Alexandra Vozick Hans Papers, 1927–2006

Hyman Vozick, the father of Alexandra Vozick Hans, was born in Russia in 1905 and moved to New York City as a child with his father and mother. Shortly after arriving, the family moved to Quebec to homestead free land.  In 1927, Hy left Canada for a job as an X-ray technician in New York City, where he worked for the U.S. Department of Public Health. He did not have a high school education but was trained on the job. During summers, Hy would return to Canada to see his family, and this is how he met Ida Wener, Alexandra’s mother, who was born in Montreal in 1910. Ida herself only had one year of high school education.

Hy and Ida married in Montreal in 1930 and then both moved to The Bronx on November 30 of the same year, first to Walton Avenue behind the Lewis Morris apartments, where their only relative in New York lived. In 1932, Hy and Ida moved into apartment H12 in the Seventh Building of the Amalgamated Housing Co-operative, located at 80 Van Cortlandt Park South. This was three years after the Seventh Building was completed and only five years after the United Housing Federation (U.H.F.), which was the parent organization responsible for the co-operative, completed the First Building. After the birth of their third child, Alexandra, on October 11, 1945, the Vozicks moved into C14 of the Seventh Building. At the time, with World War II over and soldiers returning home, there was a severe housing shortage in New York City. Thus, Hy’s brother Ben, together with his wife Flora and their new baby, moved into apartment C14 as well. The two-bedroom apartment now had three children in the second bedroom, Hy and Ida in the larger bedroom, Ben and Flora and the newborn in the living room, all sharing one bathroom and one kitchen.

Alexandra thus spent her formative years surrounded by family in the close-knit community of primarily working-class Jews that comprised the first generation of co-operators at the Amalgamated. During Alexandra’s childhood, although some members of the community remained socialists, communists, or anarchists—the predominant ideological commitments of Amalgamated residents in the 1920s–1930s—her parents, like many other co-operators, became members of the Liberal Party, which formed as an alternative to the American Labor Party in 1944. For Hy and Ida, however, their joining the Liberal Party was not so much a shift in previous political commitments. Indeed, prior to the formation of the Liberal Party, Alexandra’s parents were F.D.R. Democrats, and they also went on to support the presidential campaigns of Democrat Adlai Stevenson. Hy and Ida deplored the Vietnam War and were consistently strong supporters of civil rights throughout their lives.

In 1951, when Alexandra was six years old, her father resigned from the U.S. Department of Public Health and opened a medical instrumentation business with his brother Ben. He continued in this line of work until his retirement and death in 1995. Throughout this period Ida raised four children while volunteering on a variety of committees at the Amalgamated, serving longest on the A.H. Consumers’ Society, which helped acquire bulk goods at bargain prices for the co-operators. In 1957, Ida also became the Director of Allocations for a variety of projects for U.H.F. During the period 1957–1978 Ida allocated approximately 35,000 apartments for various U.H.F. co-operatives, culminating in the 15,000 original apartments of Co-op City. Ida also was fiercely opposed to discriminatory housing practices that prevailed in New York at the time and in the early 1960s helped integrate Penn South, the first U.H.F. co-operative housing project to be integrated with people of color. (Early co-operators of color there included Civil Rights activists Bayard Rustin and Monroe Dowling.) Ida excelled at this line of work, and many families were grateful to her for having provided them with the opportunity to live in safe, affordable, clean, and bright housing, where they could contribute to communities in which they could thrive and proudly raise children. Ida remained in the Amalgamated until her death in 1998.

Alexandra, for her part, attended City College of New York and earned a B.S. in Education before eventually moving to Boston, where she earned an M.S.W. at Boston University School of Social Work. As of 2020, Alexandra is a licensed clinical psychotherapist living in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, Paul Hans. Although Alexandra has not lived in The Bronx for a long time, she still remembers her childhood at the Amalgamated Housing Co-operative fondly. Indeed, in 2006 Alexandra prepared a history of the early years of the Amalgamated and is regarded by former residents as one of the most knowledgeable living historians of the co-operative.

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