I lived on the Lower East Side in the 1990s. The neighborhood was very different then. There were still vacant lots and crumbling brick buildings. Every morning at dawn, I’d hear a rooster.
My boyfriend and I lived in a studio near Avenue C. An old man lived below us, and when his son would visit, he’d open the door and stand talking to his father from the hallway because the stench was so bad. The building leaked. Once, I saw a neighbor come up the stairs with an open umbrella to avoid getting rained on.
Cheap rents were a motivator for many people to live in the area. There were artists, sure, but there were also a lot of working-class people. It was not unusual then to see an elderly Eastern European woman in a housecoat sweeping her stoop.
Some of those artists lived in squats. They were the pioneers. They moved into abandoned buildings, sometimes just the shell of a building, and restored them themselves. They did this on the cheap, often with scrounged materials. Some of these buildings still exist today. One of them, C-Squat, now houses the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space at 155 Loisaida Ave.
The museum is devoted to the history of squats, community gardens, and other forms of urban activism. It offers tours and events. On Jan. 8, it hosted a talk about anarchist bookstores from the 1990s—Sabotage, Blackout, and other short-lived spaces—to discuss the challenges they faced, the reasons they closed, and the possibility of creating an anarchist space today.
The event was advertised to start at 5 p.m. When I arrived, the room was crowded with paraphernalia related to neighborhood protests—posters, puppets, and flyers—but otherwise empty.
One of the volunteers stomped across the rows of folding chairs to adjust the projector. Turning to me, she said, “You with the notebook—do you know how this thing works?”
By 6 p.m., the narrow space was standing room only. Neither the panelists nor the moderator had arrived.
Several times, Bill Di Paola, a co-founder of the museum, asked the question the crowd was wondering: Who are we waiting for? He stalled for time by talking about the neighborhood’s history and the importance of volunteers in making things happen. Yet he acknowledged that free help often doesn’t like to do paperwork, cleaning, or security.
“What time did we advertise this?” Di Paola asked. “Welcome to the volunteer situation. A normal speaker would show up early. So here you go. That’s what’s happening.”
Eventually a few men made their way to the front of the room to discuss working in these bookstores. They disputed dates. At one point, an argument over timing stalled the conversation until someone in the audience cut in: “Was it 1996 or was it 1997? Who cares?”
When the moderator finally arrived, she attempted to bring the discussion into focus. She asked concrete questions meant to orient people who had never been to these spaces: What did they look like? What did they smell like? What was it like to be inside them?
The speakers had their own priorities. They pushed back against the idea that these spaces were ever meant to function as regular retail businesses. One said, “People emphasized the bookstore and thought this was a business thing that was going to go on for decades like Barnes & Noble or something.” Another framed the divide more bluntly: “Some people like to read about anarchist theory. Some people actually apply it.”
Halfway through the event, the crowd was corralled downstairs into a much larger space. The first panel had been all men. This one was all women. What was noticeable was the difference in how the discussion unfolded. The moderator’s questions—about sensory detail, lived experience, and daily reality—were taken up directly.
The speakers described the spaces as always being small. One had a copy machine (popular with everyone) and a bathroom (popular with heroin addicts, until one volunteer had the idea of using blue lightbulbs to make veins impossible to see).
The women talked about power dynamics: who held the lease and who did the work. “Consensus didn’t always result in action,” one speaker said. Another followed: “You can have an anarchistic group project, but there has to be structure. Otherwise, it’s chaos.”
At one point, a woman in the audience offered a note of caution. Idealism alone was not enough to sustain a shared project. “People aren’t what they say they are,” she said. “They’re what they do.”
I remember visiting one of these bookstores when I lived in the neighborhood. My friend Karen wanted to go. Her boyfriend was a graffiti artist who had a red fake-fur couch. She had framed botanical prints on her wall. I think she was trying to get on his wavelength. I don’t remember much about the space except the feeling: subversive and cool. Yet faced with the shelves of books and pamphlets, I had no idea where to start.
People at the event bemoaned the absence of an anarchist bookstore in the neighborhood today. The evening showed that anarchy in the community is alive and well.
