Community
Resistance to Abandonment
The Puerto Rican
community, which was most affected by abandonment,
waged a vociferous campaign against residential
displacement and social decline, coupling music,
poetry, painting and even gardening with traditional
tactics, such as rent strikes and demonstrations.
Latino poetry, writing,
and language reflected a pervasive sense of
oppression. The description Nuyorican came to
refer to an identity, a language, a genre and style
that expressed Puerto Rican experience and
frustration with the vicious marginalization and
decline of the barrios of New York. "Nuyorican
(language) is full of muscular expression. It is a
language full of short pulsating rhythms that
manifest the unrelenting strain that the Nuyorican
experiences."
Above:
Community resistance to decline. Photograph by
Marlis Momber.
Traditional forms of
tenant action on the Lower East Side, such as rent
strikes and demonstrations, remained an essential
part of the repertoire of resistance for activists in
the 1970s. Threats of impending displacement often
incited a building’s tenants to organize and
develop initiatives to forestall abandonment, such as
campaigns to collect and withhold rents from the
landlord and use those funds to purchase supplies for
essential repairs. Urban homesteading became a viable
strategy. The city developed homesteading programs
through its Division of Alternative Management
Programs (DAMP). The Urban Homesteading Assistance
Board (UHAB), the Housing Development Institute (HDI)
and LESAC were the key organizations that provided
vastly different forms of technical assistance to
homesteaders. They often acted as intermediaries
between tenant associations and city agencies that
administered an elaborate web of new housing programs.
In 1978 the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) Program,
regarded as DAMP’s most successful initiative,
was instituted to allow tenants to first manage city-owned
apartment buildings and then own them as cooperatives.
Tenants acted as landlords and were responsible for
collecting rents and maintaining a building’s
upkeep. After an interim lease period of successful
self-management, tenants were approved to purchase
the building as a low-income cooperative. A second
program, the Community Management Program (CMP),
called for extensive rehabilitation by the city (using
some federal funds) and eventual sale to tenants or a
neighborhood housing organization. Another contracted
neighborhood associations to manage buildings in
conjunction with tenants.
While most Loisaida
residents were not homesteaders or squatters, many
applauded their neighbors’ efforts at community
betterment. Well-attended street fairs and block
parties raised revenues to complete existing projects
or to begin new ones. In addition to providing decent
self-managed housing, homesteads functioned as
symbols of struggle, perseverance, and patience over
despair.
Another effort to
counter decline was the Lower East Side’s
community garden movement. The movement’s first
community garden began in 1973, when a group of
residents threw balloons containing plant seeds and
bulbs into a large fenced-in parcel on Houston Street
near the Bowery. The activists, who called themselves
the Green Guerillas, assisted local residents and
block associations in starting gardens and, at times,
gaining permission to use city-owned properties. Some
of the gardens were founded and cared for by
organized resident groups while others were the
domains of individual Latino families. Casitas
(lot gardens with small wooden shacks), maintained
mostly by Puerto Rican men, often featured shrines to
patron saints, small murals, benches and tables, a
flower and vegetable patch and, as was the case for a
garden on 9th Street and Avenue C during
the mid 1980s, a rooster.
Click here to visit the Nuyorican Poets
Café.
Here is a story about the Nuyorican Poets
Café.
Click here to buy a CD full of
Nuyorican poetry.
Click here to purchase a book
of Nuyorican poetry.
Here is the Green Guerillas’ homepage.
Here is a news story about the Green
Guerillas.
Here is a book about homesteading in the U.S.
(and particularly the Lower East Side.)
Images
(click
to enlarge)
 Photograph of a wall
mural in Loisaida.
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The book upon which this
web site is based,
Selling
the Lower East Side,
is available
directly through 
or order through 
Site design © 2000:
Kurt
Reymers and Dan
Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of
Sociology)
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