Herman J. Jessor (b. 1895 - d. 1990)

 

Herman Jessor was born in Russia and came to the United States when he was 12 years old.  A graduate of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and then the Cooper Union School of Engineering, Jessor was known for the social amenities of his designs, including apartments with entrance foyers, eat-in kitchens with windows, and bedrooms with cross-ventilation for working-class families without air-conditioning. He, along with Abraham Kazan, were the driving force of the cooperative housing movement in the United States, building more than 40,000 units of cooperative housing in New York City. 

Jessor was a young architect on the staff of architect George W. Springsteen of Springsteen & Goldhammer, the firm that engineered the first limited-equity cooperative in New York City.  He was the architect for Seward Park Houses, Hillman Houses and East River Houses, the large complexes at Grand Street on the Lower East Side in NYC.  He was also one of the designers of Co-op City, the 15,500-unit project in the Bronx, and of Rochdale Village in Queens.  Jessor also designed the Penn-South housing complex in Manhattan. Jessor was a close ally of such labor unions as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and many of the buildings he worked on were funded with the help of these unions. 

 

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