Yet Co-op City's highly political nature makes sense. ''Who wrote this article? Someone's brother-in-law? Nobody really knows.'' ''You can't pick up the paper and believe what you're reading,'' said Timothy Chung, personnel director for the New York Health & Racquet Club and a resident of Co-Op City for four years. ''It's who you know, not what you know,'' his wife Natalie, a retired bookkeeper, added. ''I know what's going on and it's unfortunate - we have become a political football,'' said Seymour Zverin, a retired letter carrier who has lived in Co-op City for 15 years.
Parness's foes, meanwhile, said his wife suffered a miscarriage after campaign literature insinuated that the couple owed back rent.įor many residents, however, the election primarily served to confirm their skepticism about whoever rules and how they do it. Opponents compared the Parness family to the Marcoses and Duvaliers. Democracy and SkepticismĪs an exercise in democracy, the election proved so rancorous as to make a case for the quietude of monarchy. Engel won election vowing to cut a better deal, and last week the Assemblyman announced one: a 31.5 percent rise spread across five years and nine months. Parness's administration negotiated a six-year, 52.5 percent increase with the state. The immediate issue was the rise in carrying charges. In Co-op City, ''CD'' doesn't mean ''compact disk'' but ''construction defect.'' Some 400 apartments sit vacant - even as a waiting list grows - because major mistakes must be repaired before they are inhabitable. Co-op City today owes $150 million in mortgage payments to the state.
On the ruins of an amusement park called Freedomland rose 15,000 cooperative apartments, and for the working class of the Bronx they offered home ownership and freedom from the tenement. Rockefeller's mammoth statewide building program -but it was also born out of dreams. But plenty of graft.'' Freedom From the TenementĬo-op City was born out of politics - as part of Gov. Co-op City was put together with spit, glue and graft. There are too many fingers in the pie, and there always have been. ''You've got everything here you could want. ''The idea of Co-op City is magnificent,'' said Lillian Ryer, a hospital secretary who has lived there since 1970.
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