“Tompkins Square Park: Legacy of Rebellion” by Bill Weinberg
(Autumn Leaves Press; Ithaca NY 2008) 40 pages
This pamphlet sets out to document “a Century and a Half of Protest & Resistance on New York’s Lower East Side”, with the struggle in and around Tompkins Square Park as the epicenter.
From the very start I loved everything about this pamphlet. The introduction reads:
“Twenty years after the (1988) Tompkins Square riot, New York’s Lower East Side has transformed from a class-war battleground to an increasingly sterile and staid high-rent enclave. The park’s bandshell is but a memory for old-timers, and neighborhood newcomers are not even cognizant of the years of political and physical struggle that cleaned the district for their arrival. They have less awareness still that they are the beneficiaries of a cycle of confrontations over the district going back nearly two centuries.”
Every time I find myself in Tompkins Square Park or walking around the Lower East Side these are my sentiments exactly, and its great to see them summarized in such an accurate and concise form.
Weinberg starts off with the history of the creation of the park, from its inception to its opening in 1834. Almost from the very beginning Tompkins Square Park was a center of rebellion and uprising. The author does a good job of documenting the park as a center of radical labor struggles, as part of the immigrant experience in the Lower East Side and through to the tremendous changes that occurred in the Robert Moses-era 1950’s.
The 1988 riot era of Tompkins Square Park traces its roots more to the late 1960’s influx of counter-culture types, along with the immigration of Puerto Ricans and a smaller number of African-Americans to Loisaida (Lower East Side). The first large riot of this era occurred on Memorial Day 1967 when police tried to shut down a group of people playing guitars and congas over a noise complaint. 38 people were arrested for disorderly conduct, and there was a dramatic shift in the attitudes of people in the neighborhood toward the police.
This also ushered in the post-Viet Nam era where hard drugs like cocaine and heroin took over the street scene, and the tenement housing stock of the area rapidly decayed. Anyone around the LES in the 1980’s will remember the wild place that it became. All this was the tinder that was sparked the night of the 1988 riot.
As a first-hand participant Weinberg does a great job of documenting the movement of Anarchists, squatters, homeless, punks, artists and other neighborhood people that came together to resist the police and gentrification from 1988 to 1991. It was in 1991 that the City of New York closed the park, built a 16-foot high chain link fence around it and started bulldozing. The park was redesigned to make it easier to police, included the complete destruction of the band shell that was erected in 1966. There is a bit of coverage of the dying embers of the movement from 1991-2008, but for all intents and purposes the writing was on the wall for the Lower East Side the minute the park fell. It wasn’t long after that the area was considered pacified, and tens of millions of dollars of real-estate investment flooded the area, creating high-priced condos for wealthy newcomers.
This pamphlet closes by asking whether, after 150 years as a center of immigration and working-class rebellion, the Lower East Side and Tompkins Square Park have finally been changed into an ‘elite playground’.
The answer is both sadly and clearly yes, though there are still a few minor ongoing neighborhood battles over issues of the community gardens, police brutality and surveillance. The more important question for those of us who related to the 1988-1991 anti-gentrification movement is what can we learn from our loss and how can we regenerate ourselves on some new fronts, complete with our knowledge of what the system is capable of.
BTW At $6 this pamphlet is a bit steep. It would be much better priced at $3, with a chance for greater circulation on this important subject.
Try getting your copy from WW4Report.com
Riot in Tompkins Square Park -1874!-
