Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square

Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square

  • Overview
  • Cast
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Status

Released

Release Date

Dec 24, 2022

Runtime

1h 23m

Genres

Documentary

User Score

100%

Original Title

Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square

Director

Kelly Anderson

Description

In 1959 New York City announced a "slum clearance plan" by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit - not displace - residents, Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification - cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty three years later, they established the state's first community land trust - a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the "real estate capital of the world."