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For a 74-year-old, Joe Holtz can cover a lot of ground very quickly. The ground he was covering the other day was the three adjoining carriage houses in Brooklyn that were subsumed by the Park Slope Food Co-op as it grew and became the largest, busiest and most argument-inducing single-store food cooperative in the United States. Every square foot, in the breakneck tour he gave, reminded him of an episode in the store’s history.
That history is inseparable from Mr. Holtz’s. He helped to found the co-op. He was its first paid employee. He kept working there, as general manager, eventually adding the roles of treasurer and general coordinator, and showing little sign of slowing down until Oct. 2, when he sent an email to all 16,000 members announcing his retirement.
“I feel that responsible planning includes retiring while I can still walk, talk, think and be available to the Co-op,” he wrote.
His last day is set for next June, by which point he will have been on the job for 50 years.
People at the co-op knew that he would eventually reach the end of his run. The in-house newsletter, The Linewaiters’ Gazette, ran an article two years ago with the headline “What Happens After Joe Holtz Retires?” Still, those who have worked closely with him find a post-Holtz co-op hard to picture. As the article put it, he “carries in his mind the whole of the co-op, with all of its convoluted functions and dysfunctions.”
Oh, the convolutions! Oh, the dysfunctionality! But also: the creamy ripe cheeses! The esoteric, seductively fresh fruits and vegetables! The strangely underpriced organic milk! Since its early days as a kind of distribution center for cheap lentils, the co-op has grown into one of the city’s premier fancy-foods stores, with net sales of almost $55 million in its most recent financial statement.
It has done this while clinging stubbornly to a cooperative model in which members make the most consequential decisions, do most of the work and buy all of the goods. Outsiders, a group that includes members in bad odor for one infraction or another, are not allowed to shop.
Passing briskly through the basement, Mr. Holtz pointed out a channel on the floor where manure was sluiced out when horses were stabled there. After noting that there are two freight elevators, he strode up a staircase to the sales floor. There were fresh steelhead trout, frozen black cod and other seafood, every last fin and scale purchased, he said, in accordance with the exacting sustainability guidelines of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Near the bins of pink-fleshed Hidden Rose apples and wild chanterelles, he paused briefly beside a stack of warm beer. A few years ago, the co-op overturned a long-running ban on selling beer. There was a catch, though. The members insisted that it not be kept in a refrigerator.
“The co-op didn’t want to be a source for people who wanted a cold beer in a hurry,” Mr. Holtz said.
Not selling an item in a form that might turn out to be popular — in fact, not selling it precisely because it might be popular — is just the kind of thing that has made the Park Slope Food Co-op such an inviting target for scoffers, cynics and chroniclers of brownstone do-goodism.
Live tweets of the characteristically freewheeling debate in 2009 about banning plastic produce bags were gleefully republished in The Awl, which once called the co-op “that magical place in Brooklyn where neighbor turns against neighbor regarding issues such as boycotting Israeli food and, oh, anything else.”
If the store’s five-decade experiment in cooperative, noncapitalist democracy has proved anything, it is that when its members are given a voice in how things should be run, many of them will use it, and a few will use it loudly and abrasively.
To true believers, and Mr. Holtz is one of the truest, the internecine fights and labyrinthine rules are more feature than bug. They are, in a sense, the whole point of the co-op.
“It’s a New York pastime to bag on the Park Slope Food Co-op, but they’re completely missing what it is,” said Kate Daloz, a writer who is a member. “The co-op is outside capitalism, so it’s solving problems a different way.”
Even Mr. Holtz has been ensnared by the co-op’s thicket of regulations. In 2022, after he went back to work while he was waiting for the results of a Covid test, which came back positive, he was suspended without pay (he makes about $125,000 a year, he said, plus benefits) and barred from entering the premises for 30 days. Mr. Holtz protested to the committee that made the decision, calling his punishment “ridiculously heavy-handed.”
“That was a huge controversy,” said Marty Stiglich, who worked at the co-op for 17 years and built its renowned cheese department. “Everybody was outraged that that happened to Joe.”
There is no unanimous opinion at the Park Slope Food Co-op on any subject, including Mr. Holtz. But he has managed to come out on the other side of each crisis and battle largely because his dedication is undeniable.
“Through all the trials and tribulations that have happened, Joe’s in there with his sleeves rolled up,” said Andy Feldman, a longtime member who served on the fearsomely named Disciplinary Committee, which meted out punishment to slackers, thieves, pugilists and other non-cooperators. (That committee has gone through several configurations and is now known as the Dispute Resolution Committee.) “He wants the co-op to be successful, in that it’s kind of his baby.”
In 1972, when he went to a meeting in Park Slope (then a slightly down-at-the-heels neighborhood) to talk about starting a food co-op, Mr. Holtz had been marinating in the counterculture for some time. He enrolled in the experimental curriculum of the State University of New York at Old Westbury but left after a year “in order to have more time to protest against the Vietnam War and other injustices,” he said.
With three other refugees from his college, he got in a Volkswagen bus and headed toward San Francisco. “It didn’t quite make it, the van,” he said, but “we did.” In the East Bay, he was impressed by early food co-ops — or, as they called themselves then, food conspiracies.
Building a new way to get groceries appealed to Mr. Holtz. Like the other founding members he joined with in Park Slope, he had lost faith in many American institutions, including the one that filled supermarkets with feedlot beef and Wonder bread. Instead of letting their shopping choices be limited by the profit motive, why not get like-minded Brooklynites together to make purchasing decisions, share the labor and plow the savings on payroll into lower prices for brown rice and tofu?
“We wanted to be able to eat better and afford it,” Mr. Holtz said. “But it was not as simple as that. We believed America was about individual success too much. So we were excited about the idea of people working together.”
They posted a weekly time sheet so members could volunteer for shifts. “We thought people would just sign up on the work chart because they were excited about the co-op,” he said.
But as many other young people learned in that era, ideals take you only so far. Within the year, this system collapsed. So did the next one, which required members to work but didn’t keep track of whether they did or not.
In the next plan, not only were hours recorded, but members who didn’t put in their allotted hours were banned from shopping until they caught up. The first time somebody was turned away at the door for not carrying their share of the work was a watershed moment. Or as Mr. Holtz put it: “The most important day in the history of the co-op.”
The co-op would have rules — more and more as time went on — and they would be enforced.
Member labor fueled the co-op as it expanded from the second floor of 782 Union Street to the entire building, and then to the two buildings it bought next door. Mr. Holtz lobbied for each move.
“He was always looking five years down the road,” Mr. Stiglich said. “In the early ’90s he knew Whole Foods was coming, and we’d have to compete.”
As many as 10,000 new food co-ops were born between 1969 and 1979, according to one history of the movement. Today, their numbers are in the hundreds, and many of those stay afloat by operating more like normal grocery stores. The Park Slope Food Co-op is one of the few that held to its original cooperative model.
“Joe Holtz steered that ship,” said Ms. Daloz, who wrote a history of commune dwellers and goat farmers, “We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America.”
A search for a new general manager is already on, and Mr. Holtz is not involved. After he leaves next June, Mr. Holtz said, he hopes to continue his work as a roaming consultant on the theory and practice of co-ops. He may also play a little Ping-Pong and spend more time at the summer cottage in the Catskills where he goes to unwind. It is part of an old bungalow colony that went on the market several decades ago when, Mr. Holtz said, “some people from Park Slope noticed it was for sale and bought it.”
They turned it into a co-op.
Read by Pete Wells
Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.
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