Cooper Square Committee

The Cooper Square Committee organized in 1959 when Robert Moses designated twelve blocks between Delancey and East 9th Streets for slum clearance. The Committee produced the Cooper Square Alternate Plan, the first community-drafted counter-proposal to a Title I project in New York. The plan took more than two decades to implement, and the city and state eventually adopted a version that kept the existing low-rise housing stock, rehabilitated buildings in place, and transferred land to the community.

Today the Committee runs tenant defense, harassment complaints, rent-stabilization counseling, and anti-displacement organizing from offices at 61 East 4th Street. The Committee shares staff, membership, and strategy with the Cooper Square Community Land Trust, which holds the ground under the stewardship the 1959 fight established. The Committee’s archive documents the longest sustained tenant-organizing campaign in the Lower East Side record, and the framework it produced, community counter-plan plus land trust plus tenant defense, travels into present-day fights against institutional and market-rate displacement across the city.