The Histories of Seward Park

The inspiration for this collection was an oversize 1961 SPC brochure that was given to me many years ago... I assumed it was a digital reproduction, and recently asked who had the digital file. In response, I was surprised to be told that the brochure was an original! It is a remarkable brochure, and the only other copy I saw of it is was a low-quality black-and-white PDF. I knew this document should be preserved, so I set out to photograph and publish it... and publishing it brought to mind other important aspects of the buildings, neighborhood, people, and community that shaped our home.

The History That Shaped Us:

And Our History Going Forward:

 

The History That Shaped Us

Seward Park Slum Clearance

The Seward Park Slum Clearance Plan, dated 1956, outlines the plans to build our co-op. Of particular interest are all the maps! Robert Moses masterminded a great many "slum clearance" projects across the city in the 1950s. While it is undeniable that many quality buildings and communities were built, Robert Moses was widely condemned at the end and in the aftermath of his career for having destroyed many homes, neighborhoods, and communities, and for leaving a great many people who were displaced by his developments to fend for themselves. The original PDF is on the NYC.gov website.

 

The Original SPC Brochure!

This brochure, The Story of Seward Park Cooperative, dated 1961, was distributed to original tenants when they first moved into SPC! A text-only version can be found here.

 

The Collectivist History of Seward Park Co-op

While running for a seat on the SPC Board of Directors in 2026, Candidate Rachel Wilkerson produced this remarkable article (Full title: "A community rather than just an apartment house": The collectivist history of Seward Park Co-op) that illuminates the backgrounds and motivations of key players in the cooperative movement that built our commmunity. (A PDF version can be downloaded here.)

 

SPC's Hugho Gellert Murals

Our lobbies feature murals produced by Hugo Gellert between 1959-1961. Much can be gleaned about Gellert from the article shown above and elsewhere on the internet, but I wasn't able to find a gallery of the murals featured in our lobbies — so I set out to create this one.

 

The Hester Street Lot

The Hester Street Lot was purportedly closed in the 1970s after a series of muggings that took place in the vicinity. The lot stood vacant and in disrepair for decades. I started advocating to make use of it when I first started this site in 2004, and stimulated a then-Candidate for our Board of Directors to pursue the issue as a centerpiece of his 2007 campaign. Upon opening in 2010, this lot became the site for the Hester Street Fair, and the adjacent plaza in front of Seward Park hosted a weekend greenmarket. These two initiatives languished due to a lack of foot traffic in the area. The neighborhood has been massively revitalized as a result of opening the gates of Seward Park (see below), and It is my hope that similar initiatives will return.

 

The Gates of Seward Park

Remarkably, Seward Park was accessible only through Jefferson Street for well over a decade. The result of this is that people couldn't circulate through it to other parts of our neighborhood. I can't say for sure if SPBuzz played a part in opening the gates, but starting in 2012, I published articles, and was in touch with scores of community leaders and organizations to advocate for them to be opened. Ultimately, the gates WERE opened in 2019 as part of NYC's Parks Without Borders (PWB) program, and this has had a profound effect at revitalizing our neighborhood. The PWB program also removed many tall fences and made many other improvements within the park.

 

SPURA & Essex Crossing

The slum clearance plan that formed SPC extended beyond our co-op to include an additional ten lots of land which, taken together, comprised NYC's largest undevelopped stretch of city-owned property south of 96 Street (see map here). Not having specific plans, and mired in controversy, this additional land — the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) — served as parking lots for nearly fifty years! Finally, in 2012, Community Board 3 and various partners forged plans for the disposition of the SPURA lots. While the final outcome was not to everyone's liking, the sketchy borders of our neighborhood — parking lots on Essex Street and all along Delancey — would be developed. This cleared the way for massive residential developments all around us, and also to big box stores like Trader Joe's, Lidl, and Target. In my view, the most significant early impact of this project was that the Essex Market moved closer to us, to the south side of Delancey Street. Suddenly, our desolate neighborhood had a magnet within it, to which we could go, and to which people from outside the neighborhood were drawn. Nowadays, the big box stores serve as magnets, and, while they are convenient, they don't exactly add any local flavor. It's hard to find a single "authoritative" document to sum up the SPURA / Essex Crossing stories, but this article, published by the Architectural League of New York, conveys a sense of the situation and the monumental challenge that faced those wanting anything at all to get done.

 

Air Rights & the Bialystoker Nursing Home

In 2018, our co-op rejected a proposed $54M Air Rights sale that would have been the largest such sale in NYC history. SPbuzz produced this post-mortem slideshow to discuss and deconstruct what happened. (SPBuzz captured all pertinent documments in the 2018 Election Corner.)

 

Our History Going Forward

SPC Lobbies & Grounds Project

No matter how the Lobby Renovation project turns out, it promises to be the most significant design change to our buildings since they were built in 1960. In December 2025, the SPC Board of Directors announced a $32M plan to radically transform our lobbies and campus. The size and scope of the proposed project spurred a dramatic backlash within our co-op. As a consequence, the project has been scaled down, and the most controversial elements of the plan (such as relocating the lobbies) were removed from consideration. As of this writing, the features of a new plan are in development. SPBuzz covered the lobbies project extensively in the context of the 2026 election. And SPBuzz also captured lobby design options that were presented way back in 2004.

 

Seward Lane

Though it wouldn't have the neighborhood-revitailizing effect as did opening the Hester Street Lot or the gates of Seward Park (see above), I propose that opening up Seward Lane would have a demonstrably positive effect on our community and our neighborhood at-large.

 

Renaming Samuel Dickstein Plaza

There has been a long-time effort to rename Samuel Dickstein Plaza — the street that runs between Building #1 and the Apple Bank — in light of the fact that it was named after someone who was later found to be a Soviet spy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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