Tenant advocate dies at 96
Literary agent and community organizer Frances Goldin, who battled Robert Moses and City Hall over plans to level a portion of the Lower East Side for urban renewal, has died at 96.
Her death Saturday was reported by the Village Sun.
In the 1950s, Goldin fought off Moses’ Cooper Square redevelopment plan, which aimed to bulldoze 12 blocks from Ninth St. to Delancey St. — displacing 2,400 tenants — for a Stuyvesant Townstyle middle-income complex, the news outlet noted.
Five decades later, an alternate community plan preserved existing low-income housing along with new mixed-income housing. Construction began in the early 2000s.
“It took us 50 f—ing years, but we made this community, this little community of Cooper Square, unlike any community in the world,” she said at a 2009 gala, the Village Sun reported. “We’re the only neighborhood in the city that built its own urban renewal plan and saw it come to life.”
In 1959, she also helped found a second tenants group, the citywide Metropolitan Council on Housing, which is the city’s oldest and largest tenants organization, the news outlet said.
Goldin also carved out a niche in the publishing world as a boutique literary agent specializing in leftist books. Her Frances Goldin Literary Agency published Barbara
Kingsolver, Adrienne Rich and Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer and is now serving a life sentence with no parole.
Born in 1924 to working-class Russian-Ukrainian Jewish parents, Goldin grew up in Springfield Gardens, Queens, and Harlem, the Village Sun reported. In the 1940s, she moved to the East Village and became a tenant organizer. She married Morris Goldin, a staffer of the socialist New York State American Labor Party. Like him, she joined the Communist Party.
In addition to her activism with the Cooper Square Committee, Goldin championed other progressive issues. In 2011, she attended Occupy Wall Street, toting a sign saying, “I’m 87 and I’m Mad as Hell.”