TOMPKINS SQUARE RIOT REVISITED
By A. Kronstadt

The Tompkins Square Police Riot of August 6, 1988 and subsequent years of protest and resistance by squatters, activists, the homeless and low-income people on the Lower East Side was a rebellion against what New York City is currently: a place where real estate calls the shots and people of moderate income are being pushed out.

Neighbors who confronted rampaging cops that night were fed up with the gentrification of the neighborhood and the "quality of life" police state repression paving the way for the nouveau-riche and their false values.

Prior to mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani, in the 1980s, the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch facilitated a new dictatorship in which the financial sector and real estate interests call the shots in New York City.

The purge against the poor started with the removal of low-cost hotel rooms in favor of luxury hotels, leading to a flood of homeless people on the streets. Attention was also focused on under-valued parcels of  real estate on the long-neglected and partially burned-out Lower East Side, home to a vibrant and creative counterculture that had long made its political voice heard.

The tenacity of these "natives" made it difficult to market that part of the city--so close to Wall Street--to the upper middle class and wealthy. Among the things that were most offensive to the "yuppies" moving in were the freedom of the streets, including the street culture with its peddlers, performers and graffiti arts, and its open communities of homeless people sleeping in public places.

As real estate speculators flipped Lower East Side properties for mega-profits in the early `80s, it became clear to them that the epicenter of what threatened their plans to remove low-income residents was the blocks of city-owned abandoned buildings nearby that had been taken over by squatters who had created an alternative community and who were providing housing for the very people that Koch was trying to push out: hippies, punks, artists, and even drug addicts and people who had been chronically homeless for years.

Tompkins Square Park, then as now , was the great living room, gathering place and back yard for these folks and their neighbors. The park was the site of counter-cultural events, including concerts and political rallies. By the late 1980s, the park had become a center of radicalism on a par with People's Park in Berkeley, California, and a lightning rod for protest against the whole "greed is good" culture.

And thus, when certain self-appointed guardians against allowing the poor to congregate attempted to have a phony midnight curfew imposed in Tompkins Square Park to be enforced with the help of the all-too-willing police, neighbors righteously resisted the forces of law and disorder on the night of August 6, 1988.

It is significant that the Tompkins Square Police Riot of 1988 occurred at a time when the great economic boom and wave of gentrification had come to a halt in the wake of the stock market crash of September 1987. The fallacy of Ronald Reagan's "trickle- down economics" became apparent in the years following the crash, as the frailties of the "ownership society" are becoming apparent in our current economy.

We at the SHADOW hope that the rebellious consciousness of 1988 will spread through the neighborhood now as it did then, as the sham of the inflated real estate utopia self-destructs.