Herman Jessor

Herman J. Jessor (1895–1990) was an American architect who helped build more than 40,000 units of cooperative housing in New York City. He, along with Abraham Kazan, was a driving force of the cooperative housing movement in the United States [ [http://www.americanculturalexpress.com/subpageCCcon3.html COOPERATIVE HOUSING IN THE NEW YORK REGION] ] .

Jessor died at the age of 95, on Sunday, April 8, 1990 in Manhattan, New York [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEEDF153CF933A25757C0A966958260 NYTimes Jessor Obituary] "Herman Jessor, 95, New York Architect For Co-op Buildings" Published: April 10, 1990] .

Biography

Herman Jessor was born in Imperial Russia. He arrived with his family in the United States at the age of 12, graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and then the Cooper Union School of Engineering. During School, he worked as an engineer and subsequently devoted more than 60 years designing and building cooperative apartment buildings for the working class people.

He was a young architect on the staff of architect George W. Springsteen when they engineered the first limited-equity cooperative in the city, the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, in 1927. Jessor was the architect for Seward Park Housing Corporation, Hillman Housing Corporation and East River Housing Corporation, the large complexes at Grand Street on the Lower East Side also known as Cooperative Village.

In one of his largest undertakings, and 40 years after working on the Amlgamated, Bronx, development, Jessor was the major designer of Co-op City, the 15,500-unit cooperative development in the Bronx. Others include Rochdale Village [ [http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/hs_historical_sign.php?id=7921 NYC Parks Dept. on Rochdale] ] in Queens and the Penn South complex in Chelsea, Manhattan [ [http://www.lesonline.org/cv/LABOR%20AND%20HOUSING%20IN%20NEW%20YORK%20CITY.pdf One of the Best Histories online on Jessor and the Cooperative movement] ] .

Design Conscious

Jessor became known for making sure working class families had proper social amenities in their daily lives. He included entrance foyers, eat-in kitchens with windows, and bedrooms with cross-ventilation, so working-class families without air-conditioning could benefit from natural breezes. At the time Jessor was an architect, air-conditioning was an especially expensive luxury.

Labor Unions

Jessor was a close ally to labor unions, like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Many of the buildings he worked on were funded with the help of these unions and, primarily, for the laborers to live adequately and with a level of esteem.

Controversy

In January 1999, in the wake of a huge collapse in the Seward Park Housing parking garage [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E5D61630F934A25752C0A96F958260 NYTimes on the Collapse] "Flooded Plaza Collapses Into Garage on the Lower East Side", By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, Published: January 17, 1999] , New York City building inspectors suspected there could be a potential flaw in Jessor's "honeycomb" design of the massive garage roof. The roof had been built to support a vast playground/park above, with trees and grass upon hundreds of thousands of pounds of soil. After 40 years of rainwater, and the "freeze-thaw cycle's" expansion and contraction, normal cracking of the concrete led to the collapse Friday night, January 15, 1999. The New York City Department of Buildings opened an investigation into other of Jessor's projects to test for durability [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE4DF1530F93AA25752C0A96F958260 NY Times on the Investigation] "Spotlight on Architect's Work In Wake of a Garage Collapse" By CHARLES V. BAGLI , Published: January 19, 1999] .

Ultimately, the investigation did not turn up any major design flaws. It was the convergence of many elements occurring at the same time that resulted in the collapse. Several days of warm rain, followed by quick freezing, thawing, and refreezing, along with a stoppage in the drainage system combined with the minor cracking of the concrete in the roof (All concrete will crack, that's determined not to be hazardous), and the immense weight above, were the total cause of the collapse. [The Greater NY Insurance Company, Insurer for Seward Park Housing, eventually lost their nonpayment case (after a four year lawsuit) to the Cooperative. They paid $18M for the damages as a result of the no-fault (chaos theory) claim by Seward.]

Citations and References

See also

* List of New York City housing cooperatives