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 ^[1].

Jessor died at the age of 95, on Sunday, April 8, 1990 in Manhattan, New York ^[2].

History

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 know 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^[3] in Queens and the Penn South complex in Chelsea, Manhattan^[4].

Design Conscious

Jessor became known for making sure working class families has proper social amenities in their daily lives. He included entrance foyers, eat-in kitchens with windows, and bedrooms with cross-ventilation, so for working-class families without air-conditioning could benefit from the natural breeze.

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^[5], New York City building inspectors found a potential flaw in the "honeycomb" design of the massive garage roof, designed by Jessor. The roof was built to support a vast playground/park above it. The park was laid out with trees, grass and hundreds of thousands of pounds of soil. 40 years of rainwater, freezing, expansion and cracks lead to the collapse on the night of Friday, January 15, 1999. The New York City Department of Buildings opened an investigation into other of Jessor's projects to test for durability^[6].

Ultimately, the investigation did not turn up any major design flaws. It was determined that convergence of many elements occurring at the same time, including, several days of warm rain, quick freezing, thawing, and refreezing, along with a drainage stoppage and minor cracks (determined not to be hazardous), and the immense weight building up as a result, were total cause of the collapse^[7]

Citations and References

See also

• List of New York City housing cooperatives