Author Archives: ileana

the bathroom – our first redo

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The bathroom was a beautiful idea in 1992. We were building it from the bones. Like most NYC bathrooms, it is very small. The size of a suburban closet. I wanted it to feel luxurious after living with crumbling tenement bathrooms for so long. Some of the homesteaders in our building were artists from the Squat Theater. Peter Halasz, a brilliant artist and principal in the Squat Theater collective installed tile on the side. He had connections to stone quarries and got us really cheap prices for stone tile. Thanks to Peter, the homesteaders all had expensive stones; marble, granite and slate in our bathrooms. I picked out a dark green slate, very spa-like. I did the walls myself in a mint green venetian plaster when I was 8 months pregnant with my second child. After 16 years, the bathroom was literally falling apart. A series of leaks from upstairs finished it off. I’ve started the renovation work here. This is the bathroom this summer.

after Certificate of Occupancy – the early days

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Our home design solutions have always been reactionary. In the homestead we started with a raw space. Babies came as soon as we moved in, The birth of a child would mean we’d buy a new bed for the new person to sleep in.  A newborn’s clothes would occupy one dresser drawer. As the infant became a toddler, it was three drawers. And when they started school, it was six drawers. We’d have more stuff – we’d buy or build something to put it in.   If a neighbor was getting rid of something that we could use – we’d take it. We didn’t have much of a budget to buy furniture and we knew nothing about design. The first baby had a crib purchased by my parents. As soon as she could stand, she would do anything to escape it. It became a place to dump toys in and drape clothes on – a big repository of clutter. So we gave it away, baby proofed everything and put a futon on floor. The second baby never had a crib. She slept first in our bed then moved to the floor futon with her sister.

Our living space was not shaped by design or beauty, only by where to stash things. First, in our raw space, we needed bookshelves, so the ex-husband and his friend built a very ugly bookcase that is still there. The so-called linen closet is the top part of that bookcase. You have to struggle to stuff the linen in because it is not deep. It is so high up that you have to climb on the highest chair in the house to put laundry away. Sometimes we are too lazy and we toss pillow cases into it as if we were playing basketball. It has sliding doors that never worked well and one day one fell off. We thought the second door could fall off and hit someone in the head so we took it off altogether. That meant the so-called linen closet was exposed to the view of everyone in the living room. My mother who could not see very well once thought it was a poster.

the start

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The apartment is a 800 square foot one bedroom (which we made into a two bedroom). It has a history. It is situated in New York’s East Village – really in Loisaida, which is a term that is credited to the poet, community activist, playwright and teacher Bimbo Rivas in his 1974 poem “Loisaida”. It is thought to be the pronunciation of a native Spanish speaker of “Lower East Side”. Avenue C is now Loisaida Avenue.

We started out as squatters at the height of the “Take Back the Land” movement of the 70s and 80s when landlords were burning down their buildings to collect the insurance money in the marginalized neighborhoods of a bankrupt city. Ours was a burnt out abandoned building. Majestic in size, our building is wide and expansive, not like the narrow tenement buildings so common in our historically immigrant neighborhood. Our hallways are wide and our apartments too, not like the more common railroad flats. When neighborhoods were more segregated, the community’s middle class could not move out to the suburbs but stayed put within their ghetto. There are buildings and entire blocks in our neighborhood that were obviously the homes of the doctors, lawyers and religious leaders of the community. There was a doctor’s office on our building’s first floor. We had to rip out the subway tile that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. The doctor probably lived upstairs.

In the early eighties, the neighborhood landscape was that of a bombed out city. Landlords burned and abandoned their properties. Residents went without basic services like heat and water. Entire areas were abandoned by government. There began a movement to take back the land in every respect. People took over their own buildings that landlords had stopped lording over and started managing themselves. People took over abandoned burnt buildings and rebuilt them. People took over empty lots and turned them into gardens. People took over abandoned schools and turned them into cultural centers. People took over abandoned banks and turned them into community banks that lent money to the homesteaders that took over the abandoned buildings.

When I came to my building, the group that had seized it had already been working for a few months and had just finished clearing  out the debris. When I came in October of 1980 we were starting the job of replacing beams and floors. It took us 12 years of working every weekend to finish rebuilding. We are twenty families – we had to stay cohesive as a group. We had to shape and respect a democratic collective process. We were also part of a movement. We were connected and in solidarity with all of the other players that were rising up out of the ashes in the neighborhood.

festival in the mid 80s with our building under construction in the background. Photo by Marlis Momber - vivaloisaida.org