Over the past 10 weeks, I have had to the privilege to learn how the Loisaida Center functions with a small staff to provide programming for their community. The project that we worked on, creating a reissue of the Quality of Life in Loisaida Magazine, was a learning experience for me that took time and…
Garbagia: Three Suns, Three Years
2018 marks the third year that the Loisaida Center has hosted the Garbagia summer program is taking place. It consists of three weeks of workshops consisting of costume design, set construction, and story development that ends in a culminating theatre production. In 2016, the theme was Garbagia Island, a story of Pirates discovering a dystopian…
The Rally for CHARAS
July 20th, 1998 was the day that CHARAS Community Center was evicted from their space on 9th st between Avenues B and C, the former P.S. 64 building. The property was sold by the city to developer Gregg Singer soon after. For the past 20 years, Singer has tried and failed to develop the space,…
Mapping my Personal Neighborhood
The map below shows the development of my understanding of the neighborhood that I live and work in. Because I live in such close proximity to the Loisaida Center, I decided to put in question, “How do I understand my neighborhood?” This map shows places that were a part of “my neighborhood” before I started…
Interview with Angie Hernandez
Link to full recording of the interview: https://soundcloud.com/user-83889900/interview-with-angie-hernandez Angie Hernandez came into the Loisaida Center with Chino Garcia on a Friday afternoon, only a couple hours before a rally for CHARAS community center on the anniversary of its members’ eviction 20(?) years ago. Angie and Chino had been longtime friends, both active members of the Loisaida…
Right to the City
In my previous blog post, I briefly touched on a point about surplus capital coming in from real estate development. The question of bridging gaps between like-minded organizations to demand a shared right to the has a lot of overlap with the previous question of how to rupture the bounds of what kinds of organizational…
The field
In the context of Nicole Marwell’s explanation of the term “field,” the Loisaida is a small non-profit community organization that collaborates with other community organizations in what could be considered broadly a pursuit of urban development. Loisaida has a broad field that works with a lot of different facets of community development. Their mission, which…
The Quality of Life in Loisaida = Calidad de Vida en Loisaida
My work at the Loisaida Center has consisted on being a part of a number of projects and helping out with events, that has allowed me to learn a great deal about the organization and the community it serves. We are now in the process of creating a reissue of the “Quality of Life in…
Historical Context of Loisaida
The Lower East Side has history tied particularly to Latin American culture, and more specifically, Nuyorican (New York/Puerto Rican) culture. The Loisaida center is a cultural center focused on providing programming and training as well as preserving culture through providing space and funding for artwork, which according to their website is part of addressing serious…
