LibGuides: Squatters' Rights & Cooperative Ownership in the Lower East Side: Occupation & repairs

Umbrella House: Squatting in NYC 1988

Documentary by Annika Hellstrom, Eddy Falcon and Geerte Frenken about squatting Umbrella House on 21-23 Avenue C in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1988. Renovation has continued and the building was legalized in 2002.

Survival Without Rent

Survival Without Rent (circa. early 1990s)
"This book has been put to together to help people with little or no money find a solution to their housing problems. We hope that after reading it people will look at an abandoned building in a totally new light. You might think that living in the conditions we describe in this book is pretty crude. We hope you won’t be forced to. But if it sounds better than what you've got now, we hope you'll be inspired to give it a try." Download from the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space Zine Library; readable physically at MORUS and ABC No Rio Zine Library.

KILL CITY: Lower East Side Squatters 1992-2000 by Ash Thayer

Excerpt photograph of squat rubble pre-renovations, Ash Thayer.

"With roots in the punk rock music and art scene in Memphis, Tennessee, during high school, Ash Thayer gravitated toward this same community while she attended the School of Visual Art in Manhattan. Living in a squat began as a housing necessity, and this milieu quickly became an inspiring place to document the abandoned buildings that had been appropriated and transformed into functioning homes, including the vibrant street life of the neighborhood and portraits of her eclectic squatter community. Thayer's images bring the complexity of gentrification and housing to the fore front. The struggle for shelter brought together diverse subjects to share in construction project in their dwellings, to prepare community dinners, and to host legendary punk shows."

A selection of this archive was published as a monograph Kill City: Lower East Side Squatters 1992-2000, by powerHouse in 2015.