Busy at Last in NYC

HOMELESS TENT CITY! One Hundred Homeless and Allies Grilling Food, Playing Music, Taking Back The Land at 115TH AND Madison Avenue in New York City. Call for all to come out and show your support. Bring food, hang out, share company...
At 11am EST, July 23 Picture The Homeless and allies installed a tent city in a vacant bank-owned lot at 115th and Madison Ave. 100 people are in the lot, enjoying corn, beans, bread, fruit, and music by the Welfare Poets. Police are on the scene, but everything's calm. We have a casita, a stage, barbeque grills, banners, signs, cardboard shovels and pick-axes, and tent structures!
As the foreclosure crisis festers, Bloomberg and the banks fail us. Across the street from the tent city is public housing, where families are doubled and tripled up. Over-crowded apartments, the shelter industrial complex, or sleep on the streets - we need better options. From Miami to Sacramento to now here in NYC homeless people aren't waiting around. Come show your support! 115th and Madison, we'll be here as long as we can. (They're bloggin' it; for Twitterers, it's pthny; and Facebook tiny.cc/pthonfacebook.)
Yes, that's the press release. And I've just left the lot. This is a great project, a long time planning, and they have generated a very friendly atmosphere. The set is by the Not An Alternative crew from Brooklyn, and it looks both festive and homey. Frank Morales is the lead organizer; an Episcopal priest and a long-time eloquent squatter, he is wearing his clerical collar. I found a little poison ivy in the lot, but we took it out pretty much before anyone got bit. Oh, and twenty plus cops and plainclothes are standing by in a line just outside the lot. I met up with the gang at Union Square Park and we headed uptown on the subway, trailed by police. Experienced activists chatted with the cops -- Ben of ACT-UP, and Chris of the Shadow newspaper. Legal observers in their green hats rode along with us, just as they did during the RNC 2004 protests. Most of this activist crew is young, however, and I'm happy to see it. When we got to East Harlem, we were split into groups. Our group, me and the Japanese writer and journalist Sabu, were followed by five cops. We went around in circles and finally hailed a black car. Where but in America can you ask a cab driver to take us somewhere because we're being followed by cops? He was like, "Okay, where to?" Some congeros showed up and beat drums, played guitar; one guy danced very nice. Then lunch was dished out, and everyone relaxed under the tall trees in the shady grove and chatted. I'm back at work on my writing here in the library -- hope it's gonna last up there! (BTW: "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" zine is ready to ship, and it looks real slick. It costs $8 to make and post in the USA.) Wow, only a couple hours, and the cops are massing. It looks like everyone still there is going to jail. It's raining in New York. At least they made the New York Times. This is one inventive group of creactivists.

Stalled construction in NYC: My first reblog...

Hi folks -- first some project news.... I cannot post the 'zine catalogue to the web. It is too big, even compressed. If you want me to sent it to you via FTP, please contact me at awm13579 [at] gmail.com with subject line "send me the HMBFC zine, please!", and I will get it to you.
There is some serious business in the air here -- I'll report it when it goes down. In the meantime, the glossy bourgie magazine New York has started paying attention to the scuttlebutt about squatting in Brooklyn with the following article on what they are calling "the Billyburg [as in Brooklyn's Williamsburg] Bust"....
[This blog post is here, along with many snarky comments, and another article on "heroin-addicted hobo invasion" of squatters to Williamsburg. Repression, anyone?]
Oh pity the poor denizens of Williamsburg. The erosion of hipster trust funds is leading their greasy little utopia to slowly devolve into some sort of Mad Max-esque, post-apocalyptic real estate wasteland, just like Miami! So says New York Magazine. Anyone who's walked around Williamsburg lately can see the painful signs of a busted bubble. New developments sit virtually vacant. New building constructions have stopped cold with the landscape of the area littered with semi-constructed buildings. We already knew things were bad, but we had no idea that things were this bad.
With sales across Brooklyn down a staggering 57 percent from a year ago, Williamsburg, with its high density of new construction, has taken on an ominous disposition. Walk down virtually any block and you'll come across an amenity-laden building that sits nearly empty: relics of a moment in history that seems, increasingly, like a fever dream.
Most unsettling are the cases of the developers who seem to have vanished, leaving behind so many vacant lots and half-completed buildings-eighteen, to be precise, more than can be found in all of the Bronx-that large swaths of the neighborhood have come to resemble a city after an air raid.
All over the city, overleveraged developers have seen their projects stymied by the recession, but the highly speculative nature of what's happened in Williamsburg stands out as exceptionally dramatic and misguided-New York's version of the collapsing exurban "boomburgs" in Florida and Arizona.
Oh but wait—This is only the beginning!
Part of what makes the present situation so dire is that it is still in the early stages of unfolding. There are already about 400 new apartments on the market in Williamsburg, and additional condos are completing construction every month. According to a study (Real estate broker David) Maundrell released last month, 2,818 new apartments will have hit the market by the end of this year, with another 2,766 projected by the end of 2010. On top of this, Fannie Mae, the country's most dominant home-mortgage lender, recently implemented a policy requiring that buildings be 70 percent in contract before guaranteeing mortgages, thus delaying the moment when a developer can stop covering the taxes and common charges on a finished project.
The writer of New York's massive piece, David Amsden, took some time to visit a few of the new developments in the neighborhood.
I made my way to a building called Warehouse 11, on the corner of Roebling and North 11th Streets. Marketed by David Maundrell, the building has 120 total units (plus the requisite yoga center, playroom, parking garage, 24-hour concierge, gym, and communal sundeck). While the model apartment seemed an appealing enough place to live, there was something generally off about the building as a whole: Despite having been on the market since early 2008, only 30 percent of the units were in contract, and it was clear that construction wasn't complete. The list prices, too, were significantly higher than comparable products, as if the developer had not been informed about the current state of the economy. A few weeks later, I noticed the front doors of the lobby had been padlocked shut. The process of foreclosure had begun.
Looking at the bright side, we suppose all of these vacant new developments will lead to some awesome squatting opportunities for the hipster looking to enhance his or her hardcore street cred. We look forward to having our tips line flooded with ridiculous Williamsburg hipster squatting stories for years to come!

Oh yeah, the catalogue!

The "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" zine catalogue of the exhibition on European Social Centers at ABC No Rio is done. It is the first. There will be at least one more, with a closing deadline of the first week August. (These deadlines are firm, people!) At this moment, the zine catalogue exists only in a print form. There are several copies in Queens, a few in Madrid, a couple in London and Hamburg. When I can get some help to make a PDF, it will be online for everyone to download. Here is the table of contents of volume one, Spring 2009:
Why “House Magic”? – a background on why this project was undertaken
Film and lecture program
Excerpts from an exhibition about the New Yorck Bethanien
Michel Chevalier discusses the Rote Flora in Hamburg, and projects at the New Yorck Bethanien
Communique from RampART Social Centre
Micropolitics plans in London
400th Anniversary of Dutch Squatters in Manhattan
Krax City Mine(d) call for a European Conference of Social Centers
A Roof Over One’s Head, by James Graham
Atelier ESC, Rome, by Virginia Villari
Communique from Social Center Cox 18, Milan
Michel Chevalier translates “Rhino Féroce,” about a Geneva squat
Danish artists talk about a road occupation in Copenhagen at the University of Trash
Credits and acknowledgements

A Quick Trip

Back in Madrid, on recreation I thought. But things have changed in a few months, and I was sucked back into a little action. I went by Traficante des Sueños and ran immediately into Pablo, outside talking on his cel. He directed me to a talk at El Patio Maravillas, the Madrid social center, that very evening. This rundown place in February had some encouraging bustle and a seedy looking bar. Now the place is plastered with a galaxy of posters and paintings, and humming with activity. They organized a "jornadas," or conference at the Reina Sofia art museum in February on the role of social centers in an increasingly provatized culture. I found this out from Dani, a filmmaker from Frankfurt I interviewed who is living in a squat in the Madrid suburb of Tetuan. Although he was involved in the first group at Patio, he is ambivalent about what he sees as the new bid for legitimacy. Surely, I suggested, something as vibrant as Patio is good for Madrid? It seemed there one could make a very long video of authority figures asking you to leave an ostensibly public space you had wandered into to get out of the sun. Unfortunately El Patio is only open during the evening.
During one evening I attended a session I assume of the permanent working group on precarity. The speaker was Zoe Romano of Serpica Naro in Milan. (As the talk was in Italian, with a translation into Spanish, I faded quickly.) Serpica Naro is an anagram of San Precario, the fictitious saint of the precarious worker which has been carried in hilarious procession in numerous demonstrations. Ms. Romano showed some of the projects the group has done. The presentation is part of a series of meetings, including a workshop, on questions around precarity and the commercialization of cultural institutions. Very interesting, dense, and too demanding for a vacationing burnout case.
Still, I later met and interviewed Dani with my camera, and he interviewed me. I will show the tape in Queens, at the University of Trash. Dani is involved with the Cinesinautor group (cinema without authors, which meets at Patio), and spoke of his group's encouraging meetings with people in Tetuan in their project to make a movie portrait of the district. He was surprised that the people who attended were not conventional in their ideas of what the movie might be. They were thinking like Dziga Vertov, Dani said, encouraging experimentation and imagism rather than narrative and coherence. While I envy Madrid its social center scene, everything looks more glamorous from far off. Dani complained of a strain of intolerance between social centers, antagonisms that were working against network. Dani is a fan of the writings published in Tiqqun, a French group I did not know. Very heady stuff it is, and looks to me at first glance like an egghead Crimethinc.
It's clear at the least that the scene in Madrid continues to cook hard. The social centers are clearly essential laboratories of collective forms, the only places perhaps from which one might imagine an integrated (i.e., non-academic) egalitarian future culture emerging, able to withstand the "desert" conditions outside of capitalism.
I also met with the artists of Democracia, Iván López and Pablo España. They are pretty well established, it seems, having curated the Madrid Abierto (Open Madrid) public art component last year that coincided with the art fair Arco. They recently did a controversial project called Welfare State (2007). They set up bleachers for an audience to watch the demolition of the shantytown El Salobral, just south of Madrid. The people cheered, the bulldozers did wheelies -- it was "like a rodeo," Iván said. There was a lot of criticism from the left, it seems... While most of the residents of the encampment had been relocated, many had not, and activists were there to do eviction defense. The project was hot at the very least, directly political in a way that U.S. work really avoids. It struck me as Laibach-y, NSK-like -- taking the position of the police, exploring the subjectivities of the right. From other work the duo showed me, I can't really think they inhabit that ideology. But playing into it surely earned them some enmity! The Welfare State project was included in a great Australian show on public space issues called "There Goes the Neighborhood." I just got the catalogue from Half Letter Press in Chicago for pretty cheap. (The photo is by Olga Berrios of a show at Patio a while ago; I'll post my own later.)

Whose Land Is It?

Last night I attended the talk by Max Rameau of Miami Take Back the Land at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Max has been conferring with Picture the Homeless, a Harlem based group, which is in turn in league with the academic unit Center for the Study of Place, Culture and Politics whose director, Neil Smith was also there. His colleague Peter Marcuse of the Columbia University planning department also spoke, as did two veteran New York City squatter activists.
Max Rameau’s position is by now well known in activist circles. (You can see him talk on the City from Below website.) His group founded the Umoja Village shantytown, taking over city-owned land in the black Liberty City neighborhood of Miami that had been intended for sale to a private developer. Not surprisingly in view of the tumultuous past of the district, the city kept hands off. Take Back has now taken over another tract of land to grow fresh food in a community garden.
After Max, Brenda Stokely spoke. She had participated in a squatting campaign – then called homesteading – in Harlem during the 1980s. She reminded the audience that the state moved against their organization under criminal enterprise statutes (RICO), although the grand jury refused to indict. Neil Smith spoke of the “global social crisis” which has closed down this last and greatest wave of gentrification. Now, he said, there is the political possibility of changing the rules of the game, to forward tenant and neighborhood control of city housing resources. He too warned that state repression is likely, given the example of 1930s activist movements that led to public housing.
Frank Morales spoke, pastor of the St. Marks Church. For him, squatting is “putting flesh on the bones of an abstract right” to be housed. He briefly recounted his work squatting in the Bronx, beginning with the St. Ann’s Avenue garden, described by Jonathan Kozol in his book “Amazing Grace.” His views on the agenda of capital, “spatial deconcentration,” were formed through contact by murdered housing activist Yolanda Ward. Frank ended by expressing the hope that this panel might issue a call for a large-scale occupation movement in New York City.
Finally, Peter Marcuse asked what happens after a squat? What can happen, and what ought to happen, and what needs to happen so that what ought to happen can. He recalled the policies of NYC’s last progressive mayor, John Lindsay, who set up the Division of Alternative Management in the city housing department. In the absence of such policies, the cycle will continue as it has after this interruption. “The next generation of gentrifiers are buying up houses now,” he said.
Additional References:
text of a Neil Smith interview on conditions in Berlin conducted by Andrej Holm, a sociologist who was later arrested by the state (he was later released)
Frank Morales is a forceful speaker; here he is in a KPFA interview in March.

[The “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” show on European squatted social centers is now up in Queens, NY as part of the University of Trash through 8/3/09. I am preparing a zine catalogue of the first part of the show; submissions are welcome. Firm closing 5/31.]

HM:BFC Up in Queens

The "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" project begun at ABC No Rio has become a research component of the "University of Trash" at the Sculpture Center, in Queens NY. HM:BGC will participate in UofT events; the schedule is here. This Saturday (5/16) from 4-7pm, the Baltimore group behind the City from Below conference will present. They will discuss Participation Park, an ongoing public art project and activist initiative based on converting a vacant lot in east Baltimore into an urban farm, social space, community kitchen, radical planning studio, free store, and adventure playground. Then Monday (5/18) 7:30pm at Brecht Forum, Max Rameau of the Florida Take Back the Land group will talk.

"HM:BFC" in a Blur -- It's the Last Week

The last week of this "House Magic: BFC" show looks pretty tight. [It's pasted below.] So I am promoting the shit out of it. Last night at Bluestockings with Emily Piper Foreman talking about our project, and the situation in global cities it was a pretty serious crew. The tech didn't work. We weren't reading. We may be getting close to assembly. I showed pretty much part one of this blog, with the sign for the Real Estate Show, "a building is not a precious gem, to be locked -- boarded and hoarded." Seth Tobocman's building-fist and the bulldozers, police and angry crowds, the nationalist Puerto Ricans standing in front of the church they took that was not serving them, Adam Purple's expunged Garden of Eden, where beauty was pitted against housing as the City of New York turned the people against art and reaped the political benefits of philistine destruction. The tangle of the Rivington School sculpture garden, Tacheles, EIPCP's Transversal, old Amsterdam squat posters, websites from Ela Eskalera Karakola, which Emily had visited, el Patio Maravillas, Centro Sociale Seco, a mani for Cox 18 in Milan, the call for last year's day of action at this time, and then our show. The computer is slogging up with spyware, so I'll get those "HM:BFC" installation photos up some other time. There is the great flag of the pirate Queen, which Julie Hair copied from our download of "What's this place?" BTW Jordie Montevecchi's short film “Take Over,” about the group that took an old church in Brighton, UK, was lovely and affecting. I hope we get a chance to show it again at the "University of Trash" in Queens. Opens March 10th at Sculpture Center which is quite near P.S. 1, if you are in town. This is the current schedule and updates now going on are here: http://collectiva.wikispaces.com/House+Magic. Bifo was here talking about Radio Alice. Now there is going to be a radio station...
THIRD (and last) WEEK
Tuesday 5 May 09
“Visions of Utopia,” directed by Geoff Kozeny; Part One, the historical background (94 min.; 2009); and excerpts from Part Two, on urban communes Two (about 30 min); collective living discussion with James Andrews of Nsumi, other invitees
Wednesday 6 May 09
Zurich -- The Art Squat – “Dada Changed My Life,” directed by Lou Lou and Daniel Martinez (2004; time?) about the Zurich art squatting action that saved the Cabaret Voltaire Guest: Olga Mazurkiewicz
Thursday 7 May 09
Denmark, Copenhagen -- “Christiania You Have My Heart,” directed by Nils Vest (62 min.; 1991; Danish with English subtitles); talk with Rebecca Zorach
next venue for the boxed-up "HM:BFC" for the summer is at "University of Trash."
press release: http://www.sculpture-center.org/pressSpecific.htm?id=12595