It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where the Big Lie is called a Big Lie, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we urgently need to raise about 400,000 by Thursday, June 30, to finish our fiscal year on track and give it everything we possibly can. Please help us get there with a donation if you can right now.
$1,150,000
$1,350,000
Right now is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we still need to raise upwards of 400,000 by June 30 to give it everything we can. Please help:
Tompkins Square Park (powerHouse Books, 2008) is about the resistance and struggle of people in the Lower East Side, literally to exist as the community faced drastic gentrification in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. This work focuses on Tompkins Square Park as the symbol and stronghold of the antigentrification movement, the scene of one of the most important political and avant-garde movements in New York history. -Q. Sakamaki
December 1987. A scene of Alphabet City before gentrification.
September 1993. During Wigstock, New York’s annual drag festival in Tompkins Square Park, a man who may have HIV/AIDS sits in the street nearby.
June 1991. A homeless man in front of his encampment.
December 14, 1989. During eviction from the park, a homeless man complains and is roughly arrested.
August 1989. Homeless people and their supporters camp out under American flags as a statement on homelessness. The Lower East Side has a long history of liberal, and at times radical, movements that have attracted artists, intellectuals, anarchists, activists, squatters, immigrants, and even political exiles. Many in the community, unlike other more passive communities facing gentrification, stood up and worked together with the homeless to defend housing rights and human rights, as well as their own lifestyles.
May 1, 1991. Allen Ginsberg recites a poem, demanding affordable housing, at the bandshell during “Resist to Exist.”
July 1989. Homeless people and their supporters protest for affordable housing on Avenue A. Although the community’s anti-gentrification movement had begun before 1988 with a small collection of squatters and anarchists, the August 6 riot triggered what became the larger Tompkins Square Park movement, a grassroots resistance that demanded affordable housing. The park became the symbol of this movement, whose impact extended beyond the neighborhood and into the rest of New York, the rest of the U.S., and even some parts of Europe, notably Berlin.
June 3, 1991. The NYPD prepares to confront protesters on Avenue B. The August 6 police riot—so called because the consensus was that the police overreacted to the protestors—and subsequent Tompkins Square riots were the manifestation of a larger concern of the overgentrification of the Lower East Side.
May 27, 1991. A Pakistani immigrant’s store on Avenue A is looted.
January 1, 1994. The inauguration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, another sharp turning point toward gentrification in New York. Although the anti-gentrification-movement still remained for several years, it lost its strong grassroots momentum, especially after Rudy Giuliani took the mayoral office. Twenty years after the August 6 riot, the park now boasts one of the best dog runs in New York City; the Lower East Side has lost much of its diversity and become one of the city’s most expensive, themepark-like entertainment districts.
January 4, 1994. A march down Avenue B in memory of Terry Taylor, another homeless Tompkins Square activist who died of AIDS. By 1991, the estimated 300 homeless people living in Tompkins Square Park were gone and the park was forcefully closed for renovations. After its reopening in summer 1992, the Lower East Side quickly started to transform into one of the most high-rent communities in New York.
December 14, 1989. In the freezing early morning following eviction from the park, a homeless couple packs their things.
Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? We're a nonprofit (so it's tax-deductible), and reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget.
We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism?