taub and his wife, Simone, were among the first occupants of what has become the largest cooperative housing project in the United States, with 15,372 units in 35 towers, as well as 7 town-house clusters varying in size, with an average of 33 units in each.
The complex, often described as a city within a city, was built under the state’s 1955 Limited Profit Housing Law, also known as the Mitchell-Lama program, which finances moderate-income housing. From the start, it was racially diverse, attracting residents of many religions and nationalities for whom homeownership had previously been unattainable.
But once attained, that responsibility presented Co-op City residents with special challenges: major structural problems in some of the buildings (since repaired); a payment strike in the mid-’70s in response to rises in monthly maintenance costs; mounting debt for the management corporation caused by structural repairs, among other things; and enough controversy over a variety of issues — parking and transportation among them — to keep community advocates like Mr. Taub on their toes.
Still, as a retired high school guidance counselor and worker for the United Federation of Teachers, Mr. Taub, who reared two daughters here, is well equipped for such challenges.
“We’d still make the same decision,” he said. “I moved here never to move again.”
In the early days, before the trees and grass had been planted and the concrete for the sidewalks poured, sand covered the ground. Mr. Taub, 74, recalled a spring long ago when his family and other Jewish residents were celebrating the holidays.
“It was April,” Mr. Taub said, “and we looked like Jews in the desert during Passover.”
Today, Co-op City, in the Baychester section of the Bronx, is home to three shopping centers, each with its own supermarket, dry cleaner, restaurants, shops and community rooms used for cultural events and private parties. A 25-acre educational park includes three elementary schools, two middle schools, a high school and a planetarium, among other things. In addition, 15 houses of worship have opened in Co-op City.
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