The
Politics and Culture of Urban Resistance
Popular resistance to
the threat of bland, middle-class aesthetics mixed
art forms and anti-development politics together as a
culture of protest. The message, "Die Yuppie
Scum" was sprawled ubiquitously on buildings and
sidewalks throughout the neighborhood. "Mug a
Yuppie" and admonitions to newcomers were
coupled with calls for boycotts of upscale boutiques
and groceries.
In the early 1980s,
key activists and organizations proposed a new
legislative means to combat the negative aspects of
urban restructuring — keeping in rem (city-owned)property
from ever entering the profit-oriented private
housing market. In 1984, a task force representing
organized low-income housing organizations developed
an agenda to use monies from sales of newly valorized
in rem properties to subsidize low-income
housing development. City-owned properties would be
sold to developers who would provide a one-to-one
match of market-rate housing and low- to moderate-income
housing. In turn, the proceeds from the sale of
market-rate housing would be used to develop vacant
lots and other in rem buildings. After a
series of negotiations and compromises with the city,
the 50/50 Cross Subsidy plan was finalized in 1987.
The cross subsidy plan proposed to allocate 1000
dwelling units in existing city-owned tenements for
low-to middle-income occupants. These units would be
rehabilitated using revenue gained from the sale of a
comparable number of empty lots to real estate
developers constructing market-value units.
The cross subsidy plan
marked a compromise between organized housing
interests and the city. Popular community dissent was
not silenced. In fact, after 1987 the level of social
resistance against neighborhood redevelopment reached
such levels that the East Village was nationally and
internationally identified with riots, protest and
demonstrations. Several confrontations between city
agencies and the police and neighborhood radicals
escalated rebellion and anti-authoritarianism as the
defining features of the East Village’s identity
in 1988-1990:
TOMPKINS
SQUARE PARK POLICE RIOT
On the evening of
August 7 and the early hours of August 8, 1988, a few
hundred diverse protesters, sympathizers and
bystanders faced off an army of riot-geared police
fortified by helicopters, advanced communications and
a high-tech mobile command center. The demonstration
soon escalated into a riot when police officers,
emboldened by the tacit consent of their commanders,
swept the park and adjacent overcrowded neighborhood
streets, indiscriminately clubbing anyone caught in
the onslaught. For several hours, alarmed and
outraged punks, post-hippies, housing activists and
innocent bystanders joined together in chants of
"No police state" and "It's our
fucking park, you don't live here!" With
organizers carrying banners of "1988=1933,
Revolt" and "Gentrification is Class War"
the crowd intermittently challenged the cordon of
mounted police, hurling insults along with bottles
and exploding firecrackers. The melee revealed
political, economic and cultural tensions among class-
and ethnic-based resident factions over ways to deal
with or combat real estate intentions and actions and
the city’s local development policies.
THE FORCED
REMOVAL OF THE TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK HOMELESS
Above:
Encampment in an empty lot. Photograph by
Robert Mcfarland.
By the fall of 1988
the public’s fascination as well as that of the
committee formed to investigate the riot soon turned
to an increasing homeless population that had "settled"
in Tompkins Square Park. By the summer of 1989, over
200 hundred homeless individuals lived in makeshift
shacks and lean-tos in Tompkins Square Park. In July
1989, 250 police officers sealed off the park,
informed the "residents" they were being
evicted, and gave them fifteen minutes to gather
their belongings. By fall a considerable number of
homeless had resettled the park. On an unbearably
cold December 14 workers from the city’s park
department, protected by uniformed and plain-clothes
police and "peace officers," subdivided the
park into six sectors, roused the homeless from their
shelters and ordered them to vacate the park.In 1991,
the park was closed for over a year for extensive
renovations.
THE SQUATTER
EVICTIONS
Tompkins Square Park
was not the only site of violent contests among
factions of residents and the state at the end of the
1980s. In 1989 and periodically in the 1990s, city
agencies and the police department sought to rid
Loisaida of the most vocal, subversive and
flamboyantly radical critics of urban redevelopment,
those squatting abandoned city-owned.
Links (click to follow)
Click here to read about
squatter evictions.
Click here to read about recent squatting in New
York City.
Survival Without Rent - How to squat a building.
Images
(click
to enlarge)
 Police/resident clashes
on the Lower East Side.
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 S.O.S. Tompkins Square
Park
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 Burning building
on the Lower East Side.
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 Homelessness on the
Lower East Side.
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'Housing
is a human right'
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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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