Alku and Alku Toinen Finnish Co-ops

Sixteen Finnish families founded the Finnish Home Building Association in 1916, and their first cooperative apartment building, Alku (Finnish for “beginning”), was the first such building in the United States. A few years later, Alku Toinen (Alku II) was completed. A decade later, Brooklyn’s “Finntown” was home to 25 other housing cooperatives, complemented by a cooperative shopping complex including a restaurant, meat market, bakery, and grocery, but almost none of the apartments in these simple looking brick buildings are occupied by Finns today.

Alku I received its building permit on May 16, 1916, and became the first non-profit housing cooperative in the United States. The concept was so new to America that these early co-ops had to be classified by the state not as housing, but under the Department of Agriculture, which regulated cooperative farms.

Non-profit “limited equity” co-op buildings are owned collectively by their residents, known as co-operators. Selling your share of the co-op for a profit is not allowed, effectively prohibiting real estate speculation. It is not surprising that non-profit collective ownership of housing would first arise in New York City, a metropolis with a chronic shortage of adequate living space and a real estate market renowned for speculation. A cooperative housing manual succinctly expresses the difference between cooperative housing and all other housing: “True cooperative housing [is] a housing unit composed of people who unite to secure attractive homes; homes built and run, not for profit, but for the service of the occupants.”
The children of Alku I and II’s original residents felt that the community nature of the homes had both positive and negative aspects. Former resident Anita Ford said, “We thought of the other children in the building as sisters and brothers. We didn’t have to wear shoes to visit our neighbors. We didn’t have strict rules because basically it was homogenous. There were rules that weren’t in the books, but everyone understood; it was moral pressure: We couldn’t have gardens in the back or barbecues; no noise after 10 o’clock; no shaking rugs out the window; no peddlers allowed. The older people would stand on the roof and watch the block (us kids would call them the pigeons). They knew everything about everyone: they were set in their ways and very cheap. They were coming from a depressed and oppressive country. They would sit and have coffee on the roof constantly. Noise was the biggest thing to them.”

While cooperative housing was later sponsored by labor unions and the city, the cooperatives of Sunset Park were the only ones with a history of clear ethnic affiliation. Why Finns were the first to build cooperative housing is not entirely clear. New York’s Finns indisputably founded a far greater number of cooperatives and mutual aid societies than did their Irish, Italian, and Scandinavian contemporaries. Goat hill (Pukin maki), the Finnish community area near Sunset Park, was, at its peak, home to 25 separate cooperative housing complexes, a cooperative restaurant, bakery, pool room, meat market, grocery store, and parking garage.