Radicals in the Bronx

Radicals in the Bronx explores the years between the world wars, when vibrant left-wing politics launched a movement to build a better life for the working class. The exhibition focuses on the communists, unionists, socialists, labor Zionists, and Yiddish culturalists who built housing cooperatives in the Bronx in the 1920s, and on the lives they made there. For a generation, the Allerton Avenue "Coops," the Amalgamated Houses, the Farband Houses, and the Sholem Aleichem Houses nurtured passionate political cultures, where ideologies governed the choice of friends, spouses, schools, and summer camps. Their pioneering founders built the largest concentration of cooperative housing in the country and helped to create a model for non-profit housing that would become an important force in New York City after World War II.