No more slow-smile leatherboys with unironic tattoos. No more bearded communist daddies with soft bellies and hard eyes. Good-bye to the forgotten guitar genius with his thin-armed jangling walk and his rock ‘n’ roll banter in his claustorphobic top-floor studio. Good-bye to the aging actor with his whispered Buddhist chants, perched on a stool day after day in the caged basement vestibule of his subterranean St. Marks castle. Good-bye to the miraculously middle-aged junkie with her sweet nodding head and her needled arms. Money’s pushing into the Lower East Side. All-consuming consumer class. Into the river, freaks and artists. Rents are rising, prices rising. We’re all going condo and to hell with the cost ... But not yet, not just yet. There’s still a foothold here, a crack to work your fingers into there. Hang on, hang on. It’s not over yet Pigeon shit and garbage and soot, sure, but where else does the light look like this, the water towers round out into the sky coming on dusk?      This is our city. Go ahead and love her, because we’ve still got a chance. Our city; our beloved, hated city. From up here on the rooftop, look down and the streets are pulsing, living thing. From up here, can you tell anyone apart? The street-smart braided hippie; the practiced young punk; the Wall Streeter, slumming on Avenue B? It’s just people, all just people flowing along down the street. Street music. Music of feet and cars and the underscore of the subway rumbling beneath those feet and aren’t we all here, now all of us in it together?

The way things are now, the way money rules—a person doesn’t have to just bow down and swallow that. It only is the way things are until people say no. Until they decide that there’s a better way to live, and rise up. That’s what they’re doing here in the squat. They’re standing up. They’re saying no. No, we will not be drones in the great corporate hive. No, we will not sacrifice our time and happiness to the all-consuming goddamn maw of consumption. No. We’re going to take this unused land, and we’re going to build a home on it, and we’re going to live here, together. A community of resistance. Sharing this land, pooling our resources, helping each other. We will spend our time thinking, making art, sleeping, making love, raising children.

It’s the nature of things. The rich eat the poor, then shit them out into the crappy run-down tenement corners of the city. Then more rich folks, and folks who want to be rich folks, move to the city and they need more room. But it’s a fucking island and there isn’t all that much room left, right? So crappy corners start to look better, especially to the ones who aren’t rich yet (and probably never will be, sweetie, sorry to break it to ya), and they move on in and eat the poor all over again, but where is there left to crap them out now? Across the river, in Brooklyn. And when the rich have gobbled Manhattan all down, then what? Roll on over to Brooklyn and take over the poor neighborhoods there.

You feed your kid packaged, pre-washed spinach that you can’t possibly know is tainted with E. coli and your child dies. Your husband rides his bike to work, as mine does every day, and gets sideswiped by a car. Your city is demolished by a massive earthquake. I am acquainted with sudden, unexpected death, and it is my most fundamental fear: the fear that shapes me, that would define me if I allowed it.