This week’s readings help to paint a picture of the experiences faced by the predominantly Puerto Rican residents of the post war Lower East Side. Together, Nandini Bagchee’s chapter, “The Communitarian Estates of Loisaida (1967-2001)”, and Peter Wilson and Bill Weinberg’s “Avant-Gardening: Ecological Struggle in The City & The World”, tell a complete story of abandonment by the city, and the rise of a strong community organising movement which stepped in to counteract this abandonment. If one reads “Avant Gardening” out of context, it is easy to dismiss its increasingly anti-establishment rhetoric as pure fiction. Suggestions of abolishing the current world order, and an open, passionate hostility of the Lower East Side towards the rest of New York City, upon first observation, seems to border on delusional. When considered through the lens of Bagchee’s chapter, however, the strongly autonomous language begins to make more sense. The chapter outlines the history of community organizing in the Lower East Side, which was born out of the adverse conditions of the post Second World War neighborhood. Deindustrialization and landlord abandonment, later combined with New York City’s bankruptcy, the oil crisis, and many other factors left residents of the Lower East Side feeling almost completely abandoned. In this environment, CHARAS, the community organization primarily concerned with affordable housing, essentially became the leaders seeking to return the numerous abandoned buildings to productive use. This non-government restoration of community services, however, came under threat in the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s, as New York City began to emerge from it’s bankruptcy. As property values and speculative development activity began to return to the neighborhood, the precarious legal foundations related to the physical spaces occupied by the numerous community groups began to undermine the progress of CHARAS and the community as a whole. It is this infiltration, to which “Avant Gardening” responds. While the extreme rhetoric implicitly advocated in the concept of the Lower East Side Autonomous Zone may seem irrational at first, it comes, not only out of a need for self preservation, but out of the immense progress which had been made by the community organizations of the Lower East Side throughout the previous 25 years. In this context, it is highly possible that an autonomous Lower East Side could have been very successful, they were essentially autonomous since the 1970’s.
As you discovered, there’s a reason I put readings together! Bagchee’s discussion of CHARAS, which I would say was more of a community self-help and cultural organization than a housing-oriented one, alongside Anarchist Bill’s screed/manifesto demonstrates just how much possibility seemed to fill the air on the Lower East Side in the late-20th century. Indeed, it did so in the late-19th and through a chunk of the 20th. (Perhaps that atmosphere of possibility will rise again!) When an entire area is abandoned by the governance structures that are meant to make it legible and visible, it becomes fairly reasonable to treat the area as a “frontier,” as Smith put it, for a whole host of “pioneers” and “natives.” Those natives, as one might call CHARAS and portions of the Loisaida, were left to invent infrastructure and solutions based on their own ingenuity and desire. Meanwhile, folks like Anarchist Bill could imagine the Lower East Side as an autonomous, cooperative, liberated anarchist-oriented, green zone. And ultimately gentrifiers could see it as an empty wilderness convenient to the financial district! It’s also interesting to think about how different philosophies of property like the ones we read in the first half of the semester were put into practice here. Locke’s labor leads to possession. The city’s paper ownership a la Blackstone trumps occupation. An ecosystem in which humanity is understood as part of nature (as the Lenape or a certain reading of Genesis might suggest) is cultivated. It goes on and on.