1934: Disgruntled KVer's Move Out

This may either refer to non-renewal of leases to tenant leaders who had protested move in conditions or tenants moving on their own volition because of that situation

KV: Clearing The Building Site 1933

Who's Who Of Knickerbocker Village: Edwin Berry Burghum

That's a picture of Naomi, Edwin's daughter as she appeared in early this September at the Little Red Schoolhouse Anniversary Day (from the Villager)
Edwin was the editor of the KV newspaper during the tenant strike.
This comes from the Burghum Geneaological Site. The author, in my view, doesn't display the proper outrage as to what happened to Edwin Burhgum and his family as a result of the McCarthy Witch Hunt:
Edwin Berry Burgum was born in Concord on 4th March 1894, the first child of Edwin Gannell Burgum and his wife Addie. In 1915 he graduated from Dartmouth College. Between 1916 and 1920, he worked as an Instructor in English at the University of Pittsburgh. Meanwhile he had time to graduate from Harvard University in 1917. From 1920 to 1923, Berry became Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois and, in 1924, he became Associate Professor of English at New York University.

Who's Who Of Knickerbocker Village: Harold Baumbach

I did research on some of the leaders of the Rent Strike of 1935. Very interesting.
"HAROLD BAUMBACH (1903 - 2002)
American master artist, Harold Baumbach was a well-known painter and printmaker, whose style ranged from figurative to abstract. The son of an upholsterer, on the Lower East Side, New York, who did not want him to be an artist, Baumbach basically taught himself to paint. He first made a mark during the late 1930's as a figurative painter in the style of Bonnard and Vuillard, doing densely patterned street scenes and Brooklyn interiors. During summers he painted landscapes, mostly in upstate New York and New England, then spent vacations in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a thriving art community where his close friends and fellow-artists, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko also vacationed. Over time, Baumbach's work became increasingly abstract, but figures - generic card players, people sitting in parks, cows in fields - were always present as dreamlike devices for explorations in color and spatial relations.

"His real subject was not the world outside of himself but the stuff and texture and light of paint," a review in 1975, in ART NEWS magazine explained. "He always turned everything he saw into his own patterned and textured imagery."

After an eye operation in the late 1980's he became legally blind, trying to paint for two years after that from memory before quitting. In 1992, he had a retrospective the same year at Brooklyn College Museum. His works are also held by several important American museums. He was frequently described as an intimist and was loosely linked with Avery during the 1940's as a modern American painter, but he never belonged to any group, being restless and without a signature style. Strong willed, allergic to fashion, even to success, he persisted in going his own way, refusing to sell to prospective buyers he thought did not admire the work properly and breaking off relations with galleries usually after only a show or two. He had 24 one-man shows in New York. From 1946 to 1966, he also taught painting at the Brooklyn College, New York."

Not Necessarily This Day In Knickerbocker Village History: June 8-12, 1935

A picture of the beautiful entrance to the Fred F. French Building.
From The Times, two articles combined into one. Seems like Fred French was one hard-nosed SOB, perhaps Steinbrenner's relative:
"Fourteen residents of Knickerbocker Village, the model apartment house block at Market and Monroe Streets on the lower East Side, have received letters from the 'Fred F. French Management Company, an affiliate of the company which erected the apartments, saying their leases would not be renewed on Oct. 1. This was announced last night by Joseph P. Selly, resident of the Knickerbocker Village Tenants Association, a militant group that led a rent strike at the apartments just after the first tenants had begun to move in last November 'In view of your evident unhappiness in your tenancy, and our apparent Inability to remedy your Expressed dissatisfaction, we believe it desirable for your sake, as well as ours, that your tenancy should end at the expiration of your present lease," the letters said. Dr. Edwin B. Burgum, editor of The Knickerbocker News, a paper of the tenants' association; Andrew Stewart, member of the association's executive committee; Mr. Selly and Harold Baumbach, the paper's cartoonist, were among those to receive letters.

More than 600 of the 1,200 members at the Knickerbocker Village Tenants Association met last night in the basement of 10 Monroe Street, one of the houses in the village, to protest against the refusal of the Fred P. French Management Company to grant renewal of leases to fourteen leaders In the tenant group.
Two petitions were put into circulation, and a mass taxicab visit to the French offices at 551 Fifth Avenue was set for Saturday morning at 10:30. Most of the tenants at the meeting, 100 of whom made up an overflow gathering In a kindergarten room nearby, signified their intention of joining the mass protest. One petition, addressed to the French corporation, said that "the activities initiated and carried on by these tenants have been in the past, and are now, of real benefit to us.'' "We, therefore" It continued, "here express our desire that these tenants remain with us in Knickerbocker Village and that you withdraw your letter to them of June 8 refusing them permission to renew their leases." The other petition quoted Section 12 of the State Housing Law, which empowered the State board to investigate the affairs of "limited housing companies": and Section 10 of the same law requiring the housing board to halt "either by mandamus or injunction" any act of such company which the board may deem "prejudicial to the interests of the
public." It addressed itself to the State Board of Housing, and in it the Fred F. French Management Company was accused of "anti-social action in refusing to allow renewal of the leases. Joseph P. Selly, president of the tenants' group and one of the tenants who was refused a new lease, presided"

Not Necessarily This Day In Knickerbocker Village History, August 12, 1936: From 10/19/07

This brings to mind interesting historical questions. Was the opposition to this a true
defense of housing for the working class or was it a "false flag" to prevent any gvt money to be spent on subsidized housing. Later in NYC there would be projects for lower income people, but there was a definite need for housing for lower middle class folks like my family.
The plan of the city administration to withdraw tax. exemption from the Knickerbocker Village model housing project on the East Side, if successful, will bankrupt virtually all the low rental housing created in New York. City under the State Housing Law in the last ten years, Aaron Rabihowitz, vice chairman of the New York State Board of Housing, said yesterday. Mr. Rabinowitz made this state- ment as a result of the ruling Monday by Supreme Court Justice Samuel I. Rosenman, denying an application for summary judgment on behalf of the operators of the Knickerbocker Village project. The operators maintained that the property was exempt from taxation and that the Board of Taxes and Assessments was in error in acting otherwise. Mr. Rabinowitz declared the withdrawal of tax exemption would wipe out the investments of hundreds of workers' families and millions of invested capital representing both equities and a substantial part of the underlying mortgages. Sees Confidence Destroyed "Furthermore, it will discredit all public effort to bring about decent housing within the reach of low- income families," he said. "If the city can repudiate its obligations after it has induced wage-earning families to invest their all in better housing under government protec- tion, it must destroy all confidence in the sanctity of government contract? Mr. Rabhowitz pointed out that total investment. in the cooperative dwellings under the law was $5,805,183. Of the non-cooperative dwellings the total investment affected by the action of the city, he said, was $12,436.277. Of approximately $36,000,000 invested under the Housing Law, projects valued at $18,241,462 were now threatened by the action of the city, he added. Discussing. tax exemption as ap- plied to the property built under the State Housing Law, Mr. Rabinowitz said a primary purpose of the law was to invite organizations and individuals to invest private and trust funds in housing projects. These projects, he asserted, produced the lowest possible rentals under conditions necessary to insure self-liquidation and proper maintenance.

Not Necessarily This Day In Knickerbocker Village History, Oct 23, 1934

The Knickerbocker Village rent strike (from an article on nyc tenant history) , employing appeals to public officials and the media more than courtroom advocacy, provided an equally innovative model of tenant organization. The setting of this conflict was a sixteen-hundred-unit complex located in a deteriorated neighborhood just north of the Brooklyn Bridge (Manhattan side), which had been financed with a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that limited its developers to a 6 percent profit and rents of no more than $12.50 per room. Designed as a model project for middle-class New Yorkers, Knickerbocker Village attracted a tenant population of young, college-educated professionals -- professors, architects, social workers, teachers, lawyers, civil servants, and businessmen. Arriving on moving day with high expectations, they found the buildings unfinished and the management poorly prepared for their arrival. Elevators did not work; apartments lacked finished floors, bathroom and kitchen fixtures, and painted walls; "model" features of the development -- laundry rooms, radio hookups, children's playrooms -- proved inoperable or poorly equipped. Worse yet, management representatives, failing to take tenant complaints seriously, offered insolent responses or avoided contact altogether.

Knickerbocker Village residents, who had developed an instant camaraderie during the move-in fiasco (and who were not accustomed to this treatment in their professional lives), swiftly mobilized to ease their predicament. Less than three weeks after moving day (October 1, 1934), over six hundred Villagers came to a meeting at a local public school and voted to withhold their next month's rent unless management agreed to a long list of demands, including repairs of apartments, elevators, and public areas, and reimbursement of tenants for moving expenses. The strategy tenants pursued demonstrated a shrewd understanding of politics, public relations, and the weight conferred by their own professional status (the strike committee had forty-four lawyers and seventeen journalists among its supporters). Within one week, the strike committee had set up meetings with the mayor, the State Housing Board, and the Village management (the Fred M. French Company), and had managed to secure four full-length articles in the New York Times. In addition, the strikers formed a legal defense committee, a newsletter, and a social activities committee to help firm up their support with the rest of the tenants. By mid-November the Knickerbocker Village management, reeling under the force of this organizational blitzkrieg, agreed to negotiate; a compromise was reached that resulted in repairs of unfinished apartments and nearly $25,000 in reimbursements to aggrieved tenants.

The successful strike generated tremendous esprit de corps among politically active tenants. One week after the French Company settled tenant claims, strike leaders announced that they were forming a permanent Knickerbocker Village Tenants Association to undertake a program of cultural and educational activities within the housing complex. The tenant leaders, ranging politically from New Dealers to Communists, approached the association as an opportunity to create a social and cultural environment that reflected the "activist" currents of the time, but they ran up against the grim opposition of the French Company, which saw the association as a threat to its control of the project. The company refused to grant meeting space to the association, set up a rival tenant group, funded an anti-association newsletter, and finally, in the summer of 1935, informed seventeen association leaders that their leases would not be renewed because of their "evident unhappiness" with conditions in the project.

The effort to evict association leaders, even more than the strike, radicalized many residents of the project. Although the association lost an eleven-month court battle to force renewal of the leases, it used the issue of arbitrary management tactics to expand its following among the tenants and create strong ties with public officials, journalists, and civic organizations concerned with housing reform. To the French Company's dismay, a whole new group of association leaders emerged who expanded its cultural and political activities, kept its newsletter alive, and expanded association membership to over a thousand tenants, thus swamping its management-sponsored rival. "Knickerbocker Village became a beehive of activity," one tenants leader recalled, "one of the most interesting places in New York to live in." For the new tenant leadership, the recalcitrance of the French Company became a metaphor for the problems all tenants faced in winning recognition of their rights to free association and collective bargaining, and they became evangelists for tenant activism in their Lower East Side neighborhood and the city as a whole.

The Knickerbocker Village leaders possessed some unique assets in their efforts to serve as the catalysts for a citywide tenant movement. First, they possessed professional skills, and they projected a cosmopolitan style that no militant tenant activists had previously commanded. College educated and "Americanized" (no foreign accents here, even among the "ethnics"), they combined a romantic faith in mass action with a hardheaded knowledge of the law, public relations, and the legislative process. Second, their radicalism, although sincere, lacked the rough edges displayed by immigrant Socialists and Communists. Recent converts to the Left, they affected a nonpartisan aura that never compromised their professional expertise or jeopardized smooth social relations with liberals. Third, they had the backing of a strong, stable tenant association that provided both a model and a source of financial and political support for their activities. At a time when housing reform had become a major issue in city politics, Knickerbocker Village activities were uniquely situated to bring together a grass roots tenant movement that sought links with liberal reformers in the settlement houses and the city government.

Not Necessarily This Day In Knickerbocker Village History, 10/3/1934

In the heart of the East Side a pack of old-law tenements leaned crazily on each other through the faded years to form what ultimately came to be known as the lung block. AL SMITH, who knows his East Side classics, re- marked yesterday that it was originally "Long Block." Any dialectician in the neighborhood could explain easily enough how '' long ?' turned to " lung!' But the new name stuck, and no one can say it was not apt. For Lung Block, with its sunless rooms and dark alleys and gratings underfoot to "ventilate the sewers," was the abode of filth and the foster-mother of disease. As long ago as 1903 the late ROBERT W. DE FORREST remarked that " every consideration of public health, morals and " decency 'I required that the buildings on the block be destroyed at an early date." Very likely thirty-one years is a mere watchman's round in the history of the city, but it is a long time in the life of the families on Cherry Street. Now it's gone, leaving behind only an unsavory memory. In its place is a tolerably spacious group of modern multiple dwellings erected by the energy of FRED F. FRENCH with the aid of Congress, JESSE JONES, DARWIN JAMES, ROBERT MOSES et AL. Most of them were on hand yesterday to celebrate the opening of such of the new structures as are now completed. These form an impressive unit between the old bridges, just around the corner from Oliver Street. The setting is not of the best, since the East Side all about is still overgrown and over- crowded and underparked, and the dwellings themselves had to be pushed up to twelve stories to keep rents down to twelve dollars. But the courts are broad and sunny and the rooms reason-ably high, wide and airy, and the whole development is a vast improvement over the squalid slums which it displaced. Already the available apartments are 98 per cent rented, a happy augury for the future success of this fine venture in slum clearance, and an indication that the ** Walk to Work " slogan is not without its appeal.

Not Necessarily This Day In Knickerbocker Village History, April 1, 1933

A new feature for pseudo-intellectualism, since I discovered a wealth of stuff in the Times Archive and rather than email pdf's to my KV brethren I figured I could post it here:
Details of the model Housing Development on the lower east side to be financed with the $8.075,000 loan made on Thursday by the Re construction Finance Corporation were revealed yesterday by Fred French, president of the Fred French Operators, Inc., who obtained the loan. The loan, which is the first for housing made by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, brings to a new phase a fight that has been waged for improvement of the east side ever since the late Robert W deForest first took up the battle 40 years ago. The project involves the purchase of all the land in the blocks bound- ed by Catharine, Monroe, Markel and Cherry Streets. As a part oi the land assembly, Hamilton Street, which extends diagonally across the site is to be vacated, creating s building site of 219,736 square feet area. With the exception of 54,000 square feet, which it has under option, the French company holds title to all the property in the two blocks. The Old "Lung Block."'
Situated In the most congested part of the lower east side, this site, Known as the "lung block" because of the prevalence of tuber-culosis in the area. is said to con- tain some of the worst examples of slum housing in existence. Their demolition is hailed as one of the most important steps ever under-taken to rebuild the section. Those rookeries, condemned as unfit for human habitation years ago, yet housing close to 3,000 men, women and children, will be demolished and replaced by twelve-story and. basement fireproof apartments of steel and concrete construction. They will contain 1,662 apartments and 6,030 rooms at an average rental of $12.50 a room per month. Mr French said yesterday that actual work on the project would begin about March 1 and that about 10,000 men wouh be employed directly and Indirectly for at least a year in tearing down the old structures and building the new. Outlining the features of Knickerbocker Village, as the development will be called, Mr. French said: "It will provide immediate unem- ployment relief, 2,000 men will be engaged actually on the site, an- other 8,000 in shops, foundries, factories, mines, lumber camps. About $8,000.000 will be distributed among about 10,000 people, averaging about $800 per person per year. "Slum clearance of one of the worst blocks th the city will begin as soon. as legal details are completed. Decent living quarters in every sense of the word will be provided for thousands of downtown workers who will be saved energy and time by having within walking distance of their work. This will also relieve traffic. The rehabilitation of the area. between Brooklyn Bridge and Fourteenth Street, East Broadway and the East River has occupied many committees and many years of constant concern. The construction of Knickerbocker Village will further this rehabilitation. It will also strengthen tinderlying security for about $75,000,000 worth of first mortgages held by savings banks and others, increasing also taxable values for the city in the neighbor. Mr. French thanked President Roosevelt, Secretary Woodin and former Governor Smith for the interest in the project. The grant for Knickerbocker Village. Mr. French declared, had "broken the ice." He predicted that loans would soon be made for other housing projects, and an-nounced that he had alfeady put in another application for a grant for further development in the district