Nature and the Pioneer between 14th and Houston; from 1st to the East River

Writing — and living — in New York City in 2024, it can be difficult to imagine a version of it where the Financial District (FiDi) and Midtown Manhattan don’t feel like a central aesthetic pull in the city’s identity. Their skyscrapers of glass and steel physically tower over the rest of the city. They house the seemingly immortal giants of global financial capital: they are the physical instantiations of New York’s claim to the “world class,”^c1 to the title of the global city. It can be equally difficult to imagine a version of New York in which SoHo doesn’t feel like a central aesthetic pull. A neighborhood once home to a subaltern arts scene criminalized by the city because its members lived in buildings not zoned for residential use,^c2 as put on the NYC tourism website,

still features galleries, though these days the work within them tends toward the more high-end commercial — matching the luxury boutiques and independent-designer outposts that characterize the area. Once you’ve had your dose of retail therapy, take a break with a meal at one of the neighborhood’s many excellent restaurants or a drink at one of its elegant boutique hotels.^c3

The wealth brought by the city’s dominant financial capitals spills into SoHo, offering what feels like a curated luxury consumerist experience grafted onto its iconic cast-iron, Neo-Grec buildings.

But these aesthetic pulls are relatively recent in the city’s history, well within the frame of living memory: they come from the transformation of New York as a metropolis brought about by a “new spatial division of labor” that emerged from the concurrent (and causally linked) deregulation of financial markets in the late twentieth century.^c4,c5 That is to say, they come from a transition in the paradigm of global capitalism from a concentration of industrial labor and production in the cities of the developed world — for whom the underdeveloped world served as a raw material-exporting appendage — to one in which industrial production is globalized. In the latter, this globalization is managed by (and for the profit of) institutions of financial capital based in the cities of the developed world. The transition that the aesthetic pulls of FiDi, Midtown, and SoHo represent — that being the loss of industrial production, the rise of global capital, and the consumerism that came with it in the developed world — was a recent one.

I offer this brief portrait — if that — of these three sites to contextualize my work here in the aesthetic landscape that the city has come to be. This paper, though, examines the area bound by 14th Street to the North, Houston St to the South, 1st Avenue to the West, and the East River, looking at its particular experience of the transition that built that aesthetic landscape throughout the 1990s.

Physically, the site is a brief walk Northeast from SoHo (whose name comes from “South of Houston,” the Southern border of the area in question). Though no subway stations service it, a walk two blocks west of the western border of the area brings you to the Astor Place 6 stop, which offers a 15 minute ride to Midtown or FiDi. Physically situated between what had come to be the symbolic centers of the transition New York City was undergoing, this space was a particularly interesting one in terms of how those who lived their lives there navigated the changing landscape, often in opposition with what was sanctioned by the state. In this paper, I will offer a compilation of narratives mobilized by people and state power in their competing claims to the space as the city around them underwent this state-sanctioned transition in the 1990s. Perhaps against the conventional imaginary of the sorts of narratives people mobilize around urban spaces, it was the place of the image of nature and the pioneer that stood out to me in these claims. Here, I compile competing and concurrent uses of these images, first contextualizing them with both a history of the site and a history of these images.

I. The Site

Today, this site has a distinct neighborhood identity: it is, unequivocally, the East Village. Historically, though, it was part of the broader Lower East Side (LES). Since the early nineteenth century, the neighborhood had been home to the city’s industrial working class, many of whom lived their working lives in the Garment District, where the city’s textile manufacturing industry was centered.^c6 Today, the Garment District is part of Midtown South and home to many designer labels: once choked by the dust, lint, heat, and humidity of industrial production, it too has become an expensive, consumerist rebrand of its past. As New York underwent its initial phase of industrialization, the LES came to be an ad-hoc patchwork of privately owned tenements. Landlords, seeking an inexpensive way to maximize the capacity of their buildings for profit, sectioned off their existing three- or four- story buildings into railroad flats, which got their name from the fact that their rooms were linked together like train cars. Of course, this resulted in cramped, unventilated, unplumbed, and unhygienic living conditions: prior to 1867, a standard tenement floor in the LES would be divided into eighteen rooms. Because the buildings used 90 percent of their 25-by-100 foot lots, only the two street-facing rooms with windows received sunlight out of the eighteen total; the little “yard” space left over would be dedicated to both communal water taps and outhouses.^c7,c8 City efforts to improve hygiene standards during this time treated the working people of the LES as collateral. Completed in 1842, the Croton Aqueduct brought clean water straight from the Croton River to the private homes of wealthy New Yorkers. The resulting lack of use of the city’s wells increased the water table, causing many of the basement dwellings of the LES to flood with local brackish waters full of the industrial pollutants their inhabitants were exposed to in their working lives.^c9

The LES’s status as a condemned space for the urban poor happened in the relative blink of an eye: within living memory, the land was transformed from a “salt meadows” ecosystem to the jumble of tenements it became.^c10 As late as 1834, when the city gifted the marshland to Peter Gerard Stuyvesant to drain and develop as a public space, the expectation had been that the “rather elegant districts that…[had] been developing a few blocks to the west — along Second Avenue, Lafayette, and Bond Streets — would expand eastward.”^c11 The Panic of 1837 prevented this expansion of a prosperous and genteel New York.^c12 Instead, that tract of land (bound by 10th Street to the North, 7th to the South, Avenue A to the West, and C to the East) came to be squarely embedded in the lives of — and a center for congregation and political resistance by — the working people of the LES. In 1857, by which point it was known as Tompkins Square Park, the neighborhood’s Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants protesting lack of jobs and food were attacked by police.^c13 In 1863, it was the center of what remains the largest urban civil disturbance in American history. Primarily Irish working class people saw the Republican party as colluding with the urban bourgeois to oppress them, and had aggregated this sentiment with racist sentiments because of Civil War conscription policies. This culminated in a riot in which they clashed with police, going on to burn down the lavish homes of the Republican elite and murder African Americans in the street.^c14,c15 By the 1870s, it was the central site of the city’s labor movement and class violence: in 1874, police violently crushed a demonstration at Tompkins demanding the government to help ease the strain of the Panic of 1873;^c16 In 1877, 5,000 people who had gathered at the park to listen to Communist Revolutionary speakers were attacked by the National Guard.^c13

The LES maintained its identity as the home of the industrial working class and a battleground for the city’s class (and at times, racial) conflict as long as the industrial working class in New York existed. The neighborhood underwent change — through the cycles of union resistance and decline; through municipal regulation of its structures; through its evolving demographics. Its medley of unregulated pre-existing buildings haphazardly adapted into tenements were first replaced by the state-regulated, standardized dumbbell style of the Old Law tenements. Their structural design was primarily in response to the regulation that required living quarters to have windows, which landlords addressed by opening a three-foot airshaft between buildings — which ended up acting as a flue that spread fires from apartment to apartment —^c17 and putting windows between interior rooms, taking privacy away from their tenants.^c18 A typical street in the LES today is lined with these five-story Old Law tenements except on the corners, where more profit could be made by building the bulkier New Law tenements which, characteristically of the gilded age, feign opulence with their heavy terracotta ornamentation.^c19 After the Second World War, the combination of the Great Migration and Puerto Rican immigration made these buildings home to the first racially integrated neighorhood in New York. It was in this moment that the area that is the focus of my inquiry here came to have its first distinct identity: as Loisaida, a Puerto Rican riff on “the Lower East Side” and New York’s neighborhood naming style (e.g. Tribeca for Triangle Below Canal; Nolita for North of Little Italy). By the 1960s, it was New York’s first predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood.^c20

This drastic demographic shift away from the Irish, Jewish, Italian, German, and Ukrainian mix of the previous century was symptomatic of liminal time in the city’s transition from a center of industrial production to a center of global financial capital. It was in the 1960s that labor came to have its contemporary global spatial division: the local class antagonisms of old — embodied in New York by the callous, profiteering construction of the buildings of the LES and the violence at Tompkins Square Park throughout the nineteenth century — were divided across oceans. In the supply chain, New York’s factories were replaced by those with cheaper labor in underdeveloped nations just starting to industrialize as they emerged from decolonization.^c21,c22 In New York, this meant that the tenements of the LES — in derelict condition after the better part of a century of hard use — were abandoned by their landlords, who could no longer turn a profit from them, and often burnt them down to claim the insurance money.^c23 At this point, white people had left the neighborhood, either coalescing in neighborhoods like Little Italy or joining the (government-aided)^c24 post-War white flight to suburbia.^c21,c25

With no more industrial working class in New York, the neighborhood came to signify urban decline: abandoned tenements perceived as “blighted” were torn down by the city, which because of a financial crisis caused by the loss of middle taxpayers,^c26 left their rubble behind.^c27 By the ‘80s, its urban ruins came to be afflicted by the twin epidemics of crack and AIDS.^c23 A combination of this aesthetic of a neighborhood on the edge and the fact that it was extremely cheap to live there, though, attracted waves of hippies, musicians, writers, and fine artists to the neighborhood. Starting with the Beat generation — among them Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Courso —^c29 the area became a center for counterculture and a squatting movement in New York. At this point — near simultaneously with the invention of a “Loisaida” identity — my area of interest here developed a second identity: the East Village, an extension of the Greenwich Village, which had been the birthplace of the Beat Generation, ‘60s counterculture, and the modern LGBTQ movement. As the New York Times put it as early as 1960: “this area is gradually becoming recognized as an extension of Greenwich Village ... thereby extending New York’s Bohemia from river to river.”^c30 As the East Village, the space came to be the home of the punk and queer movements in New York;^c31 on St. Marks Place in the ‘80s, you could find RuPaul, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Talking Heads, and the Ramones.^c32,c33 As Loisaida, it came to be the home of the Nuyorican literary movement.c34

By the mid- to late ‘80s, the combination of the countercultural edge of the East Village aesthetic and the professional wealth brought to the city by the rise of its global financial capital had started to lead to its gentrification.^c35 It was at this moment that the competing claims to the neighborhood — those of Loisaida, those of the East Village, and those of the state on the side of global financial capital — clashed, and it was in these clashing claims that each of these groups mobilized the images of nature and the pioneer.

II. Nature and the Pioneer

The images of nature and the pioneer are the most iconic cultural inventions of the American consciousness. As William Cronon conceived of them, these images are inextricably linked with the reworking of ideas around wilderness by the urban elite of the American industrial city: the very same urban elite who exploited the labor and livelihoods of the people of the LES in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Older uses of the word “wilderness” evoke “barren” or “desolate” land that could only have value when reclaimed and used to human ends,^c36,c37 but also had an embedded ancient association in Abrahamic religions with the possibility of divine revelation.^c38 As America underwent its urban-industrial capitalist transformation, many of “the very men who most benefited from [it]... believed they must escape its debilitating effects:”^c39 wilderness ceased to have value in its potential use-value if subjected to human labor, and instead came to have value in its complete alienation from the process of labor. Drawing from the word’s ancient significance, it came to be understood in terms of its sublime, revelatory potential. Men in the urban elite who — unlike their workers and their tenants, whose everyday lives were lives of hard labor — were concerned about the feminizing tendencies of civilization, constructed a mythology of “virgin” land that, as Frederick Jackson Turner theorized, allowed people to rediscover their primitive racial natures and reinvigorate themselves.^c40 Wilderness (as nature) was imagined to put people in touch with their nature. When wilderness came to be designated (and policed) in the boundaries of the administrative state, the imaginary around it was inherently contradictory: On the one hand, to protect nature was to protect an image of the pioneer that would be incomprehensible without self-sufficiency and labor; On the other hand, the protection of wilderness consisted in forbidding human labor on it. As Cronon theorizes it, notions of labor lie outside of notions of nature: “Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to to actually make their living from the land.”^c41

While Cronon’s “nature” and therefore “pioneer” was one constructed by the urban elite, the construction and use of the imaginaries of urban life is not a unilateral process taken up by the industrial age upper classes. The people of the East Village-Loisaida — in dialogue with each other and systems of power — reclaimed and reworked these images for themselves. The state — in dialogue with them and narratives in the media — did the same.

III. Case Studies

Neil Smith, in his examination of narratives of urban decline in New York in the ‘90s, paints a portrait of the confluence of media narratives around the pioneer and state action in regulating those on the other side of the ‘frontier’ in the East Village-Loisaida. The financial crash of the 1987 and the subsequent depression destroyed the “stretch-limo optimism” of the 1980s:^c42 while the ‘80s were characterized by the spillover of New York’s new global capitalist wealth into much of the LES and the Village, moving from West to East, in the ‘90s “there is no demand for pioneering, transitional, recently discovered locations.”^c43 If traditional pioneering narrative’s notion of “discovery” of lands that have been inhabited for millennia strike the ear as absurd, grafting them onto 20th century urban neighborhoods reaches new heights. Regardless, this was commonplace in ‘90s discourse about New York: the days of white, upper-middle class optimism around the reclamation of “the new urban frontier” in the name of (white) “pioneers” were seen as being over.^{c44,c45,c46,c47} In their place emerged a white upper-class discourse of decline:

An unabated litany of crime and violence, drugs and unemployment, immigration and depravity — all laced through with terror — now script an unabashed recidivism of the city. The revanchism of contemporary urban management is a visceral component of the new anti-urbanism, a reaction against the 'theft' of the city by variously defined 'others'...This revanchist anti-urbanism of the 1990s portends an occasionally vicious reaction against minorities, the working class, homeless people, the unemployed, women, gays and lesbians, immigrants.^c48

It was around this time that war-like, territorialized formulations were used to describe solutions to the problems that faced the East Village-Loisaida. Writing about the Tompkins Square Park, the New York Times claimed that the homeless had “stolen it from the public” and that the land had to be “reclaimed.”^c49 State action embodied this discourse of war-like territoriality: “Operation Restore” was intended to “take back” the parks. First, it mobilized police to occupy and close Tompkins, evicting all of its homeless, who fled East and established ten tent-cities on empty lots in the more Puerto Rican area of the neighborhood, between B and D. Like occupied territories, these sites were subject to surveillance and fenced in.^c51,c51 Eventually, the state mobilized heavy construction machinery on their own people, destroying these sites and forcing them Southeast to encampments under the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, which were eventually met with the same industrial violence.^c52

The state’s enthusiastic acceptance of the media’s narratives around the pioneer and the frontier reproduced America’s original pioneer-frontier dynamic, in which those on the wrong side of the frontier were successively relocated and, after each relocation, met with another round of violence when their new homes were considered too close to the frontier. Recast into a late twentieth century urban space, that violence was characterized by fences, police surveillance, riot gear, and bulldozers.

Before the city violently pushed the frontier East from Tompkins in 1991, Andrew Mattson and Stephen Duncombe captured the discourses around the heavy police surveillance of Tompkins in the fall of 1990. In most of the park, there was a consensus that each particular group — the homeless, the punks, the junkies — had a claim to a certain space. These claims, of course, were precarious, and subject to the whims of occupying police force. While officers’ power was mitigated by the lack of faith in the efficacy of arrest (given the city’s overburdened criminal system),^c53, they still had the ability to destroy people’s homes at will. While they would overlook minor illegalities, any “back talk” or disorder would be met with this sort of violence, which police described as the revoking of a “privilege.”^c54 The implication here is that police’s default disposition to the people who lived in the territory they occupied was violence, and it was only the occupied people’s embodiment of what police saw as suitably orderly that gave them the “privilege” of peace. The state renovation of the park in the spring of 1990 served to make enforcing this easier for police: it reinforced the spatial division of the park, segregating it with fences that made its regulation easier.

Notably, this entire system of segregation and occupation rested on a Cronon-adjacent image of the park as a natural respite from urban life: Mattson and Duncombe quote park goers as emphasizing the importance of maintaining the “fragile ecology” of the park, and the importance of “preserv[ing] the visual pleasure of sitting and looking out over an open grassy space with trees, so unlike the crowded streets.”^c55 This was central to police regulation of park activity: whereas certain spaces were demarcated as more private, in which people could conduct themselves with more freedom, it was the park’s grassy knoll that was most vigilantly monitored by police.

This created a dynamic where punks saw pulling the park’s flowers up as form of resistance: “there’s nothing rosy about this park,”^c56 one park-goer said. The plant life of the grassy knoll, in its significance as an escape from city life, was read by some as window dressing that existed to obscure the reality of injustice by aestheticizing a pocket of the city as natural.

...

Not all responses to state mobilizations of the images and nature had this life-denying quality, though. In many cases, the people of the East Village-Loisaida reclaimed these discourses for themselves. Based on Amy Starecheski’s ethnography of squatters in the East Village-Loisaida during this time period, squatters’ use of the image of the pioneer did not have the same logical tension with labor and nature as the image Cronon critiques. In fact, it was mainly construed in terms of labor and creation. Starecheski quotes squatters as mentioning their “flesh mixed in with the mortar there,” their “shoulder…knees…and lungs are forever in this building,” or as placing their art or objects of sentimental value behind layers of drywall.^c57 “The stories squatters told,” Starecheski writes, “about their hard work, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial spirit probably had some roots in the pioneer narratives that undergird an American sense of peoplehood.”^c58 Squatters employed the image of the pioneer to the end of creating a counternarrative to popular notions that they were freeloaders.

Their counter-narrative was not accepted by the city, who could only apprehend their lives and labor as criminal activity: for a long time, people’s reclamations of the images of legitimacy mobilized by the state were not accepted, and often met with police violence. As a result, squatters (many of whom did not see their goals as explicitly political) lived a radically politicized existence and resisted with political means: the Eviction Watch Network they organized explicitly saw themselves as succeeding the Yippies, Young Lords, and European urban squatting movements.^c59 After decades of narrating their history in pioneering terms and restoring the city’s buildings while doing so, the state eventually folded them into the frame of state-sanctioned property relations. The group that negotiated on behalf of the squatters was the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board: it was a claim to the image of the pioneer that decriminalized squatting.

Ironically — despite the fact that many of the squatters saw themselves as successors to traditions of resistance that themselves drew their methods from anticolonial struggles — the result of this deal reproduced the realities of settler colonialism underneath the romantic pioneer image. East Village-Loisaida squats were sold to the squatters for $1 each as HDFC limited-equity co-ops: this meant that each squatter owned a share of the property and had the right to make decisions about its management through an elected board while paying monthly fees. The agreement between the squatters and the city was that once the squatters had sufficiently revitalized the structures, they would be resold as affordable housing: the limited-equity nature of the arrangement meant that each squatter’s share was capped at $20,000. For squatters who had lived and labored without any compensation to create homes out of buildings reduced to rubble starting in the 1970s, $20,000 dollars in 2002 was meager compensation. Because of the way the state folded them into the frame of its legal framework, squatters could only seek better compensation by increasing the cap of their share, making the housing more expensive for the prospective buyers: largely Puerto Ricans who predated them in the neighborhood.^c60 “One could also see the squatters as settlers, colonizing the land of the ‘indigenous’ Puerto Ricans who inhabited the neighborhood when they arrived.”^c61 Squatters’ attempts to reclaim labor-based pioneering narratives in their self-identification (from back when their existence was criminalized) ended up embodying settler colonial dynamics when appropriated into the world of state logic. As Kristy Bard writes:

operating outside of the state, poses potentially the biggest threat to state power and authority…LES activists had proven they didn’t need the government to provide them with affordable housing; they had the effective power to take it for themselves. Formalizing a few squats into cooperatives was the city’s way of neutralizing activist’s power, effectively co-opting the movement.^c62

The co-optation put the co-opted in a position where they reproduced the dynamics of the co-opter.

Farther east in the neighborhood, Miranda J. Martinez describes a similar process by which a subaltern reclamation of the other part of Cronon’s image — nature — was modified upon its site being co-opted by state-sanctioned property relations. Her ethnography of Loisaida’s community gardens positions the garden as a site that fulfills psychological needs in human relationships with space. As Kaplan and Kaplan theorize, after one seeks orientational and security information, it is the experience of detail and discovery that make a space satisfying.^c63 The garden fulfills this insofar as it allows people to discover through the expression of their social imaginary, as an instrument to describe how the world works. Community members articulated this using a vocabulary of nature and creative labor:^c64 Unlike Cronon’s urban elite, Loisaida’s community garden members imagined their hands as creative forces on a nature to which they tended. This relationship gave people a deeper sense of territoriality:^c65 Martinez’s work is a wonderful example of ethnography’s propensity to reveal the active power of people in everyday life against structural tendencies. The twenty-first century global city may be a site of deterritorialization, but the gardens people cultivate in it give them a sense of territoriality.

In the city’s books, though, this land was “vacant” and its use was “temporary:” it could be sold for development without consultation of the people who used it.^c66 When people resisted mayor Rudy Giuiliani’s efforts to do exactly this, the city conceded that suitable spaces could become part of the parks department instead. The criteria were that the space had significant open common space, was formally organized, had extensive hours when it was open to the public, and had links with community organizations and schools.^c67 In order to save their gardens from being sold and “redeveloped,” people had to stop thinking about their labor as an extension of their personhood and desires but instead in terms of how to make the space meet the city’s criteria. Like the surrounding squats, the city’s co-optation of spaces into state-sanctioned property relations led to a breakdown of their founding narratives: people’s experience of the garden was no longer in terms of the satisfaction of a creative labor on nature, but instead in terms of doing what they could to save it by making it operate in a way that would be suitable for the goals of the parks department.

For both the squatters and the gardeners, the loss of coherence of people’s imagination around nature and the pioneer reflected a change in their relationship with these concepts and their own labor once they were brought into the city's books. The reclamation of these narratives was contingent on their existence outside of the frame of state recognition. In the end, it was the state’s initial mobilization of these narratives to police, regulate, and commit violence on its citizens that had the final say.