Page 18 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

In a lot of ways, life in Usonia in those years was idyllic. Children were on a first-name basis with all the
adults in the community, and could walk into anybody’s house and open the fridge without a second
thought. Originally, the Usonians intended to build a shared community house for meetings and
activities, but they soon realized it wasn’t necessary, because all their houses were de facto community
space. They formed a cantata singing group that rehearsed in the Friedman family’s living room; children
got cooking lessons in the Lurie family kitchen; the women held an exercise class that rotated among
their houses. Sobie remembers that when her mother hosted the group, she opened up the folding
doors separating the master bedroom and the living room to make sure the space was big enough for
the women to jump across.

Money was tight, but they helped one another out. “We were very tolerant with our members,” Reisley
remembers. “Somebody was a little slow with their payments, okay, you're slow.” In his book, Reisley
writes that “through the years the cooperative maintained a semiofficial slush fund for members’ use”;
whenever it seemed like someone was in need, he or she would receive an anonymous offer of
assistance.

Not everything was perfect, of course. The Usonians fought over the things that members of every
community fight over: how to spend shared resources; who was shirking their volunteer responsibilities.
And the larger financial problems they faced continually threatened to sink them.

One of Usonia’s main draws was the idea that you could build a beautiful home in the community for
very little money—$5,000 to $7,500, according to Wright’s original estimates. “Well, you should never let
an architect give quotes for the price of houses,” says Podell, who was David Henken’s nephew. “They
have no concept of money.” Though Wright wanted Usonian homes to be affordable for a wide swath of
people, he was unbending about the quality of materials that should be used. Amid the postwar
building boom, costs quickly rose out of control.

The cooperative’s structure entailed group ownership of both land and houses; families held 99-year
leases on their homes. Each family had a Usonian account in which they put money that was then
directed toward the costs of building their home and investing in common space. “Essentially,” Reisley
told me, “members invested in the cooperative and had equity that was equal to their investment.” It had
been a struggle to obtain mortgages as a group; now, the spiraling construction costs meant that they
risked foreclosure. A series of fraught discussions resulted in the decision to dismantle part of the
cooperative structure, giving each family individual ownership over its home and maintaining
cooperative control of communal land. “Almost three years of tumultuous meetings—held several times a
week and for hours—followed,” Reisley wrote.

But they stuck together, maybe in part because going back into the wider world didn’t seem all that
appealing. The rest of Westchester was deeply conservative, and it was the height of McCarthyism.
Rumors swirled that the young Jewish families from the Bronx living in those radical houses were actually
communists. In the stately Center-Hall Colonial houses of Pleasantville and Chappaqua, Usonia was
sometimes referred to as Insania.

So, in spite of the committees and the meetings and the financial stress, nobody really left Usonia in
those early years. They dammed a stream to make a natural swimming pool, carpooled to their jobs in
the city, got dogs, sent their kids to Sunday school at the Ethical Culture Society, wrote for the
Newsonian (“All the news that fits, we print”), threw parties to which everyone was always invited. And
then, as their children grew up and left home, things began to change.

The train up from Grand Central Station is crowded even early on a Saturday morning, full of
weekenders headed for the dense network of towns that stretch north from New York City: White Plains,
Valhalla, Mount Pleasant. Pleasantville Station is surrounded by a farmers market that may as well be in

! 17