TRADE UNION PLAZA

Trade Union Plaza, a 77-unit building occupying an entire city block near Yale New Haven Hospital, was the first “co-operative housing project for lower-income families… to be developed by a central labor council.”

“The project's origins and design fostered community interaction and interdependence. Its founders and first tenants shared union membership and class identity, and the women—cooks, schoolteachers, and hospital workers—who moved into the first units also sat in on meetings to review the blueprints. The community they enjoyed, and on which they depended, for the next forty years was one of their own making. It was this organized and self-consciously collective community that got its family members through decades of labor strife, racial discrimination, economic depression, and federal and state disinvestments in city services. It was this working community that helped each other through the loss of the manufacturing jobs on which so many African Americans in New Haven depended.”

“New Haven’s Trade Union Plaza: ‘By Working People for Working People’”