This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If you've ever driven into New York City from the north, there's a good chance you pass by a massive cluster of high-rise apartment buildings just as you enter the Bronx.

35 buildings in total. All of them with identical brick facades, all over 20 stories tall.

I remember the first time I saw these buildings, riding a Greyhound bus into the city from

Worcester, Massachusetts.

99PI producer of Meredithus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week.

I was in my early 20s at the time, and I'd never really seen skyscrapers that weren't office buildings.

These buildings, I could tell, were people's homes.

I could see laundry hanging on balconies way up on like the 22nd floor.

There was something thrilling, but also almost frightening about

contemplating the number of individual lives playing out in just one of those skyscrapers.

It had the effect of making me feel very small and insignificant. The way looking at something

incomprehensibly large can sometimes do.

I think I assumed at the time that what I was looking at was a public housing project,

but I know now that it wasn't. This cluster of high-rises was and is the largest housing cooperative

in the world, Co-op City.

When Co-op City opened in the late 1960s, people hated the way it looked.

Journalists and architecture critics thought the buildings embodied everything that was wrong with modernist architecture.

Newsweek said, quote, the towers of New York City's Co-op city rise bleak and spectrally through the smog, a prospect so remote and cheerless that affluent commuters often

shudder when they pass it. Those comments are exactly why co-op City is the best kept secret

because it's like hiding in plain sight.

This is Diane Patrick.

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