At Home in Union-Made Utopia: PBS Looks at the Housing Co-Op Movement
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Three elderly New Yorkers—Yok Ziebel, Julie Luguvoy and Pete Rosenblum—are meeting at the apartment complex in the Bronx where they grew up together. They embrace with all of the affection of lifelong friends. They joke with each other (Ziebel: “Did you lose weight?” Rosenblum: “No, I’m shrinking.” Ziebel: “We’re all shrinking.”). They reminisce.
This sweet moment begins a splendid, subtle documentary, “At Home in Utopia,” created by Michal Goldman and Ellen Brodsky, which will be shown on the PBS “Independent Lens” series April 28. (Check your local PBS station schedule here.)
Ziebel, Luguvoy and Rosenblum grew up in one of the most remarkable and least-known experiments in the history of the union movement—the housing cooperatives of New York City, built mainly by immigrant Jewish workers in the early 20th century.
These workers agreed on very little. They were socialists, liberals, labor Zionists, communists, anarchists and everything in between. They engaged in some ferocious political fights in their day.
Yet they all had something powerful in common. They thought unions should aim for “a shenere un besere velt”—a more beautiful and better world, as the Yiddish socialist Workmen’s Circle put it—even if they passionately disagreed about what that world would look like.
How to get from here to there? That’s where the housing cooperatives (and other kinds of cooperatives) came in.
