Herman J. Jessor (June 15, 1894 – April 8, 1990) was an American

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

who helped build more than 40,000 units of cooperative housing in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. He, along with Abraham Kazan, was a driving force of the cooperative housing movement in the United States.

Biography

Jessor was born in the Russia Empire. He arrived with his family in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

at age 12, and graduated from

Stuyvesant High School , motto_translation = For knowledge and wisdom , address = 345 Chambers Street , city = New York , state = New York , zipcode = 10282 , country ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, and then the

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique ...

School of Engineering. During school, he worked as an engineer. He was a young architect on the staff of architect George W. Springsteen, of Springsteen & Goldhammer, when that firm engineered the first limited-equity cooperative in

, the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in

The Bronx The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New ...

, in 1927. Jessor subsequently worked with Springsteen on the design on the

Hillman Housing Corporation 267px, Hillman Housing buildings on Grand Street as seen from the East River towers. Amalgamated Dwellings is seen between the second and the third tower Cooperative Village is a community of housing cooperatives on the Lower East Side of Ma ...

Tony Schuman, "LABOR AND HOUSING IN NEW YORK CITY Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing Movement", Appendix and was the architect for phase two of the United Workers Cooperative Colony; East River Housing Corporation ossibly with Springsteen again, depending on the source

Seward Park Housing Corporation 267px, Hillman Housing buildings on Grand Street as seen from the East River towers. Amalgamated Dwellings is seen between the second and the third tower Cooperative Village is a community of housing cooperatives on the Lower East Side of Ma ...

; Rochdale Village in

Queens Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

and the Penn South complex in

Chelsea, Manhattan Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The area's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, the Hudson River and West Street to the west, and Sixth Avenue to the east, with its norther ...

.Schuman, Tony. "Labor and Housing in New York City - Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing Movement"
New Jersey Institute of Technology In one of his largest undertakings, Jessor was the major designer of Co-op City, the 15,500-unit cooperative development in The Bronx. Jessor was married to the former Eva Jaffee. He died in

on April 8, 1990.

Career

Jessor became known for ensuring 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 Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C or AC, is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior environment (sometimes referred to as 'comfort cooling') and in some cases also strictly controlling ...

could benefit from natural breezes. At the time Jessor was an architect, air-conditioning was especially expensive. He eschewed the typical

railroad flat A railroad apartment or railroad flat, sometimes referred to as a floor-through apartment, is an apartment with a series of rooms connecting to each other in a line.Sennett, Richard. ''The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Citie ...

design, which required walking through one room to get to the next, favoring a design where rooms were accessed from a common hallway, providing more privacy to the residents. Jessor was a close ally of such

labor union A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and benefits (s ...

s as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, the

International Ladies Garment Workers Union The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), whose members were employed in the women's clothing industry, was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female memb ...

, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Many of the buildings he worked on were funded with the help of these unions. In January 1999, in the wake of a collapse in the Seward Park Housing parking garage, 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 the collapse on Friday night, January 15, 1999, the New York City Department of Buildings opened an investigation into other Jessor projects to test for durability. The investigation did not turn up any major design flaws, and cited convergence of many elements including several days of warm rain, followed by quick freezing, thawing, and refreezing, along with a stoppage in the drainage system combined with minor cracking of the concrete in the roof and the immense weight above. After a four-year lawsuit, the Greater New York Insurance Company, insurer for Seward Park Housing, lost their nonpayment case to the cooperative, and $18 million for the damages. After the insurer won a subsequent appeal, the insurer and coop settled in 2010 with the coop returning $3.25 million to the insurer.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jessor, Herman 1895 births 1990 deaths 20th-century American architects American cooperative organizers Russian Jews Stuyvesant High School alumni Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States

Biography

Career

See also

References