The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  The long-term goal is to change that. In the short period of time that I’ve gone through this transition in life, I’ll be honest with you, my thinking is along socialism-Marxist lines—I get it, you know. Capitalism is not going to work, especially with respect to housing for poor people. Poor people are never going to win the housing fight when housing is a market commodity. It just ain’t going to work. Especially in this city because it’s on a steady incline. You see new buildings being constructed—condos, studios starting at $2.5 million.

  He pauses then laughs.

  If you don’t have two-and-a-half million don’t even look, right?

  He laughs.

  That’s a reality. That’s what it is. And they just keep putting up tower after tower around the city. It’s three thousand a month: Do you want it or don’t you?

  Seven towers just south of Central Park are either under construction or on their way. One is known as One57, and it aims to be the tallest residential building in the city—though after four years of construction only seventy-five of the marketed ninety stories have been completed. Two of the towers are nearly as tall as the Empire State Building—one will rise 1,424 feet. At this height it will form a monolith of steel and glass with a shadow long enough to deny sunlight to giant swathes of Central Park. In fact, the group of shadows from the larger towers will dominate the southern portions of the park throughout the year and at midday on solstice these shadows will extend half a mile, elongating to almost a mile as they cut northeast, prioritizing the views for the relatively small group of luxury condos over thirty-eight million park visitors left to experience darkened baseball fields, playgrounds, paths, and fields.

  At its fundamental core, capitalism is about greed, right? How much can I get out of you, how much can I maximize from you? And it just doesn’t allow room for sharing or for anything that has anything to do with morality. During the financial crisis, when our government decided to bail out the banks, that was a point, in my opinion, that there should have been revolution in this country. What our government essentially did is say that it is okay for you, homeowner, to fail but the banks can’t fail. We’re gonna take tax money out of your pocket and give it to the banks so that they’re stable. Then those same banks turned around and said, “You can’t pay your mortgage? Well, you know what, I pay an insurance policy that gives me the incentive to evict you. So I am going to evict you and take your house and put it back on the market and sell it again.” I don’t care that the tax money came out of your pocket, I don’t give a shit, this is how it works and you got to go.

  Greed, man.

  And you’re seeing this around this country. I’m now working with the New York City Anti-Eviction Network, but it’s modeled after networks that were popping up around the country, where people are reclaiming houses and they’ve taken the direct action to a level of: Okay, you want to evict this family? We’re gonna defend their right to be in the house. The same day that the marshal is going to come, we’re going to the nearest branch of your bank and shut it down, there will be no business conducted in that bank. It’s gotten to that level. So a hundred people in front of the house, a hundred people in front of the bank: showdown. Banks are like: “No, no, we’ll give you principle reduction, come in and let’s talk.” So when you pressure them they reduce the principle on your mortgage right? But they weren’t going to do it otherwise. It shows you how messed up the system is.

  At Take Back the Land our theory was that even principle reduction is not a good deal, because it still leaves your house on the market. It’s not transformative. If we go through another economic downturn you can go through the very same shit again. Take Back the Land forces all banks to turn over property to community land trusts. Then we have control of that house, the community governs what happens to that house, and the people get to stay in it.

  It’s gonna be constantly scrapping for what’s left and it’s not much because the banks control it all and we have to change that. We have to rise up with transformative organizing where community gets control of the land. Make no mistake about it, that’s what’s at the crux of the problem in this country: land. The fight for land and property rights. One percent of this country owns land; 99 percent of us are out of the equation, man. The only way I see changing that is through revolution. I never believed that before; at Take Back the Land we always talked about nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action, we called it positive action. But it’s going to take something like revolution because capitalism’s not going to surrender, you know? It’s the old “Power concedes nothing without the struggle,” right? That’s real.

  So how do you organize and politicize people to get to that point?

  It bothers me in the city when people don’t take control of their lives. The one thing that I see traveling around the world is self-determination, and that doesn’t exist in the United States. I just came back from Columbia where people will find a piece of land and they’ll take it, and they’ll defend that piece of land. They’ll build shacks to live in, to defend themselves from the elements. That level of self-determination doesn’t exist in this country. It’s something that bothers me. We have a sense of entitlement in this country: “Somebody’s gonna fix it.” I get frustrated sometimes at some meetings and say: “What are you going to do? ’Cause there’s no helicopter, you know, above the building with the three-bedroom apartment asking you where do you want them to place it.” That ain’t happening, you gonna have to get up and do something to make it happen.

  I’m working now with a lot of Occupiers and students who were in urban planning classes who identify themselves as gentrifiers and want to figure out a way to reverse that—they feel shitty, right? I often have to tell them: “I understand the situation you’re in, you need a place to live, you need to find a place affordable for you.” I tell them, “I wouldn’t necessarily call you a gentrifier. You didn’t just come in and say bulldoze this neighborhood; you did something different than the gentrifiers do, you said, ‘I can coexist with these families and I’m fine living here.’”

  It’s about us, right? What are our needs? What is it our community needs? We need land, we need housing, we need health care. When you organize around needs, it takes you away from self-centered values. It’s using the human rights frame, which looks at human needs vs. property rights. There’s been narratives spun in this country, home ownership is the way to wealth. I’d argue that anybody who is wealthy didn’t get wealthy buying a home. They got wealthy either ’cause money was passed down over generations or they made investments, and poor people can’t make those investments so you’re never going to get it, but meanwhile we bought into this narrative that home ownership was the way to wealth.

  I remember my dad moving us out to Long Island in the ’60s and everybody in the family thought we were rich because we had this house. I look back now, understanding the history of housing in this country, redlining and all of that stuff, and I realize, you know, actually it was a load of shit that we were sold.

  When my dad and mom went to look at houses on Long Island these real estate agents were leading them to neighborhoods other than where they wanted to go, and then the one house that they really fell in love with, the agent told them it was rented. My dad didn’t trust the agent, and he asked his friend Murray, who wasn’t black, to go out and inquire about the house. Murray did it, and the guy was willing to sell the house to Murray, and my dad realized that this stuff was going on. He went back and threatened the agent and ended up getting the house. It’s the house I grew up in.

  I’m not going back to my dad to say, “Look, you got jerked when you bought this house back then,” but I get it now. And I’m able to articulate this in real terms by telling my own family story. You got to share those stories. People buy into narrative. Look at the big picture of capitalism and what it means. Maybe that’s our mistake as grassroots organizers, not coming with the political education on a regular basis and having things like the MST6 scho
ol in Brazil where all the folks and young folks come together, and learn together, talk about struggle together.

  I think in this—quote unquote—the wealthiest country in the world there are expectations and people have become complacent, sitting back saying the government will fix it. My response to that is the government broke it, why do you think they are going to fix it? Them and the corporations broke it and I don’t think there is going to be any attempt to fix it.

  27.

  Jerry has been arrested ninety-three times:

  Almost all political—no theft or anything like that, nothing serious, a few little things here and there in the course of it all. This started before I ever came to New York. See I refused to go to Vietnam—I’m one of those. So my very first arrest ever was for desertion when I was twenty-three.

  Jerry, aka Gerald Wade, aka Gerald Green, aka Gerald Douglas Hines is a man whose rap sheet bares a long list of aliases, each with its own story. Mostly he is Jerry the Peddler and he is giving me a tour of 155 Avenue C, home of C-Squat since 1989. Jerry lives in a 350-square-foot apartment and over the last four decades has squatted in three different buildings and helped to open several more on behalf of others. He takes me onto a catwalk overlooking the basement—formerly several small apartments, now one big open hall.

  This is our performance space. We’ve had everybody from—you name ’em—False Prophets has played here, Black Rain has played here, Leftöver Crack has played here—but half of Leftöver Crack lives in this building, so—

  He laughs.

  We used to do a lot of parties, like once a week. Sometimes they put two cops on each corner just to keep an eye on us when we sit back and shut down the block and party. Nowadays we’re a lot more civilized than we were just a few years ago.

  We’re getting old, I’m a token hippie in a building full of aging punks.

  I like Jerry because he reminds me of Willie Nelson. Jerry lets his beard grow much longer than the outlaw country musician but both men have a way with a bandana—they wrap them around their heads with similar precision. Jerry has the tired eyes of a sixty-seven-year-old lion and the mischievous laugh of a man who has never answered to a boss. The walls of the performance space are covered in graffiti, large pieces of work in a few spots.

  There was a time when the walls in C-Squat had graffiti all the way up. Real graffiti—art and what have you; unfortunately we had to come up to code and that meant putting up all new Sheetrock in the hallways. So now in the hallways we got tags instead of graffiti.

  Most of the people in this building have been here from the beginning. When I first came in the late ’80s they were punks, they were all in their late teens to mid-twenties. There was no roof, there was no stairs; they had a series of cargo nets that they used to climb up to get from floor to floor, mind you. They taught themselves carpentry, and plumbing, and electric. Nowadays when they need money, they go out and find themselves a construction job.

  We walk out onto the street and Jerry points at the tree in front of his building:

  I planted that, ’02, I guess. It’s a plum tree, it produces plums every year. I’ve yet to have one. Just as they’re ripening, somebody always comes along and takes them. Personally I don’t know if I would really want to eat a plum that was from the side of a New York City bus stop.

  He laughs.

  I planted it more for the aesthetic value than anything else.

  I follow him north on Avenue C. As we walk he points to various features of his neighborhood.

  This was a burnt-out building. Most of this neighborhood was a burnt-out derelict back in the late ’70s, through the ’80s.

  There were lots of little-bitty gardens, the Lower East Side is famous for its gardens; they had chickens and the occasional rabbits, goats, pigs.

  This was a weed store. This guy and his sons, they sold weed outta here. And they made sure that nobody went into the garden and did drugs. If you wanted to smoke a joint you can do that. But if you were caught down here selling dope, selling coke, his two sons would run you off the block with a baseball bat. Eventually they got rich, went back to Puerto Rico.

  This was a coke store here, but it was one of your better quality coke stores in that it was actually a deli that also sold coke—as opposed to a lot of places that just sold coke and everything else in the store was fifty cents.

  He laughs and cuts left into the Pedro Albizu Campos Plaza, a public housing development.

  The projects we’re cutting through, they were built during the late ’70s, during the time when there was still money available for public housing. After the riots in the ’60s in Detroit, Newark, Watts, places like that, the government couldn’t figure out what was going on. So they put together a commission—they’re so good at that—Governor Kerner was in charge, so they called it the Kerner Commission, and they sat down and studied the problem and they decided that the black flight during the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s from the South, up to the northern cities and the West Coast, had concentrated all these poor people, mostly black people, into these inner cities. And they were blaming the people—not the conditions—for their lifestyle. And they decided the best way to deal with this is to deconcentrate these spaces. Now how do you do that? How do you get thousands of people to move out of their homes and neighborhoods? Well, you cut off services. You cut back on the police, cut back on fire departments, you close schools, stop funding housing, and you let the drugs and the alcohol, you let all of that go on all during the ’70s and deep into the ’80s. Most of the kids that grew up in the projects, they had no choice: it was either deal drugs or nothing—or starve. So that meant that a couple of generations of mostly black and Latino youth either died in the gutter or went to prison and their lives were destroyed. These projects now, they’re half empty still. There’s no life. You see a few kids but not a lot. It’s sad compared to what it was thirty years ago.

  The New York City Housing Authority cares for 178,557 apartments. At any given point over three thousand are vacant. Turnovers and processing account for some of these but others sit empty for months or years awaiting required repairs and renovations. By the authority’s own count, over three hundred homes have been empty for an average of seven years, some of them in aging buildings from the 1930s and 1940s, and the vast majority constructed before Jerry’s arrival.

  I got to New York in ’75 from Texas, grew up in San Angelo, and I first moved to the Lower East Side in ’77. I lived on the corner of Twelfth and A, directly overlooking the intersection from the third floor. I was sitting here one night—he points up at the building in front of us—I’d only been in the apartment a couple of months, and all of a sudden I hear this big boom right outside of my window. Now I’m enough of a country boy to know what a shotgun sounds like, enough of an ex-GI to know to drop and roll. So that’s exactly what I did: rolled out of my chair and across the floor. I gave it a minute then I’m up against the wall and I’m looking out the window, and right in the middle of the intersection there’s this cat standing with a shotgun, just like this—Jerry holds an imaginary shotgun tight against his hip—pointing straight up Twelfth Street. Then it’s like something out of High Noon, he takes his shotgun and just walks right up the middle of the street. No cops, no nothing. I sat there for a good half an hour just watching. No cops ever showed up, cops only came down here either to dispose of bodies or to rob drug dealers. There was no other reason for cops to be here.

  Tompkins Square Park was not a park you wanted to go barefoot in, okay. Drugs like you wouldn’t believe. I once walked around in one area of the park with a bucket and some thick welders gloves and picked up two hundred sets of works7 just laying around on the ground and what have you.

  I didn’t think of it until all the drug epidemics were over, but I’ve often wanted to mount all the drug paraphernalia that I found on the street in the shape of the New York City skyline. Another little art project I’ve always wanted to do—they would never give me the permits for this:
I’ve always wanted to go up to the top of the Empire State Building with time-lapse cameras pointing down at Thirty-Fourth and Fifth and then just an hour or so before rush hour, I want to take like twenty gallons of different colored paint and splash ’em in the intersection and then let the cameras film the cars painting pretty pictures.

  He laughs.

  They would never give me a permit for that, I know better than to even try. But I still think that would be a great Andy Warhol, single shot—every different color of paint you can think of and then just let the cars come along.

  Jerry stops at the corner of Thirteenth Street and pulls a half-smoked cigarette from his pocket. He holds it in his hand as he speaks.

  This is the original squat—the one that everyone says was the first. This is where Rosario Dawson grew up—544 East 13th Street. She was hanging out on the front stoop one day and a Hollywood movie director came by and saw her and said, “She’s gorgeous. I’m gonna make her a star.”

  He laughs.

  And that’s kind of what happened. Squatter child makes good—makes very good.

  This is Thirteenth Street, this is the famous block right here, this is the one where they brought the tank in on us. See the tall building here? It was taken over by junkies and the cops couldn’t get ’em out, people couldn’t get ’em out, they just kept trying and nothing seemed to work. The cops would come once every couple of months and raid the place and take everybody out and two hours later they would start drifting back in.