You might not know Herman Jessor's name, but you'll certainly recognize the architect's work: Penn South, Co-op City, Rochdale Village, and Starrett City—monumental brick complexes with populations that rival small American cities.
Throughout his 60-year career, Jessor (1894–1990) maintained tunnel-vision focus on one goal: building as much affordable housing as he possibly could. And he was remarkably successful, having worked on 17 limited-equity cooperative developments in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, which encompass 40,016 units in all. That's more than any other architect in the city, yet he remains relatively unknown today—despite how transformational his work was to the city's housing landscape, and how reviled he became to the Jane Jacobs brand of urbanism, which opposed large-scale redevelopment. Jacobs referred to the middle-income towers that were Jessor's bread and butter as "marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life." But this outsider's view from the street isn't exactly accurate.
A new exhibition on Jessor's work wants to redeem his reputation. "JESSOR: The Architecture of Herman Jessor and the Limited Equity Cooperative Movement in New York (1925–1974)," on view through May 23 at Citygroup, a gallery and collective on the Lower East Side, introduces the architect and recontextualizes his immense body of work, which dramatically increased housing supply at prices working people could actually afford.
Curated by the architect Brad Isnard, photographer Zara Pfeifer, and historian and journalist Daniel Jonas Roche, the exhibition includes contemporary photographs of Jessor's buildings, new drawings of their floor plans, and a documentary film about what day-to-day life is like living in these radical communities. "They're kind of invisible if you don't know about them," Isnard told Hell Gate. "But they are thriving, vibrant places despite, or because of, their everyday architecture."
As New York buckles under the weight of its worsening housing crisis, Jessor's approach to designing massive quantities of affordable, good quality apartments outside of the speculative market serves as a critical historic touchstone and a possible way forward—especially considering the political circumstances that gave rise to his buildings, like the state housing laws that regulated rents and created limited-dividend companies, the Mitchell-Lama program that funded the projects, and the nonprofit developers who constructed them.
"People are always talking about this Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs dichotomy," Roche said. "He's almost like the third leg of the stool here and was opposed to both of them."
