A Trivial History of Loisaida

In doing background research for Quality of Life, I haver read countless historical documents about the neighborhood; I am veritably drowning in ephemera. However, despite the pages of footnotes I have scrutinized, there are random things that stick in my mind, things that don’t really have to do much with the zine, small events that I remember about the neighborhood that make me smile. When cobbled together, they offer a random, tangential, idiosyncratic, trivial history of the neighborhood, one that is more magical, even if less helpful to a historian than the one found the neighbood’s wikipedia page. 

1926 – Jesús Colón wrote a letter to the editor of La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper about a new Latinx organization Colón was starting in the Lower East Side. The letter itself is very quaint and written in the stiff Spanish style that is common to letters of the era, but has spelling mistakes and revisions in the margins. 

1974 – Bimbo Rivas writes the quixotic poem “Loisaida” that gives the name to the neighborhood.

1977 – An enormous blackout of New York City. Nobody had electricity except 519 East 11th Street, which had used sweat equity to install a wind turbine and solar panels on the roof. 

1982 – Cityarts Workshop created a two-block long mural series on avenue C that asked artists to paint faux businesses on empty storefronts to highlight the lack of small businesses and urban decay in the area. 

1985 – The Artmakers Collective and CHARAS created La Lucha Continúa/Τhe Struggle continues, an ambitious series of six murals painted at La Plaza Cultural community park. Only two of the murals remain today, but la Plaza Cultural remains a central gathering space for the community. 

1987 – The first Loisaida Festival is created. In addition to music, poetry, and traditional Puerto Rican food, the festival features huge puppet heads placed on regular-sized people. 

1987 – Pedro Pietri is 0fficially ordained as a Reverend by the Ministry of Salvation and inaugurated his Church of the Mother of Tomatoes (La Iglesia de la Madre de Los Tomates) as a roving performing ministry of preaching to the “poetry-deprived” to advance AIDS advocacy work, condom use, and absurdist comedy. 

1998 – To stop the sale of CHARAS/ El Bohío Community Center to a real estate developer, activists broke into the Center’s auction at 1 Police Plaza and released 10,000 crickets into the auction, according to rather excellent 2018 article from the New York Times. The crickets were cleared out, the activists were led away in handcuffs, and El Bohío was sold to a real estate developer, but the protest became legendary. 

1999 –  Adál Maldonado, the co-creator of the whimsical artistic group El Puerto Rican Embassy, issued the Annexation Proclamation that declared New York to be El Nuevo Hybrid State of NuYoi and annexed it as a commowealth of the fictional El Espirit Republic de Puerto Rico. The effects of the annexation were to be the issuance of new passports with out-of focus ID pictures, the tropicalization of all New Yorkers, and the “immediate decolonization of each citizen’s brain.”

2020 – The First Virtual Loisaida Festival is created. There are definetely huge puppet heads involved.