Homesteading a Little Place in History
December 8, 2003
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.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/nyregion/08SQUA.html?ex=1071927251&ei=1&en=d81b1715420fe661
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