Herman Jessor
Herman J. Jessor (June 15, 1894 – April 8, 1990) was an American
Abraham Kazan, was a driving force of the cooperative housing movement in the United States.[1]
Biography
Jessor was born in the Russia Empire. He arrived with his family in the United States at age 12, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and then the Cooper Union 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
Co-op City, the 15,500-unit cooperative development in The Bronx.[citation needed
]
Jessor was married to the former Eva Jaffee. He died in Manhattan on April 8, 1990.[7]
Career
Jessor became known for ensuring working-class families had proper social amenities in their daily lives. He included entrance
railroad flat
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
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.
In January 1999, in the wake of a collapse in the
Seward Park Housing parking garage,[8] 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.[9] 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.[citation needed] After the insurer won a subsequent appeal, the insurer and coop settled in 2010 with the coop returning $3.25 million to the insurer.[10]
See also
References
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Herman Jessor.
- ^ American Cultural Express: "Cooperative Housing in the New York Region" Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b Tony Schuman, "LABOR AND HOUSING IN NEW YORK CITY Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing Movement", Appendix
- ^ New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission: United Workers Coop (1992)
- ^ AIA Guide to New York City, 5th edition, Page 105
- ^ NYC Parks Dept. on Rochdale
- ^ Schuman, Tony. "Labor and Housing in New York City - Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing Movement", New Jersey Institute of Technology
- ^ "Obituary: Herman Jessor, 95, New York Architect For Co-op Buildings", The New York Times, April 10, 1990
- ^ Herszenhorn, David M. "Flooded Plaza Collapses Into Garage on the Lower East Side", The New York Times, January 17, 1999
- ^ Bagli, Charles, V. "Spotlight on Architect's Work In Wake of a Garage Collapse" The New York Times, January 19, 1999
- ^ "Seward Park Co-op and Insurance Company Settle Garage Collapse Lawsuit | the Lo-Down : News from the Lower East Side".
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