Joe Holtz

Interview Description

Oral History Interview with Joe Holtz

Joe Holtz is a founding member, served on the Board of Directors, and remains a General Coordinator of the Park Slope Food Coop, a food cooperative market in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Holtz became an adult in the late 1960s, when multiple social causes were trending mainstream. Awareness of food science also grew in the early 1970s, and that period overlapped with Holtz's arrival in New York City. He settled in Park Slope as a renter and later as a homeowner. With other founders in place, the Coop opened in February of 1973 and management began tinkering with how to make the cooperative system of customers/owners/workers a viable, sustainable operation. The Coop was originally in a space that was sublet by a community center. In 1978, with over a thousand members, the Coop made a down payment to buy 782 Union Street. Two neighboring buildings were purchased in the two decades that followed. In 2016, membership was between 16,000 and 17,000.

In this interview, Joe Holtz identifies the various strains of food cooperatives and how Park Slope Food Coop fits in with the members-only ownership and sales model. He recalls the founding principles of the Coop, and the other models of coops on the city marketplace in the early 1970s. He discusses the rollout of their labor strategy and the growing interest in food sources and research in that era. He speaks about the physical spaces the Coop has occupied, some organizing principles, and membership fluctuations. Holtz points out several ways the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn has benefitted from the Coop's practices. He also sees the pressures that gentrification is having on the area, in general and through firsthand examples. With the Coop a success, he has advised other newly-forming coops. In closing, Holtz speaks to the benefits and tensions of the rules for members working at the Coop, the approach to product boycotts, and how the Board of Directors functions. Interview conducted by Sady Sullivan.

The Voices of Brooklyn oral histories: Community activists series features a dynamic range of narrators. Some are prominent public figures and others are well-known in their communities. This ongoing series focuses on Brooklyn history and the experiences of these narrators who have a history of or were presently supporting an underrepresented segment of society, or forming a social movement, which thereby effected broad change to a neighborhood, much of Brooklyn, or the country. The content relates directly to organized support of those harmed in natural disasters, creating cooperative business models, forming architectural preservation groups, and documenting civil rights and social justice movements. The oldest narrator in this collection was born in 1917.

Citation

Holtz, Joe, Oral history interview conducted by Sady Sullivan, September 05, 2008, Voices of Brooklyn oral histories: Community activists, 2008.031.4.002; Brooklyn Historical Society.