CBH Talk | Rules and Rutabagas: A Conversation about the Park Slope Food Coop with Joe Holtz, Sun Yu, and Alexandra Schwartz
In the early 1970s, a remarkable experiment in collective action took root in Park Slope: the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC). Founded in 1973 as a members-only, collectively-run buying club, the Coop has grown over 52 years into the largest single store food cooperative in the United States—and quite possibly the world. Nearly 17,000 members now work regular shifts in exchange for access to high-quality groceries at lower prices, sustaining a vibrant model of cooperation against the odds.
That same year, the Coop launched its newsletter, the Linewaiters’ Gazette. Published every few weeks since, the Gazette has offered an unvarnished, often passionate view into the life of the Coop. From articles on inventory issues (“Bugs in the Barley”) and classifieds (“Cats Up for Adoption”) to fervent letters to the editor debating everything from product boycotts and the use of plastic bags to whether selling meat, beer, or canned tuna aligned with the Coop’s progressive values— the Linewaiters’ Gazette has documented the institution’s ongoing negotiation between ideals and pragmatism.
Taken as a whole, these newsletters chronicle over five decades of the Coop’s inner workings—its rules and values, conflicts and compromises, all unfolding within the broader story of a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. They offer insight not only into the mechanics of collective grocery shopping, but also into pricing and procurement, managing real estate and managing people, and the deeply human project of democratic governance.
This summer, the Center for Brooklyn History marks the completion of an ambitious project: the digitization of the Linewaiters’ Gazette archive from 1973 to 2021. This trove of primary source material will now be available to researchers and readers around the world.
The release of this digital archive coincides with another Park Slope Food Coop milestone: the June retirement of General Manager Joe Holtz, one of the Coop’s original founders and its very first paid employee. To celebrate Joe’s extraordinary career and the unveiling of the Gazette archive, we invite you to a public conversation reflecting on the messy business of collective decision-making.
Holtz will be joined by Coop member and unofficial historian Sun Yu, who may be the only person to have studied every single issue of the Gazette—a feat undertaken in the writing of his book, Park Slope Food Coop: Fifty Years of Cooperation. The discussion will be moderated by Alexandra Schwartz, a Coop member since 2013 and staff writer at The New Yorker.
Together, they’ll explore this one-of-a-kind experiment, the rules that bind (and sometimes baffle), and what five decades of newsletters reveal about an institution that has always aspired to be much more than just a place to buy groceries.
PARTICIPANTS
Joseph Holtz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. In 1973, at age 22, Joe and about ten other Brooklynites co-founded the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC). Joe has been actively involved in the PSFC ever since. In 1975 Joe was hired as the first paid staff with the title General Coordinator. In the mid- 1990’s he was named the Coop’s first General Manager and now coordinates, with a team of five other General Coordinators, a paid staff of 85 and the required work of member/owners, who now number more than 16,700. This past year the PSFC’s sales volume was over 59 million dollars generated wholly by its member-owners.
Sun Yu is the author of Park Slope Food Coop - 50 Years of Cooperation, which is based on his reading of the entire volumes of The Linewaiters' Gazette from 1973 until the dawn of pandemic in 2020. Shortly after his relocation to New York city from California, he stumbled upon the Coop and joined the membership in 2017. Fascinated by the unique culture and history of the Coop, he decided to do something for the cause. He spent his year-end vacation in the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central branch in December 2019 to make photocopies of old archives of The Linewaiters' Gazette. After three-plus years of reading through them all, he finally published the book in 2023 at the 50 year mark of the Coop.
Alexandra Schwartz has worked at The New Yorker since 2013, the same year that she joined the Park Slope Food Coop. She became a staff writer at the magazine in 2016. "Bounty Hunters," her profile of the PSFC, was published in November, 2019. She is a host of the magazine's flagship culture podcast, Critics at Large.
