Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City

Abstract

In July 1986, a newly renovated sixteen-story building was the real estate industry's $10 million wager that New York City's young upper middle class was ready to pay a premium to live anywhere downtown. On the eastern edge of Tompkins Square Park, the Christadora was a reset jewel in a setting of vacant lots and de-lapidated tenements. Originally built as a settlement house for immigrants, the new condominium epitomized the sort of economic and social transformation that developers desired for the Lower East Side as a whole. Re-faced brick walk-ups and nearby tenements draped in banners advertising “luxury units” were the classic indications that private capital had finally targeted for gentrification the long-neglected Lower East Side. Or was it all just fool's gold? On August 7, 1988, a few hundred neighbors of the Christadora gathered in Tompkins Square Park to protest a recently imposed midnight curfew. A twenty-four-hour hangout for punks, junkies, unelected politicians, and bored adolescents, the park represented all that was undeveloped and unplanned in the neighborhood. The influx of yuppies and new investment had in many cases simply displaced these established residents of the area. For those unable to afford even pre-gentrifica-tion rents, the park became their permanent home. The gathering turned into a full-scale riot that left forty-four people injured. A video of the demonstration and the violent reaction of the police in clearing the area, run and rerun on the local news, vividly marks the exact moment that the most recent Lower East Side boom went bust.