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New York City squatters from the 1990s
03.17.2015
09:53 am
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“Beer Olympics 1”
 
It’s strange to think of the 1990s as a bygone era, but artist and photographer Ash Thayer’s new book Kill City: Lower East Side Squatters 1992-2000 shows a New York that simply no longer exists. Thayer began living in a Lower East Side squat in 1992 after being kicked out of her Brooklyn apartment. As a young art student, she recorded the (mostly young and white) inhabitants of these crumbling buildings with a keen photographer’s eye and an unflinching focus on the decidedly unglamorous wreckage.

There is an optimism to the collection though; so many squatters looked at absolutely unlivable conditions and saw renovation potential—the picture of the pregnant women installing windows is particularly striking. Living in these buildings wasn’t even legal—they rarely had water or electricity, and were often infested with rats or roaches—so Thayer’s record of the LES squatters of the 90s is particularly precious, considering how covert many of these squatters had to be to evade eviction.
 

“Famous Pregnant and Building Windows”
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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03.17.2015
09:53 am
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German police mass 2500 officers to evict 25 residents of legal squat in Berlin
02.02.2011
11:56 am
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image
 
Dangerous Minds pal Chris Campion wrote this morning to alert me to something going on right outside his own apartment window today: More than 2500 German police officers are evicting the tenants of a former (now legal) squat in the Liebig 14 tenement block in the east Berlin district of Friedrichshain.

So there are 2500 cops. Guess how many residents there are? 25! Still, about a thousand protestors turned up to support the (legal) tenants. The most amazing thing about this is that the German police are apparently being used to enforce the will of a private landlord. Just imagine the cost of that little operation!

From The Guardian:

Demonstrations and publicity stunts are planned across Berlin throughout the day. Already, protesters claim to have paintballed the famous department store KaDeWe, Berlin’s answer to Harrod’s, along with the town hall in the district of Schöneberg, where John F Kennedy gave his"Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.

The building, which has 25 bedrooms, four kitchens and five bathrooms, was first squatted in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After Berlin’s housing board took ownership of the house in 1992, the squatters signed a lease making them the legal residents.

After it was sold to private developers, the lease was passed on to the current occupiers, who range from 19 to 40 years old and hail from around the world. One British resident, a 24-year-old PhD student, gave her name as Sarah.

“We were told we have to leave because the landlord wants to renovate the house and divide it up into expensive flats, which is what has already happened to other alternative housing projects like ours,” she said.

“People with not much money are being forced out of Berlin city centre. This is not just about 25 people losing their home, it’s a protest against the gentrification of the city and ordinary people all over being priced out of their local housing market.”

Sarah refused to say how much rent she paid, but it is widely believed to be a token amount. German media has reported that the rent is still set at 1992 levels, which equates to just €1 (85p) per square metre per month.

The district mayor, Franz Schulz, criticised the eviction. “It is not a good day. We’re losing an important alternative project,” he told Inforadio.

Most of today’s protesters were in their 20s or 30s, but standing by the police line on the south side of Liebigstrasse were an older couple from Munster, who looked on with concern.

“Our daughter is one of the residents,” said the 60-year-old university professor, who did not want to be named.

“She has lived there for 10 years now. We come and visit every month or two. It’s almost like our second home. I know many of her housemates and they are nice, peaceful people. It’s crazy that the city of Berlin is allowing this to happen.”

Crazy and tragic.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.02.2011
11:56 am
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