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December 8, 2003

Homesteading a Little Place in History

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

it was empty, the sorry old tenement on East Seventh Street. The City of New York was the owner of record, but no one was keeping up the building. Parts of the facade were crumbling. Bits of sky could be seen through the holes in the roof.

Then the squatters came.

Almost 20 years ago, a group of artists and skilled tradespeople began living in the dilapidated hulk. The city did not acknowledge that they were there; officially, the building was not fit for habitation. So these squatters led an outlaw existence. They wired stolen electricity into the building. They carried water upstairs from fire hydrants. Always, they kept a wary eye out for the police. Now the building has new windows and doors. There is a boiler for hot water and a solid roof. And on the third floor of the building on 209 East Seventh Street, one of the longtime squatters, an artist who calls herself Fly, is beginning to think about posterity.

So here are some artifacts: a key to the front door of Dos Blocos, on East Ninth Street, where squatters were evicted in 1999 to make way for renovations and deep-pocketed renters. Here is a schematic showing how to steal electricity from mains. Here is a pair of shorts of the sort favored by certain squatters; Fly calls them "crusty shorts" and shows how the patches are sewn on with dental floss.

"I began my squatter museum bit by bit," Fly said as she sat in her kitchen, a simple airy place with plywood floors. "I wanted to make people aware that squatting has historical and cultural significance and I wanted my approach to be anthropological."

Fly is one of a group of squatters who have decided to pool their collections of documents, photographs and artifacts. The group, the Lower East Side Squatters and Homesteaders Archive Project, received a modest grant from New York State this summer and have hired an archivist. The goal, they say, is a collection that could be housed in a cultural institution and be available to the public.

As the neighborhood becomes increasingly gentrified and as the squatters themselves take ownership of the buildings they seized, many want to record a way of life that may be vanishing. For some squatters, the days when they cooked on hot plates, burned wood in homemade stoves and marched in group protests were a time of camaraderie in the face of adversity.

They may remember the old days as poetic, but others in the neighborhood think the squatters are criminals. There is no way, however, to tell the recent history of the East Village without them, said Christopher Mele, an associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the author of "Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City" (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), who has advised the squatters on their archive project.

"They are a constant in a recent history of rapid economic and social change," Professor Mele said. "To have their records in a repository will make a world of difference from a historical ground-up perspective."

Peter Filardo, the archivist of the Tamiment Archives at New York University, a collection documenting radical politics and progressive movements, agreed. He said that the squatters' part in the history of the Lower East Side was significant to scholars and researchers. An archive, he said, "would be the type of thing you could guarantee would be well used."

Although dozens of squatter buildings once dotted the Lower East Side, most of the squatters have been evicted. But last year the city transferred the titles of 11 of the 12 remaining squatter buildings there to the Urban Homesteaders Assistance Board, a nonprofit housing organization. That group says that after the buildings are brought up to code, it plans to turn the deeds over to the squatters, making them legal owners, with the provision that future sales be to low-income buyers.

This was a surprising turn of events to those who remember the history. During the 1980's and 1990's, developers and city officials criticized squatters, saying that they fostered a raffish, disorderly atmosphere and obstructed the gentrification of the Lower East Side.

At times clashes between squatters and the police led to public disturbances. In 1995, the riot police used an armored personnel carrier to evict squatters from buildings on East 13th Street that the city wanted to convert to low-income housing.

Some longtime residents of the Lower East Side still resent the squatters. Ralph Feldman, a landlord who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, said he thought many squatters were simply after a cheap adventure. "They were looking for free housing," he said. "It was like being at camp away from home."

The squatters disagree, saying that they used sweat equity to change abandoned properties into affordable housing, and that they spent plenty of money on repairs. Some squatters wonder aloud how their detractors would fare living without heat or hot water, as many did in the squatter buildings. Others see vindication in their continued existence.

"We created a culture that still exists today," said On Davis, a member of the archive collective who lives at 209 East Seventh Street.

About a year ago, Matthew Metzgar, who has lived in two squatter buildings, began discussing the idea of an archive with others, including Miranda Edison, who curates a library of rare self-published magazines at ABC No Rio, a cultural center on Rivington Street that was once a squatter building, and Peter Spagnola, a poet who had lived in an East 13th Street squat. They assembled a board and began meeting at the Tribes Gallery on East Third Street with Steve Cannon, the gallery owner.

After receiving a grant for $1,845 in September from the Documentary Heritage Program, part of the New York State Education Department, the group hired Alan W. Ginsberg, an archivist who has worked on collections belonging to the Union Theological Seminary and the Woody Guthrie Archives. Board members began handing out survey forms to squatters asking for a list of material they would be willing to donate.

Among the documents the squatters have already gathered is a flier from the early 1990's with "Declaration of War" and "Defend the Squats" next to an illustration of a squatter facing a police officer. Another flier from the same era, intended to build support for squatters, was titled "Living in a Squat," with photographs of a squatter building before and after repairs.

"We want this archive to be a collection that anyone, friend or foe, can access to write our history," Mr. Metzgar said.

Gerry Wade, who called squatting a "self-help housing movement," said he had lived for two weeks in Tompkins Square Park in 1984 after being evicted by a landlord, then moved into a squat on East Ninth Street. He has several hundred pieces of paper on squats, including legal documents, fliers advertising benefits and political demonstrations and lists of people who had agreed to rush to any building that was in imminent danger of eviction.

Mr. Wade said that his previous squatters collection had been destroyed in a fire in a squat on East Ninth Street in 1995, but he felt it was important to assemble a new one. "If we don't create our own history," he said, "somebody else will."

http://www.ebway.org/2003_12_07_archives.html

2003 The New York Times Company

Community Interactivism

(Company Business and Marketing)The Industry Standard, Sept 18, 2000,

by Colin Moynihan

ON A RECENT EVENING, STEVE Englander and Eric Goldhagen stood in a fourth-floor room at ABC No Rio, a cultural and community center on Manhattan's Lower East Side watching images play across a computer screen: A young man dressed as a sunflower climbs a tree outside City Hall to protest the razing of gardens. Protesters are arrested moments before the Esperanza Community Garden on East Seventh Street is bulldozed by the city. Avenue B gardeners explain how they transformed an abandoned lot into a fertile green space.

Some of this footage appears in the first issue of http://www.interactivist.net/ , a site started by Goldhagen and Englander as an alternative to mainstream media coverage of community activism.

After the film Goldhagen says, "We're simply creating a more direct path between people involved in newsworthy actions and other people who want to know what happened."

The idea for Interactivist.net came to him while he was at the now-defunct radical newspaper The Guardian and working with stringers in Nicaragua, who filed stories using Fed Ex ? and UPS. When they stopped flying out of Managua because of the unstable political climate, the correspondents turned to early Internet services to transmit copy. "It became obvious that it provided an infrastructure that could be used by small activist news organizations," says Goldhagen.

Last summer, Goldhagen told his idea to ABC No Rio coordinator Steve Englander. The two wrote a proposal and were awarded a new-media grant by the nonprofit Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Soon after, Interactivist.net was formed with a group of 20-odd volunteers.

Two weeks after the ABC No Rio screening, some 200 bicyclists gathered in Union Square for a monthly ride called Critical Mass in which cyclists pedal through the streets, demonstrating to motorists that they have an equal right to the road. Along for the New York ride that evening was an Interactivist.net camerawoman.

The bicyclists wound through Manhattan. Musicians played brass instruments while riding in pedicabs, and cyclists blew on whistles and kazoos. As the group reached Times Square, police officers in vans and cars appeared. Most cyclists continued downtown, but a dozen were handcuffed by police and charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing traffic.

A couple weeks later Englander and Goldhagen were back at ABC No Rio planning the issue in which the Critical Mass footage would appear.

"It would be great if we end up getting shots of cops pulling people off their bikes." Goldhagen says. Englander nods. "People were arrested for disorderly conduct' he adds. "But the real disorder happened when the police began making a big scene." And if they have the footage, they'll show it.

http://www.interactivist.net/

Colin Moynihan (CR Moynihan ?@aol.com) is a regular contributor to the New York Times.