At Home In Utopia

When the architect Andrew Hazelton and the filmmaker Ellen Brodsky came to me with an idea for a film about the Bronx Jewish labor housing cooperatives, I was immediately fascinated. The story of these visionary workers’ communities was completely new to me. Somehow, immigrant garment workers had managed to build big, beautiful, cooperatively owned apartment complexes in the 1920s. How did they pull it off? What inspired them? I wanted to know partly for personal reasons. I had grown up hearing tales of the labor movement from my father, a union lawyer. My immigrant Jewish grandparents had been moderate socialists.

Of the four cooperative “houses” Andy had researched, the one that attracted me most was the United Workers Cooperative Colony – aka the Coops, run almost from the beginning by Communists. The idea of a big Communist community (between two thousand and four thousand people lived there during the Depression) at the edge of Bronx Park fascinated me. How did they pull it off? How did their ideology inspire them, and how did it blind them? I wanted to explore these questions without sentimentality.

I quickly learned that these cooperatives grew out of a huge social movement, or more accurately, a series of overlapping movements. The union movement provided people with a way of thinking collectively, wages decent enough to undertake ambitious collective projects, and a ready-made network for recruiting members and support. Cooperativism was an international movement; some people thought it might offer an alternative to capitalism. (1920s New York had many workers’ cooperatives - restaurants, dairies, and outside the city, cooperative camps. At Camp Nitgedeiget – Camp “No Worries’ - factory workers could spend a few days in the country for just a few dollars. Socialism, Anarchism, Communism, Zionism – different as these ideologies were, they shared the belief that by acting together, working people could transform their lives, taking collective responsibility for their individual fate.

I worked on At Home in Utopia for eight years. Along the way, I met men and women who in their 70s and 80s were passionately engaged in life, and who knew how to tell a good story. I cherish every minute I had with them. And yet, I was still left with unanswered questions. Do people need the inspiration, analysis, and far–reaching vision of a social justice movement in order to dare to transform their circumstances? And if people need to believe in a shared ideal – or ideology – in order to begin, what keeps then flexible and able to compromise, in order to succeed?