Transcribed by Anne Ennis
In the 1980's, when I was starting out drawing comics, and so was Eric Drooker, Paul Hewitt, Peter Kuper. We had this guy, Ronald Reagan. Anyone who grew up in the 1960's and 1970's, at least to us, Ronald Reagan was quite shocking, because he said things that we were taught were stupid things to say. For instance he said, "When I was a young boy, we never heard of this thing called racism, this is some recent invention". He said this! And yet, he was amazingly popular. He said trees caused pollution. He got on television and joked, "We've just passed legislation outlawing Russia forever, the bombing will begin in ten minutes". He was this avatar of everything that seemed ignorant, and everything that growing up in the 1960's and 70's, we learned was false and that the older generation to a large extent admitted they had been wrong about. Yet suddenly, here was this guy, and that really shaped our world view a lot. That somehow, we are not communicating to a majority of people the things that we think are true.
The political situation in the 80's was such that we wanted to make a statement, and that there was a feeling that you needed to reach people. And the fine art world had really rejected communication, it was very opposed to communication, was very opposed to narrative, was very opposed to representation. And comics had maintained representation, so we were looking for a new way of talking, and a big influence were the wood cut artists of the 1920's and 30's, like Lynn Ward and Franz Manserell, you know, wordless books, stories in wood cut. And that had a big effect on us. We obviously chose to work in black and white because it was affordable, we could print it ourselves. I've never wanted to do artwork that didn't go anywhere. I don't feel good about a piece that isn't published, or isn't displayed. And so I tended to work a lot more heavily in black and white than in color, even though I had some capacity to work in color when I was a kid, I haven't really developed that, and I'm just experimenting with that now.
I started out doing propaganda cartoons for all the radical movements in New York City and the squatters definitely wanted a lot of graphics. I was supporting them by providing free art work that was used quite a bit. And also, by printing their writings and artwork supporting their actions in our magazine, World War III Illustrated. A lot of that material was somewhat simplistic, it was propaganda. It was saying: these are the good guys, you should support these guys. That got used a lot in flyers and it moved around a lot. And from that point, there were people that said, "So, you're doing flyers for us, why aren't you part of the squatters movement, seeing as you are doing all this artwork for us? Why don't you take a space? Why don't you do this?" Even people said, "How can you do this artwork if you're not part of the activity?" When in fact, the artwork was done as a favor, so everything gets kind of turned around.
And so, at one point, I said let's check this out, this seems really exciting. I became more involved in it, and went through a four-year period in my life when I was intensely involved in this activity. At that time there were photographers on our ass all the time, taking pictures of every goddamn thing you did. There were journalists running in and out of things, putting their own versions of things into the papers, usually highly distorted. A few people were good. Colin Moinahan was quite good, but a lot of the journalism was very distorted and very biased, and a lot of the photographers were quite ... in getting pictures. But that material would then be used in the media in ways that were not positive. Then there were cartoonists like Stan Mack did a lot of cartoons about what was going on.
So, there were a number of us: myself, Eric Drooker, Paul Hewitt, who had been doing political art with a neighborhood bent for a number of years, We'd been doing posters on the street, we did posters against the police killing of Michael Stewart and the police killing of Eleanor Bumpers. We did posters against gentrification. Eric was involved in the Tenant Union called Angry NoHo Tenants, I was involved in the Tenant Union in my building, we were both involved in campaigns to get drugs off the block, and we did posters and graphics for all these things. So, when the squatter thing started heating up, we of course did artwork for it, and as someone who was involved in the situation, I started saying, 'Hey, what an amazing story this is; what an incredible set of events these are'.
I started doing pieces based on that, and those pieces started to become a lot more detailed, and a lot more narrative, and a lot more, if you will, cinematic in structure than my earlier propaganda pieces. I started having to deal with a really difficult issue, which is character, and the fact that a person is not an idealized social unit, a person is not Joe Squatter, Joe Black person, Joe Revolutionary. A Person is an actual person who has contradictory actions, and how to write about that in a way that wasn't lying, because I didn't want to lie as an artist. I never have, I've never liked the idea that propaganda is associated with lying. So I felt that if there is something that is so present in my life, it has to be incorporated in my work. So, I started working on longer pieces that were of this nature, and they appeared in World War III Illustrated, they appeared in Heavy Metal Magazine, they appeared in various places.
Then in the mid-90's, I had a series of negative interactions with my housemates, which caused me to give up the space in the squat, and sort of return to a private life. At that point, I said, 'Well, let me record all this', because this was a huge experience for me. I did a graphic novel called "War In the Neighborhood", which did deal with a lot of the internal contradictions of the community. And I know that not everybody feels great about what I showed, but I think that I showed myself making some mistakes, too; of course, it's from my point of view. I assumed at the time that everybody was going to do the same thing. I assumed that other people -- and there were plenty of other cartoonists, and plenty of other writers, there were plenty of artists, plenty of photographers in the scene -- that they were going to do their own books, their own movies, and they were going to put out their own version of things, so I didn't feel that I had to be shy about my own point of view.
What I found years later is that very few people have recorded that period. Most of the material that was produced at that time was for immediate consumption and that now, seemingly, nobody wants to talk about it. So that in a lot of ways, "War In the Neighborhood" stands alone as one of the only documents of the period that is circulated, which I think is sad. I think there should be other books on it. I would encourage other artists, Fly or Lawrence Vennage or Michael Webber, to do books on it, because it's historically really important, and they will have a different point of view than I did.
The Lower East-side is, or has been, a very special place. Maybe it isn't really as much now, but the Lower East-side was the place where a lot of immigrants came into New York: Italian, and then Jewish, German. And, like you'll see that there are old synagogues on almost half the blocks here. They're not used anymore, but there was a large orthodox community in the Lower East Side in the 1920's, 1930's. It's also been a place where a lot of radical activity took place. You had Emma Gordon who lived on 10th street over here. If you read her autobiography, she tried to prostitute herself to raise money to buy Berkman a gun on 14th street. She went to bars, restaurants and clubs and around here, which is where you get the phrase, "If you can't dance, you can keep your revolution!" Because Berkman didn't like her going out to bars, so all that happened here. You had the Hippie Movement, the Beat Movement came out of here. Alan Ginsberg lived in this neighborhood. Abbey Hoffman organized the hippies from Baker Street.
You also have a large Puerto Rican community here. In fact, when I came, it was largely a Puerto Rican community. They came in after Puerto Rico was colonized, and they were given incentives, particularly rural people were given incentives, to move off the land. Because the United States was helping big landlords consolidate in Puerto Rico, and they were given incentives to move to New York City. So you had a large displaced Puerto Rican community that came in here. You had a political movement called, "The Young Lords Party", which was the Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panther Party in the 60's and early 70's, that was very active in this neighborhood. And then in the late 70's, you had this phenomenon in almost all major American cities, but particularly in places like the Lower East Side, where the government essentially cut off services. They said, "These areas cannot be transformed into working economies, and we would rather simply cease investment and have them fall apart than continue to invest money". So you had cutback in the size of the fire department in New York, which Roger Wallace, in his essays says, "demonstrated in the result of massive burn-out of the Bronx and Brooklyn", and you also had burn out here.
So, you had buildings being burnt, and a kind of a free for all, where people were selling drugs on the street, quite openly, selling heroin and cocaine. And you had long lines going down the street of people coming to buy drugs. You had a kind of collapse of the area, and that was about the time that I moved here. I moved here in 1978 or '79, largely because I had dropped out of college, and I had decided that I was going to make my way in the world as an artist, and I was very aware that there was not going to be any money in that, and I needed a cheap place to live. I got the option of getting an apartment on 3rd Street which was $150 per month for 3 rooms, in a building that was actually, I actually had to fill up income forms to get into, it was a semi-housing project, it was 50% publicly owned. That was probably the best decision I ever made in my life, because my entire life has been shaped by being here.
As a person who grew up in the suburbs, I was immediately aware of all the things that the people in the suburbs are aware of, in inner-city ghetto communities. A man was stabbed in my doorway the day that I moved in. There was an incredible amount of street violence, an incredible amount of open criminality. And of course, that is the first thing you become aware of. But what I became aware of as time moved on, was that there was also an incredible amount of civic involvement;that there were community gardens where people would take in an abandoned lot, and they planted a garden in that lot, and were growing food or creating a nice space. There were Homesteading Associations, where people were renovating abandoned buildings and moving into them. There were community centres that provided some type of culture that was indigenous to the community here. And of course, within my own building there was a Tenant's Union, and there were Tenant's Unions in a lot of buildings, and there were Block Associations.
I actually felt there was more civic involvement in this neighborhood than there had been in the suburbs where I grew up, and [there] everyone seemed to be fairly isolated and secure enough to remain isolated, and [here] people really had to pull together for their own common good. I can even remember at one point being held up by a guy who put a wire around my neck, and a neighbor of mine came by and chased the guy off. And I was like, Nobody would ever do that for me in Cleveland Heights, nobody does that! So, I felt there was a very unique sense of community involvement here as well as a lot of the damage that was going on.
You also got the sense that a lot of the people who were involved in these struggles were not getting a lot of support from the State. In fact, their main adversary seemed to be the State ,even people who were trying to clean up crime on their block, who were trying to get the drug dealers arrested, couldn't seem to get cooperation of the police force for this. I could introduce you to more old-time Lower Eastsiders who will give you stories about the times they complained to the police, and the police told them to go to hell. It only became interesting to the government to clean up the drug dealing when the area started gentrifying.
So I was aware of this as a pretty unique and special place at that point. We also became aware that there was a gentrification of the neighborhood that started with the 'Clean-up the Drugs' on 3rd Street, right across the street from my house actually.
That was a really complicated situation, particularly for younger white folks who moved in, because we were perceived as gentrifiers, even if we moved in because it was cheap. It was particularly complex for artists, because opportunities were offered to artists to be part of the gentrification of the neighborhood. For instance, landlords would say, take a storefront, rent it out for $500 a month to some kid just out of art school, and say, 'You can run an art gallery here', and they would rent it out to him for a year, because there is no commercial rent protection in this city. So after a year, they could kick the guy out, they give him a one year lease and they would use the fact that they were art galleries on the block to make their property look more valuable. So this was a real exploitation of young and actually, rather desperate artists, who imagined they were going to do well on this scene, because obviously a few people had: Keith Herring, Basquiat, Bill Monrovich, all become rather successful, very young. No criticism of them on this, whatsoever, they're great artists, all of them. But it was very shocking to people that anyone was that successful at 22, because fine art, at that time, was very ageist, more in favor of people who were more established.
So, all this was going on and in the middle of this we were publishing our own magazine World War III Illustrated, trying to do political comics, and working on that. The Squatters Movement emerged in the neighborhood as some way that I felt I could have a positive interaction in the neighborhood. Because there were all these abandoned buildings and the City wanted to make them into market-rate housing. Local organizations had come to a compromise, saying that they would be 50% market-rate housing, and the squatters said, 'To hell with that, we're just going to seize these buildings, and none of it is going to be made into market-rate housing'. That seemed to be a very dynamic move that I wanted to support. So, I did first get involved with supporting the squats, and for a short period of about four years or so, I was a house member in one squatted building. And that meant participating in weekly work days, paying a monthly rent, participating in the defense of the building, and in exchange you got a space in the building. That was a big experience for me; it was like a huge moment in my life, I think in a lot of people's lives.
Those years, 1988 to about 1993 were just amazing years, in which there were numerous street confrontations in the neighborhood, either because the police were trying to evict the squats, or because they were trying to curfew the park, or they were attacking homeless people, or they were enforcing some other ridiculous idea that the community rejected. There was a real sense of homeless-to-local-militia aspect, where people on the block, or people in the neighborhood, would get together and form a group, and go do something very spontaneously, but not purely spontaneously. There were mechanisms and organizations, there was a phone tree, there were people who had enough credibility they could call people together to do something. But still, there was a sense of people, just, 'Hey let's go do this', and everybody would go.
There was a really brutal crackdown that crushed that sensibility. The park was Tomkins Park, where we are now, was the center of activity. It started with an attempt to curfew the park, which started in 1988, where they tried to impose a twelve o'clock curfew on the park, and people resisted that. There was a night-long street battle, and after that, the government actually gave in and said, okay, we'll lift the curfew. And so, there was this amazing sense that we could actually make policy on the street corner, as opposed to making policy through the political process, which had become very frustrating for people. That continued for a number of years, and then there was this huge crackdown on the park, where the park was actually fenced off for an entire year, with like a two-storey fence that went all the way around the park, one-storey fence. And a large police presence, usually thirty police assigned everyday to watch that fence. And that was followed by some squatter evictions, in which a tank was used actually to show who was boss. The police actually brought in a tank. And at the end of that process, really ten years down the road, about 13 of the squats had been legalized. There had been about 30 in the beginning, so more than half had been evicted.
The discussion of what kind of incomes people had was a favorite topic of liberals, who were always saying, 'You all aren't really poor enough to be doing this'. What I found was that there was a fair mixture of people. I remember, there was this one guy who owned an airplane, but there were people who came off of the street and really had nothing. There were people who were in college, there were people who had 9-to-5 jobs, there were people who were sort of outside of society in some way, and this was a society that they could function with. For whatever reason, when they tried to be in normal jobs or normal apartment situations, they just fucked them up, they couldn't handle the paperwork. They could deal with someone who was their friend coming in and asking for rent, but they couldn't deal with putting a rent cheque in the mail and sending it to the landlord, there are people like that. And, this was the one society where they found safety. There were people who were quite extreme, and this was the place that they could be extreme. So there was a real mixture of people, and I think that was true to the neighborhood as a whole, there was a real mixture of people.
I think that the main argument that liberal and progressive people who were anti-squat would make is, the squats are not 100% low-income housing. But if you look at what they have built in the neighborhood, they're all like, 60/40, 80/20. They have an 80/20 plan, they're building a building [that] 20% of it will be low income, and 80% will be market rate; this is everything they've built for the last 30 years in this neighborhood. So in a lot of ways, they're were the pot calling the kettle black there. Obviously, you need some capital base for a project, somebody has got to have some bread. If nothing else, to buy the other guy six, somebody there's got to have some bread. You're never going to have a project that's 100% low-income that actually works, unless it's got a very strong parent organization that's probably state-connected, and there weren't even such organizations coming out of the liberals in the 70's, 80's, 90's, that had all been scrapped. Real social service programs haven't happened in this country since the 60's. So that argument was made and I think that it was false.
I think the driving force of the squatters movement in this neighborhood was that people wanted to live here, that they felt this was the community they wanted to be in. They felt comfortable here, people feel comfortable here out of different reasons. White people from middle-class backgrounds who didn't fit in feel comfortable here, because you don't feel judged by middle-class standards. A lot of African American people have told me they feel comfortable here because they could, for instance, have a white boyfriend or a white girlfriend, and no one would judge them, and they can live their life the way they want to. Gay people come here feeling that they will not be judged for being gay. A lot of Hispanic people feel, particularly people who were born here, feel that this is their neighborhood and they should not have to live some place other than where they were born. So a lot of different reasons, but for all those reasons, people felt that being here was really desirable, and they were willing to make effort and make sacrifices to do that.
There were clearly people with a strong ideological bent who played a major role in the squatters movement, I think that's true of any social movement. The majority of people were not like that. The majority of people had personal and practical reasons for wanting to live here, and had they been offered an affordable rent elsewhere, they probably would've taken it, but they weren't being offered affordable rents. I know that there's some people who have an ethic about living free, or living off the grid. I think that was a real minority in the community here. And in fact, those people didn't always fare that well, because other people expected them to work, other people expected them to put in money. So somebody who saw the squats as chance to live without working very often was very disappointed in how that worked out for them.
There was this older gentleman who lived in our building who'd been living on the street. He'd been making his living collecting scrap metal, cans and whatever, and selling them to recycling companies. He was an older Southern sort of Black guy, with a really heavy accent, spoke country Black English, old South country Black English. It was sort of understood that if he were to go out and get a job, it would not be a very dignified job. He happened to have enormous experience with construction work; he'd done construction work all his life, and so he could do two days a week instead of one. A lot of what he did in those two days was instructing people on the right way to do things. So that I thought, was a really good arrangement.
Another arrangement was, there was a guy in the building who had a tendency not to take care of himself. Like, if he made some money, he ran out and went to a rock concert, and had no money. He was found one day freezing on a really cold day with no jacket and no heater in his room, because he hadn't bought a coat, and he hadn't bought a heater, and he just didn't care about these things. He got high, listened to music, and said, To hell with it. People said, here's the deal: You can take your month's rent and buy a heater with it, and you can take your month's rent and buy a coat with it. I think things like that were the squats working at their best; because these people knew you, they could accomodate you, if they liked you. Or, there were people who did make a fair amount of money, okay, you can take two spaces and pay extra money, you can take off some work days and pay extra money. That way, we can accomodate you for that. So, that's really where they were at their best, is that everything was on a personal basis. It was you knew these people, you had a relationship with this group. Where I think it went badly was when people didn't like you for whatever reason; they could be very judgmental and very harsh, and very unjust. That because there was no legal processes, the way you deal with any problem is you move the guy out, forcibly. And so, that can be kinda rough.
People had to negotiate who was doing what work. [Some] people were far more inclined to work on things than others. People had to negotiate security concerns. For instance, at one point in time, my electricity was illegal, so any time someone used electricity, there had to be a black cloth over the window, and there were people who were careless about that. That had to be worked out, they had to be aware that they couldn't do that. People had to decide who was moving in and who wasn't. People had to deal with, if somebody was abusive or violent, people would have to deal with that. We had a staid position that nobody was allowed to use hard drugs. There were always, just as there is in the larger society, there are always real anomalies in the law enforcement of that. I mean, some people get away with, some people don't get away with -- enormous hypocracy and disagreement about that. It's a problem the whole society has, and we had it too. Only, there was always the feeling that things would be extra hard for us if things went badly, because this was an illegal situation, and the police could come in at any time, and, do you want something here that could put you in greater danger? Of course there were no legal rights, so those then things could be decided by people. People decided that so-and-so is a drug dealer, let's go get baseball bats and get him out of here. There were also people who found it a very convenient place from which to deal drugs in certain buildings, and who eventually, as buildings legalized, had to leave. So there were some people who were against legalization for exactly that. So there were a lot of tensions that had to be resolved.
Well, there were like, weekly meetings that went on way into the night, and involved a kind of consensus process. Some of those meetings got pretty intense. I also should stress that there were lots of buildings with lots of different arrangements; some buildings didn't have meetings, some buildings had more democratic processes than others. But, yeah, people had to make a decision about how they were going to run things. And I actually think, although it was a difficult process and it became overwhelming to me at a certain point, I think the idea of whether it's a squat, or a Tenant Union, or a Block Association, whatever it is -- the idea of people getting together to make decisions about their lives, rather than having those made by some distant authority, is educational to people, they grow from that process. They discuss things, they learn how to get along together, or fail to. But I think, actually, the difficulty we have with it stems from the fact that we weren't brought up doing it. It's hard for us to learn how to negotiate our differences with our next-door neighbor, with people in our immediate environment, and [it's] probably aggravated by the fact that this is a city, and people are very diverse, so the person you are dealing with may have a very different way of looking at the world than you do. But, I think it's a process that people are going to have to learn and find their way through before we can have a society that's democratic. People are going to have to be able to do that, as difficult as it is.
Legally, with regard to our relationship to our community and the police: legally, the police are not required to participate in evictions, that is supposed to be done by the Marshall's Office. Legally, a person who can prove that they have lived somewhere for 30 days has the right to due process. The reality of the situation is that all of this is very elastic. What I always say to people in CD training is that, the operative word with the police is "CAN", they CAN do anything they want to do. Does that mean they will? No, but they CAN. You shouldn't assume that because the Constitution says you have certain rights, that the police are going to respect that, or any other legal paper, when they're on the street with you. Also, the city can tell police to do things that may be not be legal, and you can argue in court about that later. But, if they've bashed your head in, evicted your building, or done whatever else that they are trying to do, that may be all they really want to do anyway. So in effect, you get charges dropped, or even financial compensation for their behavior, may not be all that relevant to them. After all, the money you're getting is money you gave them as a taxpayer anyway.
So, I think the early Homesteaders Movement in the Lower East-side really tried to have good relations with the police, and to keep them out of their business. And as the movement got bigger, and as the confrontations took place here in Tomkins Park, that became impossible. There came to be a sense of, kind of a war zone, of there being two sides, and that the police could not be trusted for anything. It became very dangerous to talk to the police, take anything they said seriously, to try to negotiate with them, because they would try to trick you. We came to a point where we started to see the world in this kind of Zoroastrian universe, of the dark and the light, the police and us, and they're all evil, they are robots. And for all practical services, this was true, because a policeman might be a nice person, but if he is here, in this situation, he is expected to work to fuck you up. That's successful behavior for him, so he is going to. So, whatever you may philosophically think of him as a human being is irrelevant to the situation, and that created a problematic universe. Because obviously, one is depending on the police for certain things, one is dependent on police for protection from certain types of people, and so then you have to do that yourself; so that was a hard time for people I think.
I think that people developed a very unusual dialogue with political power which is unusual in this country, unusual in the process that we normally have here. Because there was a sense in which, you can train them by punishing them; I think they have that attitude toward us, and we have that attitude toward them. And it worked that you could say: Okay, police are coming to evict this building. Somebody throws bags of cement from the top floor to the street. Next time the police are asked to evict a building, they're going to ask the city to get their paperwork in line first, because they don't want to be in that situation. That process progressed over a series of years, where essentially, anytime there was eviction, activists punished the city for that with lawsuits, with confrontation in the street, with bad press, with civil disobedience, with actual violence, that they raised the stakes of doing that. And the result was, at a certain point, the city said, Okay, there are 13 more buildings left -- it's not worth what we're going to go through to evict them, so let's cut a deal with these folks. That's a way of getting changes in society that is not taught to you in your Civics classes, but it actually works, it actually got people something.
I think that economic crisis in the United States, there's an opportunity for a lot of people to try new ways of living and organizing themselves, who have an enormous amount of abandonment of property all over the country, and it's obvious somebody is going to do something with that. I suspect that it will be done by people who are concerned about the welfare of the low-income communities that have already been forced out of these buildings. I think it will primarily be done for economic reasons, I don't think it will be ideological in nature, I think it will be driven by necessity.
I think that political activism which is connected to some material thing that has to be accomplished in the here and now, in the immediate environment, is much different than political activism which is attached to an issue, to a bill in front of Congress, or a far away situation. I think there's a completely different sense, and a completely different toolkit for dealing with it. I think that political activism which is attached to people's immediate material concerns is far more powerful. I think that people have to Bachman's first rule of politics: everyone is an Anarchist when it comes to their own ass. That everyone thinks they should be free, they should be housed, they should have the best of what's available, with as few hassles, and that they will do the right thing with that freedom; they're not so sure when it comes to somebody else. And because of that, when you're organizing people around their own interest, they will really move, they really do things. Whereas, if you're organizing people around some abstract influence of someone somewhere else, no matter how good your cause is, there's a certain anemic quality to what comes out of it.
I think that the American Left has been really crippled -- I guess these are bad words -- but the American Left has been really damaged by its obsession with problems in foreign countries. Not that you do not need an analysis of what goes on in Mexico, or an analysis of what goes on in Africa, or the Middle East. But in the end, you can't really organize a community around what goes on in another country. You have to organize them around what is happening to them, and then they will have very definite opinions, real openness to conversation, because the facts are really necessary. You know this, you know the difference between, say, American Zionists, and people in Israel. That American Zionists have all kinds of odd and idealized notions about the situation, whereas, people in Israel, whatever their political positions, know what they are talking about, and are concerned about the practical reality. So I think, the neighborhood movement that existed here, the squatters movement, the movement to end the curfew in Tomkins Park, the movements to save rent stablization, the movement to save the community garden, the movements against police brutality, the movement to get people adequate aids: these movements have a lot of power because people who are active in them are genuinely the constituents of their own movement, they're acting to improve their conditions. I think the future of the American Left is in going to be doing more things like this, particularly as the economic and ecological situation are deteriorating.
