"Abstract: Though New York’s Lower East Side today is heavily gentrified, it spent decades as an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan. Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting into something never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the story of that social movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. The squatters had made moral and political claims on urban space that, in a rare turn of events, turned into legal rights. These persistent squatters created almost a dozen low-income, limited equity co-operative buildings in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York but also, more intangibly, a sprawling network of chosen family, a history of struggle, a repertoire of tactics, and a story that continues to inspire others to ask: Is it possible to create a space outside of capitalism? Combining oral history and ethnography, Ours to Lose not only tells a little-known New York City story, it also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America." -- University of Chicago Press Review
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives is one of the collecting areas in NYU Special Collections and has a focus on left politics and labor history. The collection holds rich collections of books, serials, pamphlets, archives, photographs, oral histories, and more. Information on how to visit the collections is linked above.
Subject coverage spans a wide range of topics such as:
The Tamiment Library first initiated the Squatters' Collective Oral Histories Project in 2008 as a larger effort to document the squatters' movement in New York City. The project was later continued by Amy Starecheski who conducted an additional thirty-seven interviews for her scholarly research in cultural anthropology. This collection is comprised of forty-four interviews documenting the experiences of individuals living as squatters in New York City between the 1980s and the 2000s. Interviews included in this project touch on a number of topics including general discussions about the experience and politics of squatting; legalization of squats and negotiations with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB); gentrification; and the experiences of women and minorities in squats. The majority of squatters interviewed in this collection lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side, but the collection also contains discussion of squats in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx.
