In the mid-1920s, thousands of Jewish immigrant garment workers pooled their resources to build four cooperatively owned apartment complexes in the Bronx. Focuses on the United Workers Cooperative Colony ('the Coops'), the most grassroots and member-driven of these cooperatives, where many residents were Communists or sympathizers. In the 1930s they racially integrated their cooperative house, with unexpected consequences; the film tracks the community's rise and fall from the 1920s into the 1950s.