Who was Herman Jessor? And to what extent did he shape New York City? An exhibition at The Cooper Union poses these questions. Jessor studied engineering at Cooper Union and eventually won its lifetime achievement award. He worked on some of New York Citys largest cooperative housing projects, delivering over 40,000 units across a 60-year career with very little scholarly documentation. In 1976, Cooper Unions Board of Trustees said Jessor designed housing for more New Yorkers than any other architect. London critic Owen Hatherley called Jessor the most important radical architect youve never heard of.Curated by AN news editor Daniel Jonas Roche and photographer Zara Pfeifer, with a drawing by AN contributor Brad Isnard, the show is the result of over two years of research. (Roche and Pfeifers collaboration was .) Large-scale photographs, a video interview, and a map are now on view in the schools Third Floor Hallway Gallery.The exhibition is free and open to the public until March 28; Roche and Pfeifer will give a closing lecture on March 27, followed by a reception. ANs executive editor, Jack Murphy, spoke with Roche, Pfeifer, and Isnard to learn more.Herman Jessor in the middle with his nephews (Courtesy Jessor family)AN: Who was Herman Jessor?Daniel Roche (DR): Herman Jessor was born Herman Yezhersky in modern-day Belarus. He immigrated to the United States when he was about 10 years old, and then started going by Jessor after he Americanized his name, like many Jewish emigres from the Pale those days. He grew up in New York City and went to Stuyvesant High School. When Jessor was a high school student, he illegally enrolled in The Cooper Unions engineering school at night. He graduated with his engineering degree when he was a teenager. He immediately hit the ground running and went to work for an office called Springsteen and Goldhammer.One of the first projects he worked on were the United Workers Association Houses in the Bronx, which is a legendary housing estate built by trade unionists for mostly Jewish and Black families that were escaping squalor in the Lower East Side. It became a hotbed for revolutionary activity. W. E. B. Dubois, Emma Goldman, and Paul Robeson all frequented the United Workers Association Houses. Pete Seeger used to do free concerts for children there. The United Workers Association Houses are vividly captured in Vivian Gornicks The Romance of American Communism. Jessor later worked closely with Abraham Kazan of the United Housing Foundation, a group which built Mitchell-Lama cooperative housing. Overall, Jessor was behind the construction of over 40,000 cooperatively owned homes.Co-op City is situated on a sprawling 320-acre site in the north Bronx. (Zara Pfeifer)Many of todays shareholders at Co-op City have lived there since construction finished in 1973. (Zara Pfeifer)AN: Zara, could you talk about what it was like documenting these buildings? How did it start?Zara Pfeifer (ZP): Dan and I met when I started researching Co-op City in 2023. I was in New York at the time for a three-month artist residency. Before I arrived, I had researched large-scale housing. I had watched online a talk about Co-op City, and how it was so popular with residents, theres a waitlist to live there, and about how the community spaces are vividly used. Co-op City reminded me of what I experienced at Alterlaa here in Vienna, which I had photographed for a long time, so it was a good comparison. I started to visit Co-op City, and then Dan and I were introduced by a mutual friend, Brad Isnard. We eventually visited twelve projects, from the north Bronx all the way to Coney Island.There are a lot of similarities between Jessors projects and complexes like Alterlaa, such as how residents speak about their experiences, the community, and the prejudices they face from outside. On one visit with Brad in the Bronx, I felt like I was at a municipal building in Vienna. I asked myself, What is it about this place that makes me feel like Im at home? Is it the details? Is it the textures, or the architecture? Is it the atmosphere? The inner courtyards are definitely spaces I know from Viennese social housing! Before visiting each complex, we attempted to secure access beforehand, or we just approached people that we met when we went there together. Thats also often how I photograph: I go, then I see what I find interesting, but also what develops out of meeting residents who might say, Okay, let me show you this place. This happens by being on site. This is something that I always do across my projects, which helps me sense an atmosphere that you cannot see from plans or texts. Dan and I were amazed that everyone living at these places were very happy. This project fits into my overall interest in maintenance, and in challenging assumptions about what makes for good architecture.A courtyard at Penn South in Chelsea (Zara Pfeifer)An archway at Amalgamated Dwellings in the Lower East Side (Zara Pfeifer)DR: We spoke to a lot of residents. When I see particular people in Zaras photos, I remember specific conversations. I want to point out that a lot of these places are whats called NORCs, or naturally occurring retirement communities. When a population moves into a development and stays in place over time, NORC status helps them request new things to help them age in place. This is a huge problem in New York, where it is increasingly difficult to grow older, but also raise a family, so NORCs help with that. In these Jessor developments, when people move in, they dont leave. Theres a woman at Co-op city who is 113 years old. She said the thing that keeps her going are Co-op Citys dance classes. She can no longer dance, but she goes just to hang out and see her friends. These social aspects are so important.Noel Ellison at his home in Co-op City (Zara Pfeifer)Residents of Starrett City, now Spring Creek Towers (Zara Pfeifer)AN: How did Jessor design?DR: Jessor is pretty much the bogey man in Jane Jacobss urban saga; his buildings were, apparently, everything that was wrong with architecture at the time. And now were in a world where it costs $6,000 a month to live in the Greenwich Village that Jacobs romanticized. Jessor had no interest whatsoever in the sidewalk ballet Jacobs wrote of. Jessors unapologetic goal was abolishing the tenements and, in turn, poverty conditions. And he was punished for it by critics like Jacobs. Ken Wray, the last executive director of the United Housing Foundation, once called Jessor an unrepentant Commie, which is in part why hes so underappreciated today, his radical politics.Amalgamated Dwellings in the Lower East Side looked toward Europe for precedents, notably complexes like Bruno Tauts Horseshoe Estate in Berlin, Karl Marx-Hof by Karl Ehn, and Moscows Narkomfin by Moisei Ginzburg. Jessor interviewed working mothers about what they wanted and needed, and put their inputs into his designs. This however didnt just inform interior units, but also shared spaces: The United Workers Association Houses had a kindergarten and a library with thousands of books in Yiddish, English, and Russian.Green space at Sholem Aleichem Houses (Zara Pfeifer)AN: Who were Jessors clients?Brad Isnard (BI): He worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the United Housing Foundation, and other groups. The participatory model Jessor used was directly connected to the social formation of the various organizations that were building these buildings. These were generally trade unions that were building these places, so they already had a political infrastructure in place to communicate their needs and to deploy methods to achieve them. With everyone having a stake in the development, theres a more robust apparatus to actually execute that architectural work that was unique to this time period, which doesnt really exist today.DR: Its important to emphasize that Herman was educated as an engineer before becoming a licensed architect. I think its his engineering background which gave him the freedom to move so fluidly between styles, and made him so malleable as a designer and problem solver. He wasnt beholden to any single movement. AN: What is the current state of Jessors projects?DR: Its all over the place. Some, like Sholem Aleichem Houses, have been privatized. The later, much larger complexes, like Co-op city, Amalgamated Houses, Rochdale village, and Penn South, are all still cooperatively owned but under a different management company called Twin Pines. United Workers Association Houses are in bad shape because of the negligence of its private management company, but it does thankfully have landmark status.BI: Hermans larger projects remain affordable through various subsidies, like the Mitchell-Lama Program. Seward Park, like the rest of Lower East Sides co-ops, remain cooperative, but only some are low income.Spring Creek Towers, previously known as Starrett City, is a private development however. This is an enormous private development on Jamaica Bay, which Kazans union began developing in the 1960s. Starrett City experienced financial hardship and was sold mid-construction to a private company owned by Fred Trump [Donalds father]. Fred Trump and Kazan were arch rivals, which is a whole other story. Even though it is privately operated, [Spring Creek Towers] received Mitchell-Lama grants to finish construction, and it continues to receive those tax subsidies to this day.For the most part, these buildings remain cooperative and affordable. Whats interesting however is that they operate like social batteries that resist market fluctuations in the neighborhoods around them, which have gotten extremely expensive. These things continue to operate in the way they were intended in spite of the way the economy changes, and the city becomes more unequal.A map at the end of the Third Floor Hallway Gallery by Brad Isnard locates Jessors major works. (Joo Enxuto)The exhibition offers vignettes from Jessors buildings. (Joo Enxuto)AN: The exhibition includes a map of the city that locates Jessors projects. How does this help us understand the development of New York?BI: This map was a first effort to survey everything Jessor worked on, and then to correlate it with wider urban development patterns, which had a lot to do with Robert Moses and the way the State of New York took a more central role in managing the citys development. We had to take a metropolitan view to begin to make sense of it all. Jessor designed more housing units than any other single architect in New York, and today more New Yorkers live in a building designed by him than by anyone else.Jessors buildings are landmarks in their own right, even though the architecture itself is not particularly notable. But as a collection of buildings, theyre very memorable. Most New Yorkers have a sense of these projects already: A Jessor complex [Seward Park] looms over Dimes Square, Penn South has a huge footprint in Midtown, and everyone sees Co-op City when driving on the Hutchinson River Parkway. At the same time, theyre mostly contained within their own campus footprint. Plus this kind of development doesnt seem to exist anywhere else in the country, much less the rest of New York City.The blue areas are where Jessors major works are sited. (Brad Isnard)BI: When you look at the project locations, a portrait emerges of an architect who works at the scale of the city plan. Initially he works on small developments at the periphery of the city in the North Bronx, where there is cheap land upon which you can build dense housing. Then he went down to the Lower East Side, using funding sources that came from urban renewal regulations that emerged in the 1920s and then again in the 1940s. He tweaked his methods as he went along. Theres an interesting interplay between periphery and core that suggests a different vision of suburban development that actually predates the postwar vision of American suburbia that took over, with the carpet of single-family homes. AN: What should architects today learn from Jessor?DR: I think people are hungry for this sort of planning and thinking that we havent seen in the U.S. for a long time. Ive interviewed New York City mayoral candidates who are interested in revisiting Mitchell-Lama, and other alternatives to the private housing industry. I hope this exhibition helps jump start this process in which we can envision what a Mitchell-Lama 2.0 could look like, but also legislation that protects Section 9 public housing, which is also under threat by predatory capital. I dont think piecemeal free market development is going to solve the affordability crisis in New York City.ZP: I also want to just generally talk about what is perceived as good architecture, because these buildings are often not taken into consideration when we talk about good architecture.Resident of Rochdale Village in Queens (Zara Pfeifer)BI: We have a bit of a chip on our shoulder, because Jessors work has largely been discarded and even openly maligned. In the architecture criticism Ive waded through for this research, both contemporary and historic, theres this general, liberal line that goes, Well, its good that it is housing and affordable, but by gosh, why is it so boring and ugly? And then a critic will do a book about why the most expensive single-family home is also the most important piece of architecture theory.Jessors architecture is interesting for a number of reasons but the primary one is: People love living there. This exhibition is one part of a larger project to analyze these housing developments and rescue them from the sentiment of, Oh its modernist and car oriented, so therefore its bad. These things came about because of a much more complex set of relations. The buildings come out of a larger, holistic design economy in which the savings from making a boring building is reaped by the people that live in them, because they collectively own the property. Bringing this ecology back into conversation is vital for us.Herman Jessor on his wedding day, at age 86 (Courtesy Jessor family)BI: As we look back at 1920s New York City, when these developments began to be built, it echoes where we are today, in that there was a huge housing crisis, but also in that there were only two types of residential buildings being built: Really nice, beautiful apartment blocks and then tenements that are expensive and horrible. Weve come full circle, but today we have the added benefit of this archipelago of collective developments that continue to exist in spite of everything. Theres inherent value in learning from that condition and being inspired.