VIEW FROM THE STREET

WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!


If the “powers that be” reside in marble halls and boardrooms, revolutions are born on the street. In the open air of the city, resistance can take the form of planned acts of civil disobedience or incidences of spontaneous protest. With impromptu crowds, militant marches, and dynamic performances, grassroots movements in the Lower East Side and elsewhere have commandeered public space in order to draw attention to a shared political cause, target repressive institutions, and demonstrate the coherence and extent of their popular support.

Familiar chants ring out: “Whose streets? Our streets!” “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” Even as the sound invites onlookers to join a newly visible public, these declarations bring implicit power struggles to the surface, provoking and escalating combat with the state. Throughout the political history of the Lower East Side, citizens have

strategically used public protest and performative resistance to anchor social movements in time and space, lending materiality and visibility to efforts that might otherwise seem diffuse or abstract. Harnessing such events to capture the attention of the media and broadcasting local issues to a national stage allows social movements to situate regional actions within a global context.

The view from the street refers to a tradition of pageantry that defamiliarizes everyday spaces in order to draw attention to the issues impacting our everyday lives. The timeline of visible actions celebrates the work of activists and artists who have labored side by side to create striking, unexpected, public presentations.

Seminal marches and demonstrations in New York City, 1967-2014. Illustration by Nandini Bagchee Mother Earth by the Bread and Puppet Theatre was paraded in the streets of New York on the event of the third UN Special Session on Disarmament. Photograph by David McReynolds, 1988.
A selective timeline of Mayors, squatting, and ABC No Rio, 1980-2010. The Real Great Society, named audaciously in response to President Johnson’s Great Society, sought to achieve bottom-up self-sufficiency within the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of New York City. The young members of this group leveraged their experience as former gang members to build new grassroots institutions from the bottom up. The University of the Street was one such undertaking that gained traction and funding to open a free education center in a storefront off Tompkins Square park. The student body generated the course list, which ranged from the remedial to the intellectual. The curriculum included classes in English, Spanish, math, karate, music, dance and philosophy as well as job training courses in such areas as television and radio repair. Downtown Guggenheim, 1983. Discount Salon outside PS 122, 1984. A selective timeline of Mayors, squatting, and ABC No Rio, 1980-2010. Flyer for War Resisters League benefit concert at ABC No Rio, 1991. Food not Bombs, 1990s. Flyer for War Resisters League benefit concert at ABC No Rio, 1991. PPTV Gulf War Series Compilation, 1990-91. Talks Not Troops banner on 339 in 1991 Response to September 11th World Trade Center Bombing, 2001. Press Release by ABC No Rio, 1989. Art for the Evicted, 1984. Timeline of demonstrations, rallies, nuclear threats, and war Timeline of demonstrations, rallies, nuclear threats, and war. 1960-2013. Continental March Map, 1976 The Continental Walk, 1977 Anti-Nuclear Rally, 1979 Women’s Pentagon Action, 1981 Dome at the Anti-Nuke Festival, 1977 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 A TIMELINE OF STREET ACTIONS BLUE REPRESENTS THE PACIFIST/ ANTIWAR/ SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIONS. YELLOW REPRESENTS THE ANARCHIC/ ARTIST ACTIONS. GREEN REPRESENTS THE COMMUNITY/ ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIONS. RADICALS AND REAL ESTATE (1968 - 1971) LOISAIDA: A STATE OF MIND (1974) CHARAS IN DOMELAND (1971-1982) LOISAIDA: NUYORICAN ESTATES (1981) THE REAL ESTATE SHOW (1980) LA LUCHA CONTINÚA (1985 - 88) SAVE EL BOHIO (1990 - 2019) ENGAGING THE NATION (1977 - 1982) The Lower East Side is often described as the “Portal to America,” an incubator of the immigrant American Dream. As the narrative goes, waves of immigrants began their life here, often in dismal conditions, before moving on to greater prosperity elsewhere. Many of the members of CHARAS grew up in the Jacob Riis and Lilian Wald Houses, facing the waterfront between 14th and Houston Streets. Their historic distrust of government grew as they realized their limited economic prospects. As the last large influx of unskilled labor to post-industrial New York City, Puerto Ricans were denied the rags-to-suburbs experience of previous immigrant groups. This exhibit expands on some of the themes examined in Nandini Bagchee’s book Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side (Fordham University Press, 2018). The book centers on three buildings on the Lower East Side that were repurposed by activists over four decades. The Peace Pentagon (code blue) was the headquarters of the anti-war movement. El Bohio (code green) was a symbolic “hut” and home base for the Puerto Rican community’s environmental stewardship. Lastly, ABC No Rio (code yellow) was a storefront gallery in a decrepit tenement run by artists with an anarcho-punk sensibility. The timeline describes the actions that flow like rivers from these counter institutions into the streets. The War Resisters League, the oldest secular organization in the United States was founded in 1923 by a group of men and women who had opposed World War I. This organization actively opposed World War II -the allegedly “just” war. They were also a part of the more popular opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 60’s. Members of the organization were targeted and surveilled by the government. In 1969, WRL members arrived at their rented office at 5 In the 1970s, disinvestment alongside more stringent tax foreclosure policy enforcement transferred thousands of distressed properties in poor neighborhoods like the Lower East Side to City ownership. Burned-out tenement buildings and rat-infested, boarded-up properties lined once- thriving alphabet avenue blocks. In 1974, Puerto Rican poet-playwright-plumber Bimbo Rivas memorialized this territory in his poem “Loisaida.” The struggling Puerto Rican community claimed the neighborhood as their physical and spiritual home: As well as a place, The name Loisaida, helped galvanize support for a series of actions involving the idea of a place that was variously reimagined as a “movement, an ideology, and a state of mind” and later as a “fight- back mentality” and a “philosophy of responsibility, cooperation, and determination by the people.” These sentiments were transmitted by word of mouth, poetry, and performances, and were reinforced by the work of activists and ordinary citizens who transformed and claimed abandoned properties through work and play. “Man, these streets are a whole life experience, using techniques I learned when I was a gang leader. You know, it’s a simple decision to make. You destroy things or you make them.” Chino García, CHARAS, 1973. Through the homesteading movement, CHARAS learned to navigate the terrain of city-owned real estate, securing temporary leases on several properties between Avenue C and Tompkins Park for new community programs. The first of these converted a 5000-square-foot garage on east 8th Street and Avenue C into a community-run recycling center, soon filled with mounds of glass, paper, and aluminum thanks to a “cash for trash” incentive. A second project nearby focused on cleaning up 25,000 square feet of adjoining lots into a park-scale community garden. La Plaza Cultural would become an iconic community garden with an open amphitheater, provided space for events as well as horticultural experiments, becoming the locus of the emergent artistic and cultural practices of the Nuyorican community. In December 1979, a group of artists broke into a city-owned property in the Lower East Side and staged The Real Estate Show. The works expressed outrage at exclusionary policies that had destroyed neighborhoods and rendered many homeless. The artists’ manifesto announced their anti-institutional stance, but even as the police shut down the show, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development offered them an alternate space: a commercial storefront in a four- story tenement building in the same neighborhood. The artists accepted the offer and formed a volunteer-run art center ABC No Rio in playful reference to a partially effaced sign reading “Abogado Notario,” directly across from the building at 156 Rivington Street. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s, as the city sought to hand off the administration of troublesome properties to private developers, many gardens and community facilities without leases became vulnerable to eviction. Signs reading “Lower East Side Not for Sale,” “This Land is Our Land,” and “Speculators Keep Away” appeared on buildings, in gardens, and at street demonstrations. In 1985, at the behest of CHARAS, the mural collective Artmakers sent out a call to artists to paint murals on the walls of buildings bordering La Plaza Cultural. The resulting artwork reflected both local and global concerns: images of police brutality and the destruction of buildings in New York were emblazoned alongside images of popular uprisings in Latin America and anti- apartheid actions in South Africa. Common themes of dispossession, revolution, and community were tied together by bands reading “La Lucha Continua.” In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the War Resisters League quickly channeled the energy of the anti-war movement into national organizing for pacifism and against nuclear proliferation. Along the route of the Continental Walk for Disarmament and Social Justice (1976), activists released balloons from crucial sites such as the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Facility in Colorado, bearing written warnings of the potential hazards of nuclear contamination to those living downwind from the plant. Similar actions were staged at nuclear plants from Wisconsin to New York. The WRL’s shift toward an anti- nuclear, environmental agenda found resonance with groups like CHARAS. PUERTO RICANS IN THE LOWER EAST SIDE (1960) UNIVERSITY OF THE STREET (1967) 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 Map of Puerto Rico NYT article on the University of the Street Real Great Society members CHARAS Dome Cardboard Structure, 1972 CHARAS Working on the Dome, 1972 Kids with Wireframe, 1972 CHARAS The Improbable Dome Builders., 1973 CHARAS Biodome, 1974 Domeland Comic Book, 1974 Dome Instructions, 1978 Buckminster Fuller returns to El Bohio, 1982. CHARAS Dome at the No Nuke Rally, 1977 No Nuke Rally, 1977 Dome at local street fair, 1982. 339 Lafayette St. War Resisters League Office City-owned Properties and Census, 1970-1980 La Plaza CHARAS Recycling Center, 1979. Loisaida: A View from Above, 1979. Wind Turbine, 1978. End Apartment Warehousing March and Rally, 1990. US Presidents and their support of wars. 1980-2013 Map of Art Spaces in the 70s. Interior view of ABC No Rio, 1980 Real Estate Show Flyer, 1980. Not For Sale, 1981. Coalition Protest, 1987. La Lucha Continua Mural, 1985. Operation Class War, 1992 Bread and Puppet, 1988 Octopus Flyer, 1980. Ed Koch: Acting Mayor of New York, 1982 Mayday in DC Event at La Plaza Cultural, 1978. ART AGAINST GENTRIFICATION (1983) The influx of artists and art institutions in the Greenwich Village, SoHo, Tribeca and the Lower East Side, experienced at first as a counter-cultural phenomenon, ultimately brought the attention of the city and real estate development to these areas. The artists themselves unwittingly became the forefront of gentrification. Between 1980 and 1984, the artist collective Political Art Documentation and Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) engaged in a series of projects that questioned the role of art and artists in this process. Most of these shows were installed on the facades of buildings and in the streets where the forces of gentrification were already visible. RGS Life Magazine Article Draft card burning in Union Square Dome Instructions, 1978 TALKS, NOT TROOPS! (1991) In 1991, US-led forces launched airstrikes against Iraq. Paper Tiger TV, a radical media collective located within the Peace Pentagon, embarked on a ten-part video series entitled the “Gulf Crisis TV Project,” to counter what founding member DeeDee Halleck described as “media disinformation.” The result, a collaboration between local and international video activists, examined the history of the Gulf, documented dissent on the home front, and recorded the grief and anger of the Iraqi people. To mark the rare collaboration between PPTV and the WRL, a 50- foot banner reading “Talks Not Troops,” was hung from the parapet of the building. PUNKS TO THE RESCUE (1988 - 96) In 1988, in the course of construction at an adjacent site, a bulldozer damaged the eastern party wall of ABC No Rio. The city took the opportunity to serve an evacuation notice to the gallery, as well as eviction notices to the low- paying residents upstairs. ABC No Rio refused to leave the building and embarked on what became a decade long struggle with the HPD to hold on to the building. In 1990 as a first generation of artists exhausted with battling the city moved on to other pursuits- a younger generation seeking a location for their Saturday Hardcore Matinees became the unlikely bedrock of resistance. After a decade of squatting and creative activism ABC No Rio finally convinced the city to give them the building. Timeline of the US Presidents and their support of wars, 1980-2013. Timeline of the US Presidents and their support of wars, 1980-2013. Timeline of the US Presidents and their support of wars, 1980-2013. AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND (2001 - 2008) The 1993 truck bomb that detonated in the basement of the World Trade Center in NYC was seen as a one-off act of terrorism. The 1991 Gulf War had lasted a mere hundred days with minimum casualties for the allied western forces. The memory of this invasion was brought home afresh as two hijacked American Airline planes full of passengers were deliberately flown into the World Trade Center in New York’s financial district on September 11th, 2001. Anti- war activists at the Peace Pentagon watched with sadness from the roof of their building as the second tower collapsed before their eyes. Two days later, a sign painted by volunteers at the Catholic Worker and installed by members of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Network was hung from the façade facing the iconic New York skyline. The message was cautionary rather than didactic: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Timeline of demonstrations, rallies, nuclear threats, and war (1960-2013) Timeline of the US Presidents and their support of wars, 1980-2013. Timeline of the US Presidents and their support of wars, 1980-2013. The War Resisters League with Tax Resistance signs in front of the IRS offices, 2011. Lafayette Street Façade of the Peace Pentagon, 2014. El Bohio for Sale, 1998-2001. ¿Se Salva el Bohio? , 1997. ¿Se Salva el Bohio? , 1997. Protest at City Hall, 1999. Thank your Mayor, City Hall, 2017. Peace in Vieques, Loisaida Festival, 2001. Stop Eviction, Viva Charas, 1999-2001. 2016 2017 THE PEACE PENTAGON EL BOHIO ABC NO RIO CODE BLUE CODE GREEN CODE YELLOW The “Peace Pentagon” at the corner of Lafayette and Bleecker Streets, 1978. Photograph by David McReynolds PS 64 / El Bohio as seen from above. Photograph by Gilbert Santana, 2017. ABC No Rio, a collectively run art center in a former tenement, 1980 -2017. Photograph by Jade Doskow, 2012. 2011 2014 2017

This project is an expansion of the themes from the exhibit Activist Estates: A Radical History of Property in Loisaida (2019) authored and designed by the urban historian and architect Nandini Bagchee in partnership with curator Libertad Guerra.

AELES is an evolving resource that can grow to include supplemental layers of the case studies selected and the ongoing survival and futuring intents of these legacies.