The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  One day they took everybody out and people from one of the buildings here took a piece of orange fluorescent paper—like the notices cops post, you’ve seen ’em a million times—and they put a little NYPD police symbol on there at the top and they were like: “This building is closed due to drug trafficking. For further information contact the 9th Precinct.” They put a chain and a padlock on the door; the junkies came by, saw it, turned around and left. After a couple days, people went in there and turned that from a shooting gallery into a squat.

  In the spring of ’95 there was a group that wanted this building. They’re people that I call property pimps, they get tons and tons of money from the government and they’ll fix up a building and put half that money in their pocket and they’re just sitting there exploiting people and making themselves rich. They wanted this building. We took ’em to court and we were in court over a year, claiming adverse possession, claiming people had been in there for over ten years, that they had a right to it—they had run out all the druggies, they had done all the repairs, and they had saved these buildings when nobody wanted them. The judge was sympathetic, we won in his court; unfortunately we lost in the appeals.

  That was in May of ’95, and there was a lot of standing off and what have you in June. They were going to evict everyone and we came in and built a barricade of cars, and that’s when they brought the tank out. It wasn’t a real tank, it was an APC, an armored personnel carrier. When I was in the army in Germany I actually drove a few of those things. It doesn’t have a turret and a cannon; it’s just a big track vehicle, used to carry troops into a heavy combat zone. And they were gonna just drive it straight through the wall.

  He laughs.

  This was back during the Giuliani administration, and Bratton was police commissioner. They were both showboats but then at the last minute they realized what a media circus they had created, so they backed off with the tank.

  They eventually evicted this building and put up scaffolding, put a little command center right here, put a cop there twenty-four seven.

  Then on the Fourth of July, there’s a fireworks show in the East River and the whole neighborhood is going this way, and all the cops are going down there. By this time I’ve got a garden over on Ninth Street and I’ve been sitting there drinking beer all day. Now I can hold my beer, at least I could back then—I don’t drink a lot now. Unfortunately, when the beer ran out they were drinking wine, and you know beer and wine don’t mix. Then we came stumbling over here and they should never have let me on that roof, drunk as I was—I acknowledge my part of it, I was drunk out of my mind. We went up on the roof and, being from Texas, I started screaming: “Victory or death.” That was how Travis signed his famous letter at the Alamo. “Victory or death! William Barret Travis, Lieutenant Colonel.”

  He laughs.

  These silly Yankees had no idea what I was saying, they thought I was paraphrasing Patrick Henry or something.

  He laughs.

  We had taken over the whole building, took ’em completely by surprise, there were people all up in that fire escape, we had a big banner across the front that said “Home Sweet Home.” At one point they were dropping bricks off the roof to keep the cops from the front of the building. I was standing up there, I was really drunk, and this squad car came down the street. He got about right here and I’m like: “Damn, I can hit that.” Well, guess who woke up the next morning in the tombs with attempted murder on a police officer?

  He laughs.

  Only felony I picked up, all these years.

  We move closer to the East River, to the area the Dutch originally referred to as Burnt Mill Point because of an eighteenth century windmill fire. The neighborhood was largely uninhabited in the early nineteenth century when one of its first developers, the Dry Dock Company, started buying most of the land in 1825. The state legislature gave the company unlimited charter, including banking rights, to last “as long as the grass grows and the water runs.” So after constructing dry docks to hoist boats out of the water for repairs, the company set out to build a complete neighborhood with a railway, a four-story Federal-style bank, shops, and tree-lined streets with three-story houses. Originally built for single families, most of these homes were converted into small apartment buildings in the twentieth century. Jerry points to the one with an added fourth floor and rooftop garden:

  Ever hear of a McMansion? This is a McMansion. This is now a one-family home. See, they evicted twelve apartments, just slowly and quietly, and they didn’t really evict them, they just bought ’em out. Then they came back and added like a floor and a half, put all this wrought iron stuff up top. It’s been in several of the Better Homes and Gardens –type magazines and what have you.

  This process—buying a building that was originally inhabited by one owner then broken up into several apartments and converting it back to a single-family home—is on the rise. “It’s like a return to the Gilded Age,” one real estate agent told The New York Times in an article about the reinstatement of single-dwelling mansions with leaded-glass windows and marble fireplaces. In Brooklyn there is one listed at $13 million and in Manhattan the price tags range from $20 million to $44 million. The $44 million option has 14,000 square feet. A second real estate agent describes the surge of all-cash, largely international buyers purchasing these homes like this: “A townhouse or mansion is almost like a piece of art and there are buyers who appreciate that history and want to be part of it.”

  Jerry turns away from the McMansion with the trellised rooftop garden and walks closer to the East River. At the corner of Avenue D he points up at a five-story brick building with the unlit cigarette still wedged between his fingers.

  The building on the corner, that’s a former squat and one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood, built in 1827. The original Dry Dock Savings Bank was in this building. Then it sat empty for a number of years. The Glass Factory came along, had it for about twenty years, then it sat empty for a few more years. Then in the early ’90s the punks went in and took it over, and this became Glass House. This was one of the more famous—one of the more notorious of the punk squats down here. I guess because I live in a punk building and have for a long time now, I’ve witnessed a lot of what’s happened, and I don’t think the punks get enough credit.

  These buildings don’t always have electricity, so sometimes you have to tap into these guys—Jerry bends down to knock on the base of a streetlamp—and that’s what they did here.

  They went back inside and the lights were on. Then all of a sudden the lights started blinking. Then they went off. Then they came back on, and just started the process all over again. What they had done, they tapped into the “Don’t Walk” lights. Being the type of people they were, they left the lights like that for a few days until finally it drove even them nuts.

  He laughs.

  So if you’re going to squat, and you’re going to tap into a pole, get somebody who knows what they’re doing.

  He laughs.

  There was a woman named Linda Twigg, petite little woman just as sweet as she could be—if you messed with her, though, you would find out there really is a hippie Mafia. You did not want to mess with this woman. The building she lived in got evicted, and she ended up in Glass House for a while, and Herbert used to hang out with her in here. Ever hear of Herbert Huncke? He came from the Midwest to New York City, specifically to sell heroin. He’s the guy that introduced Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, that whole crew. Linda was good friends with Herbie and he was sitting here one day, and he’s like, “We called ’em flops and the beats called ’em pads and the hippies called ’em communes and you guys call ’em squats, but you know what? They’re still flops.”

  He laughs and stands silently for a moment, taking in the building formerly known as Glass House. A smile breaks out across his face.

  Two weeks after this building was evicted, Linda Twigg sent guys in to rescue several five-gallon buckets full of nothing but prime marijuana seed t
hat had ended up in this building. Cops all up and down on the sidewalk.

  He laughs and moves on.

  Allen Ginsberg lived on the next block in the ’60s but those cats lived all over this neighborhood; I can show you twenty different places where Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac lived. They hung out and worked in the West Village but they lived over here because the rents were lower.

  I don’t call this the East Village, by the way. The term East Village started with the Beats as a joke. They worked in the West Village: “Ha, ha, you live in the East Village,” that type of thing, joking. Then the real estate speculators picked up on it. I, personally, consider it the Lower East Side.

  Right around the corner here, on Eleventh Street, there were three guys that date back to the ’50s, they’re all Puerto Ricans: Armando Perez, Bimbo Rivas, and Chino Garcia.

  Back in the ’70s, they squatted a building in the middle of the block. It was unheard of to announce that you were squatting. Squatting goes back many, many decades, but to get right in their face just didn’t happen. These guys not only got in their face about it, they put a wind turbine and solar panels on the roof—back in the ’70s. Bimbo became known as like a neighborhood Latino poet; he’s the one that came up with Loisaida, making fun of all the white boys who were starting to come down here: “Ah, you can’t even pronounce it correctly, you’re running around calling it Loisaida, it’s Lower East Side!” Again, a joke.

  Rivas, along with Perez and Garcia, founded CHARAS, a community center in an abandoned school across from their squat.

  This is CHARAS. This school was empty for many years and they took it over. Nowadays it’s empty again and it has sat empty for twelve, thirteen years. Giuliani stole it out from under them and this guy bought it for $3 million. He’s not supposed to make a profit on it.

  Gregg Singer bought the school from the city at auction for $3.15 million in 1998 and evicted CHARAS shortly thereafter. He has yet to get the approval for any of the varied plans he has submitted to the city. The building has been the subject of two decades of lawsuits, including one for $100 million in damages, brought by Singer himself, who claimed the city was blocking his development plans. Jerry points up at the windows on the top floors, overtaken by pigeons.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term scalping a building? In order to prevent a building from getting landmark status, which would place restrictions on its development, a landlord or a building owner—see above the windows over here? That building’s been scalped. They took all the masonry off just so the building could not get historical landmark status. That’s scalping.

  Ornate stonework once framed the window Jerry is pointing at, but all that remains is a clump of broken brick—a jagged surface that reveals the violent lashes it survived. As we continue down the block and turn the corner, Jerry is still fidgeting with his half-smoked cigarette in his hand, still unlit.

  We’re now on Ninth Street, the next two blocks have so much history I forget half of it.

  This is Serenity House. I opened up four buildings back in the ’80s, this is the only one still standing. We took it away from this guy, he was going to turn it into a halfway house and call it Serenity House. He would have got major grants, he’d have done a shitty rehab job and walked away with a pocketful of money. So we took the building away from him. That was almost thirty years ago and, as it is, this building has housed people almost every day since then.

  Jerry turns and crosses the street.

  This is Serenity Garden. I took the back third of this garden in ’95 and announced that I was gonna build a place where I was gonna sit down, smoke blunts, drink forties, and play spades for the next few years, which is precisely what I did.

  He laughs and we turn another corner:

  This is Dos Blockos. A group called Everybody’s Kitchen—they were just a school bus going around the country feeding people—they parked over here and a couple of people got off the bus and opened up this building and it became known as Dos Blockos. Dos Blockos, meaning, people who never go more that two blocks from their home.

  This was a pretty wild building. It was the first squat on our scene—the hippies. Most of the squats over here were hippies and punks, they were counterculture squats, the other squats were what I call “working-class bohemian.” They get up, they go to their jobs every day, they give as much liberal support to as many liberal causes as they can, and occasionally they do something. I’m not putting them down, just to say over here we were always hippies and punks, we were more likely not to have a job, more likely to get drunk and go out and do something.

  We turn another corner and come upon La Plaza, which is filled with twenty-somethings sipping beers and parents shadowing children who are trying to run freely in the open space of the park.

  This old rainbow hippie who had run rainbow soup kitchens, he showed up at La Plaza one day and took charge over here, stood right on the corner, started spare changing to get a bag of rice and a bag of beans. He started cooking and I’d say for the next year and a half we were feeding two hundred to four hundred people a day, seven days a week, on an open campfire, on the Lower East Side.

  By the mid ’90s I was living across the street and I had a key to La Plaza and I let the punks come in. The police tolerated the hippies and the activists, they tolerated the homeless and the hungry. They did not tolerate the punks. That’s when they wanted to bulldoze La Plaza but we fought them on that, too.

  Jerry takes me under the canopy of trees in the park to show me where there used to be a kitchen, then we head back to the street.

  This building right here is what we call Mother Squat. One day this couple, Steve and Cathy, they showed up after squatting in Europe. Steve organized what we call the Eviction Watch List, this was a list of all the squatters and their supporters, and any time we had of any kind of trouble, whether it was from police, or landlords, we got on the phone and we started calling the Eviction Watch List. That’s when we started getting more organized as squatters, that was December of ’84. We took our cue from the gay community: closets kill. We now had four, five buildings, maybe a hundred people, and that’s when we started getting in their face. Letting the city know, letting the neighborhood know, letting everybody know: we’re taking these buildings—these are our homes and we’re going to fight for ’em. And we did. We took the idea that these were our homes very seriously: you fight for your home.

  We stand in front of Christodora House, across from Tompkins Square Park. Constructed in 1928, it originally housed European immigrants. By the 1960s, the building had been abandoned, and it later became the home for several organizations, including the Black Panther Party. Jerry points out an air-conditioning unit near the top of the building where a hawk nests. Then he crosses the street to enter the park.

  I follow a half step behind him as he walks the park’s designated path; he takes several pauses to clear his throat or clear his thoughts while he fiddles with his cigarette.

  There were people living in this park, twenty-four seven, every day of the week, every day of the year.

  This area right here, this is where we organized a tent city. There were a couple of people—I always use the expression, “burnouts from the ’60s that hadn’t quite burned out yet.” A couple of them were sleeping in here and they started organizing. The homeless were just people, okay, they didn’t want to be exploited by people like us, political activists with an agenda, but at the same time they knew we were pretty much talking the truth; they didn’t want to fight the cops but they really had no choice.

  In the late spring, early summer of ’88, some landlords, a couple of cops, and a couple of people from the community board got together and started talking about putting a curfew on Tompkins Square Park. And one day in July, late June, early July of ’88, they went around to every entrance of the park and they wrote in big letters: “The park closes at midnight.” They left that up there for a month.

  Now this was ’88. Remember Morton Downe
y, Jr.? Well a bunch of us were doing Morton Downey, Jr. shows at the time, myself included. We were defending squatting, what have you. One time I had to debate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, and Morton Downey, Jr. in a nightclub uptown. Out of the eleven shows that I did on television, this one nightclub show was the only time that I actually got paid; they gave me $200 plus we got all the food and wine and what have you that we could drink. That was the same night they were going to set the curfew, so we called for a demonstration right here at St. Mark’s Place and Avenue A.

  Now again you have to picture this: the whole area is overflowing with homeless, as far as the eye can see: tents and shanties and people sleeping on benches everywhere. We went up, a whole group of us, the standard yippies. We got here ’bout 11:30 that night, about thirty people. I went and I got a case of beer, and I came back and thirty people went crazy for twenty-four beers. So I went and got another case of beer. Now I’m coming back over and I got these four cops about five feet behind me and got all these people in front of me, and I take my beer and I start going—Jerry holds an imaginary beer over his head, shaking it in sync with his chant—“Pigs out of the park! Pigs out of the park!”

  Once everybody started to chant, I take my beer, I opened it up, and I sprayed down the cops. Needless to say the crowd went crazy.

  He laughs.

  Next thing you know, squad cars coming in—they were waiting for us. They busted four of us. That was the night of July 31st.

  We cross to the south side of the park.

  This is where the band shell was. Now, after the incident with the beer we called for another demonstration, the night of August 6th—one week later. I had spent some of the Morton Downey, Jr. money, paid for a couple of the leaflets, bought a hundred police whistles. We called for a demonstration right here at the band shell. Had they let us do that then we would have chanted our chants, waved our fists, and flashed our banners and gone home and that would have been it. But McNamara requisitioned all this heavy equipment, special trucks and what have you, and he parked them all right here.