It’s 10:47 am and a gritty wind blows through our living room. Francisca huddles on the couch that we have carefully arranged near a dumpster on the sidewalk, while Pilar, bundled in a parka, fusses with a stack of old televisions next to a row of parked cars. I roll over in the bed, crammed between a public telephone and an iron security fence, and notice that we have carved out our sleeping area on top of a secret repository for discarded chicken bones.

A middle-aged woman passes through our kitchen area and picks up an aluminum coffee pot. “How much is this?” she asks.

“It’s not for sale,” Francisca replies, “but we’ll be giving it away tomorrow morning at 6:00am.”

Pilar explains to the woman that we found the coffee pot, along with the couch, chairs, bed, television, kitchen set, dishes and clothes in the garbage, and that the three of us will be using everything to create a makeshift living space on the sidewalk for one full day, before we give it all away. The woman gives us a quizzical look and replaces the coffee pot onto the kitchen table.

A postal worker pauses in the living room to inform us of our impending doom. “The weather report says it’s going to be pouring by eleven,” he tells us.

We are only a few hours into our 24 - hour Urban Homestead. The three of us collectively shudder at what the early November sky may have in store. Hurricane Noel is scheduled to pass the tip of Long Island today, sending torrents of rain across the entire New York City Area.

Unlike previous incarnations of the Urban Homesteading Project, this homestead had been planned for weeks. We had secured a partner in crime, a local documentary-screening venue called Union Docs, to provide a bathroom and a source of electricity. We reached out to our friends and colleagues, inviting them to contribute unwanted household items and to join us in our homestead for however long the could endure the cold. We even rented a truck in anticipation of the volume of discarded home furnishings we might find. The truck rental paid off. After scavenging in nearby Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a mere two hours on the previous day, we filled our U-haul with enough reusable “refuse” to furnish half a city block. In the pre-dawn hours of a Saturday morning, we unloaded onto the sidewalk on Union Avenue, in a working class neighborhood in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, predominantly inhabited by Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and an ever-increasing population of the obligatory Williamsburg hipsters.

Francisca, Pilar and I had all been residents of South Williamsburg at one time or another; Francisca and I eventually moved to Greenpoint, while Pilar still resides in a large tenement building a few blocks from Union Docs. My experiences living in South Williamsburg, back in 1999 when I moved to New York after college, were flavored by a combination of friendly curiosity and blunt racial tensions. While the North Side of Williamsburg was in the midst of an explosive gentrification process in the late 1990’s, the South Side continued to retain its’ Puerto Rican and Hasidic majority, joined by a rapidly increasing populations of Dominicans and Ecuadorians. To many of our neighbors, my roommate and I were harbingers of an inevitable economic transformation that was unlikely to benefit any but the upper middle-class and wealthy, who would soon encroach upon the South Side in search of cheaper rent. While the deli owner across the street gave us discounts and joked with us in Spanish, and the grandmother living next door greeted me with a bear hug every time she saw me, other neighbors only acknowledged us with chilly stares that seemed to evoke what the teenage boy living downstairs often said when he saw us:

“Ugh, here come the white people.”

Even the police found our presence in the neighborhood to be disconcerting. During a police round up half a block from our apartment, my roommate Andrew was stopped on his way home, on suspicions of attempting to buy drugs.

“I live on this block,” Andrew pleaded.

“Yeah, right,” sneered the police officer.

Our relationship with our neighbors improved after Andrew and I were repeatedly observed picking items out of the garbage on our block. During our two months living in New York City, we had both failed to find regular work, and home improvements on our dingy, mustard-yellow apartment overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway had to be put on hold. As so many penniless New York émigrés had done before us, we furnished our apartment with discarded items from the street: a set of pots and pans and a kitchen table thrown away by our upstairs neighbors; a slightly leprotic velvet couch with matching love seat found on the corner a few blocks away. While it’s likely that Andrew and I were still viewed by many as representatives of the trespassing bourgeois class (but without the cash), the fact that we were depending on cast-offs from the community ingratiated us with some of our neighbors. An elderly woman on our floor tipped us off about some lamps that someone had ditched in the building foyer. The building handyman, Renaldo, left an end table in front of our door that he had dragged in off the street, after noticing our pursuit of usable garbage. A few days later he arrived to our apartment to fix a collapsed ceiling, lugging a salvaged television. Renaldo sat in our apartment for an afternoon, smoking marijuana and regaling us with the shady history of our block.

“South 2nd Street was crazy in the ‘70’s,” he told us. “The only way to stay alive was to join a gang. People were getting murdered execution-style all the time. Since then, things have changed, but man, this block is still crazy.”
Pilar recalls receiving similar warnings when she first moved to South Williamsburg, eight years ago.

“We were the only non-Puerto Rican or Dominican tenants in the whole building. People told us the neighborhood was really bad. It didn’t matter that I am from Chile; to the neighbors, I was the white girl. I just had no idea about the codes of the neighborhood when I first moved in.”

Francisca, who is Brazilian-born, and has lived in both Barcelona and Bogotá tells me that sharing a common language with her neighbors helped to break the ice.

“People didn’t expect me to speak Spanish. I could hear people making comments about me as I would walk up Havemeyer Street. When I responded in Spanish they were really surprised, but became much friendlier. Before I moved to Greenpoint, I lived for a while in a mostly Hasidic neighborhood. I was invisible to everyone except the Spanish-speaking deli owner down the block.”

Ultimately, Pilar’s willingness to stick it out in South Williamsburg paid off.

“The fact that I speak Spanish really helped me to get to know people. There’s a whole network of people in the community who I’ve developed good relationships with; the old lady who hangs out her front window to chat with people on the street; the building super and the deli owner; all the kids I’ve watched grow up over the years; even the heroin dealer living next door. My roommate and I developed a friendship with him and he sold us a nice futon for $40. Then one day the police broke down his door and he climbed out onto the roof and ran away.”

The first Urban Homestead was spontaneous: Francisca, Pilar and I came upon an entire living room that had been dumped along Franklin Avenue in Greenpoint while riding our bikes on a Sunday afternoon. We arranged the 1980’s era couches, a coffee table and a dresser along the sidewalk, and settled in for a few hours. We invited some friends for dinner, and ordered Thai food, which we had delivered to our couch. While people called out the occasional “Is that apartment rent stabilized?” and gave us the occasional odd look when passing by, we were mostly ignored. The experience was not that of interaction, but of observation of the patterns of people’s lives on that particular block, as they enjoyed a summer afternoon.

When it came time to decide where we would launch the first premeditated, 24-hour Urban Homestead, there was no question as to where we would do it. The streets of South Williamsburg, in all their fluctuations between friendliness and anger, strife and celebration were sure to provide the interactions we sought. Francisca, Pilar and I had all observed the culture of informal appropriation of public space that occurs in South Williamsburg. Whether watching television on the sidewalk or barbecuing on the street corner, people proudly lay claim to the neighborhood by bringing their private lives to the street, creating an atmosphere that is both exciting and intimate.

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Around 2:20 pm, the traffic is backed up at a stoplight on Union Avenue. Motorists stare at us as we huddle on the couch, watching a slightly defective VHS copy of Sixteen Candles that was found in a cardboard box on the Upper East Side. As Molly Ringwald’s adolescent bleating is drowned out by honking and revving engines, a raindrop falls directly into my eye. Pandemonium ensues as we attempt to rescue our living space from a soggy fate. Pilar hastily covers the bed with a tarp, while I sweep a pile of personal effects into a rickety dresser; horn-rimmed sunglasses, an address book and a bouquet of plastic flowers found inside a trunk on the banks of the East River. Francisca rolls up a rag rug formerly owned by a Hasidic family and tosses it behind the pay phone. An older man with a salt and pepper push-broom moustache strides past us, seemingly disinterested in our mad dash to preserve our stuff. He suddenly stops, a block and a half away and calls out to us.

“So basically you guys are just living in the street, can I ask why?”

“Why not start living with all the free stuff you find?” I answer.

“You mean you found this television in the street, and it works, perfectly?” he asks incredulously. “The man looks thoughtful for a moment. “You know, don’t get offended, but it’s mostly white people who throw working stuff away.”

While I suspect his assertion might be statistically untrue, my foraging missions have left me with a similar impression. If South Williamsburg is a hotbed of useful trash, areas like the Polish section of Greenpoint, the Upper East Side and the East Village are veritable Meccas for beautifully crafted furniture, functional electronics and semi-pristine house wares, all left for dead on the sidewalk. Even after finding a job and moving out of the apartment shared with Andrew and into a Polish, Puerto Rican and Italian section of Greenpoint, I found myself searching the curbside rubble for clothing, working electronics, LP’s and furniture. Random scavenging along my daily routes to and from work turned into premeditated nighttime expeditions on trash pick-up night. As my new apartment became cluttered with ramshackle cabinets and velvet paintings of lapdogs and severe-looking nuns, I was forced to purge my collection to make room for better finds. It was by returning my rescues to the street that I began to notice patterns within the life of reusable garbage. An old orange dresser I had outgrown disappeared hours after I dumped it on the curb. Three months later it was back on the street in front of our building, only to disappear again and rematerialize months later. One day I set a box of old clothes on the sidewalk; a pea coat I’d found hanging on a fence along with a few of my husband’s old sweaters and a lacy red bra and garter belt given to me as a joke at my wedding shower. The box of clothes inevitably vanished. Days later, I noticed a woman walking down the street in my old coat. I glimpsed the red bra and garter belt hanging on the laundry line of my upstairs neighbors, who were two elderly Polish women. My husband, Pierre, noticed the man who lived in a van around the corner wearing some of his old clothes.

“Hey, that was my sweater,” Pierre called out to him.

The man, who suffered from mental illness and was usually deep in conversation with himself suddenly became lucid. “Hey, thanks man!” he exclaimed.

As in South Williamsburg, the free exchange of objects that furnished the intimate space of a home, or in the case of clothing, a body, served to connect members of a community often fragmented by cultural misunderstandings and lack of common language. For me, the motivation to forge this connection eventually moved beyond utility, evolving into what could be called sentimentality, anthropology or even voyeurism. On late-night trash missions, Pierre and I kept an eye out for large heaps of overstuffed industrial garbage bags. Inside these bags we were likely to discover the melancholy chronicles of the recently deceased, spelled out in eyeglasses, magazines and false teeth, and punctuated by family photographs and “to do” lists written on pieces of scrap paper. On one such expedition, after being tipped off by a friend, we found the entire contents of an apartment, illegally dumped in North Williamsburg on the banks of the East River. The heap had already been picked over, anything of real monetary value carted away. The leftovers included mountains of clothes and bedding, huge stacks of photo albums, letters, diaries, scrapbooks and a crisp white envelope containing the last will and testament of a man named Kenneth Brownlie. As we explored the pile, two young Mexican women gleaned all the shoes and luggage from the site and hauled it away in an old shopping cart. A middle-aged woman, openly smoking crack, put on several men’s trench coats and staggered off into the night. It began to rain. Pierre and I frantically gathered together all the papers, photos and personal effects we could, leaving the remainder to dissolve into oblivion on the riverbank. The next day, wearing one of his sweaters, I spread Kenneth’s possessions across my living room floor. I learned that Kenneth died at age 74, and that he was a child psychologist in the Queens Public School system. He served in the military, spoke German, and was a member of the Goethe Institute. He had a sister and a niece with whom he was very close, loved the theater and was preceded in death by his lover and sole beneficiary, Harold Greenberger. I searched on the Internet for his sister and for the attorney who prepared his will, but had no luck. I folded his sweater and put it in my drawer and filed his will and his diaries away with my own personal papers. A military portrait of Kenneth Brownlie now hangs on my office wall, next to the military portrait of my paternal grandfather, who died in WWII and left very few keepsakes behind.

Sometimes Pierre will comment: “Oh, you’re wearing Kenneth’s sweater today,” or “the cat peed on one of Kenneth’s socks last night.”

Kenneth has been absorbed into our lives as seamlessly as other unknown, deceased relatives from whom we have randomly inherited the odd rolling pin or record album. In his book “Mongo: Adventures in Trash” Ted Botha separates the varieties of garbage aficionados into ten categories, that range from “Pack Rat” and “Survivalist” to “Voyeur” and “Archeologist.” Botha writes: “In time, I also discovered that collectors don’t go only for what you see on the sidewalk but also for what lies under the sidewalk and behind the sidewalk.” (Botha, pg. 4) Similarly, the act of collecting, as it relates to community, can sometimes take the form of surface negotiations and the expansion of firm social boundaries, and other times manifest as an intimate and elusive relationship based on the preservation of memory, both real and imagined.

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At 5:30 pm, several of our friends have braved the cold to join us, and sit huddled on the bed. Some people knit, others steal nips of whisky and watch a found VHS tape that is labeled “Carrie,” but is actually a black and white French film recorded off PBS.
“What a feeling……feels blah blah la la la…”

A scruffy guy wearing a hockey jersey erupts in a half-assed rendition of “Flashdance” as he rifles through the magazines on our coffee table. A willowy blonde woman in yoga pants fondles a stack of plastic plates in the kitchen area.

“You can take it all for free after 6am tomorrow,” Pilar calls out, from under an enormous pile of blankets.

“God damn, I thought this was a yard sale,” says the Flashdance-guy, throwing the magazine down in disgust.”

“But you can have it for free, tomorrow,” I tell him.

“Nah, nah man, I don’t want it,” he replies, backing away.

The woman in yoga pants clutches the plastic plates to her bosom for a moment, before returning them to the table and walking off.

Raphael, a resident of Union Ave. for over 30 years, arrives, carrying a stack of VHS tapes. Raphael has visited the homestead several times already today, first inquiring if he could have the blankets and television when we were done, then to bring us all hot coffee and donuts.

“I’ve got something to donate,” he tells us. “Something to get you through the night.”
Raphael synopsizes the movies he has brought as he hands over the stack of tapes, which includes “Children of the Corn Part V,” “The Hollow Man.” “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning,” he calls to us as he hurries away.

A minivan slams on its brakes in front of our homestead and a white-haired man leaps out.

“I was just on my way to have sushi and I saw you people here,” he exclaims, running over to us. “This is great, it’s great, what is it?”

We explain our project to him and invite him to sit down. He sprawls on the bed with our friends, beaming.

“I paid no rent for almost 20 years. I was a squatter and I found my entire house in the garbage. Look at you people, you’re living like kings over here! You people are beautiful.”

The man pulls out a digital camera and snaps a picture of himself lying on the bed with our friends, then jumps up and runs back to his van.

“Pay no rent!” he screams out the window, before driving away.

The idea of interrupting capitalism in some small way has become inextricable from the Urban Homesteading Project’s agenda, which in part, channels the spirit of the “Freegans,” a group that has achieved preeminence in the art of resourcefulness by gleaning clothing, household furnishings and food from the garbage. For the Freegans, garbage picking is an activity rooted in abstinence:

Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able. (http://freegan.info)

The creation of the Urban Homesteading Project was influenced by a shared anxiety about capitalism’s corruptive impact on our natural and social environment, yet critics of our project have pointed to the suggestion of material gain that is underlying and often intrinsic the social exchanges that take place within the homesteads. The pursuit of usable waste, especially as demonstrated by the fanatic junk collector or the covetous passerby, evokes the rampant human characteristic of material lust that encompasses the very heart of a capitalist system.

Despite gathering inspiration from the Freegan movement, Urban Homesteading Project has not wholly renounced the capitalist system; our homesteads are in part designed to illustrate the futility of investing in an object that is destined to become waste long before the object has lost its function. Far more important to us than condemning the satisfaction of material gain is our critique of the available forums in which these negotiations and interactions can take place, or to put it simply, the lack of public space in South Williamsburg, in New York City, and in the United States. This outlook also applies to critiques of our project as it relates to homelessness. The Urban Homesteading Project in its often-playful approach to urban survival has been criticized for making light of this issue. However, the UHP, in it’s recreation of living spaces that mirror the informal public habitats of the homeless, brings attention to the peripheral, invisible existence of those living in space by creating a bizarre situation that people feel compelled to look at.

I was the idea of fluid public space, against the backdrop of 25,000 tons of garbage collected daily in New York City that first inspired Francisca, Pilar and I to create the Urban Homesteading Project. In September, the three of us had undertaken a series of aimless wanderings around Brooklyn on our bicycles, inspired by the Situationist practice of the “dérive,” a concept invented by French theorist and filmmaker, Guy Debord. Debord writes in his essay “Theory of the Dérive,

"In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones." (Debord, 1958)

It was a practice that we had all undertaken separately before our collaboration, and was as much out of a common interest in urban exploration and social geography as it was a practice employed to amuse oneself for free in an increasingly unaffordable city. We dubbed this activity as our “Psycho-Rides” (short for psychogeography). As is described by Debord, we sought those “psychogeographical contours” that exist between community and industry, and as is sadly the case in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the fragile patterns of nature amidst calamitous environmental destruction. We explored the trails along the Newtown Creek, an infamous tributary of the 17 million gallons of crude oil that continuously oozes beneath Greenpoint. We came upon both industrial cemeteries and cemeteries situated within dreary pockets of industry. We observed the improvised living spaces of the homeless near overgrown railroad tracks. The spaces were in various states of deconstruction, the people once driven to the periphery, now shifted onward to places unknown.

Cruising across Greenpoint to the Williamsburg waterfront, we found an elegantly contoured chez-lounge constructed from plywood, accompanied by a coffee tables and stools, arranged to face the sunset over Manhattan. We peered through the fence at what was the final resting place for Kenneth Brownlie’s possessions, the once informal waterfront park on North 7th street, on the site of the former Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, a site described by author Daniel Campo as “the setting for probably the widest range of informal uses, the most spontaneous activities and the most idiosyncratic interactions with the waterfront environment.”(Campo, page 10) The BEDT has now been remade into a controlled space, replete with security guards and surveillance and a luxury-shopping complex opening next door.

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By 1:22 am, twelve friends have gathered in our living room. People eat falafel and scream warnings at the television screen as Kevin Bacon’s invisible form stalks an unsuspecting female lab technician in “The Hollow Man.” We have turned on several lamps, that don’t illuminate us, so much as they light up the sidewalk that traverses our living space.

“Word, y’all are having a mother fucking party,” a teenage boy screams out as he jogs backwards through our living room.

A few moments later, a hipster wearing a red Devo hat does a robot dance in front of our television. A drunken woman in high heels, clutching the arm of her friend, staggers over to us from across the street.

“Sit down, have some chips,” Francisca says.

“If I sit down, I’m lost,” she replies. “I gotta ask you. You brought the inside outside, right? It’s like an inside-outside thing, cause you’re inside, but your outside, and I love that you’re outside.”

The drunk woman’s friend grabs her under the armpit and tries to drag her away.

“I just want a chip!” the drunk woman barks at her friend, before staggering off.
An hour later, a young man sidles up to the couch where Francisca is sitting and announces that he’s lost his girlfriend, claiming that she suddenly got up and ran out the door into the night.

“Is she really drunk?” Francisca asks.

“She’s really drunk,” he replies, nodding his head emphatically.

The homesteaders agree to a look out for her, and to keep her with us if we find her.
He disappears for an hour and then returns, escorting his girlfriend, who wears a sheepish smile. We cheer.

The Urban Homesteading Project was first conceived of as being similar to a performance art project; we set up a public living space out of trash, and then commenced a mundane series of activities, such as knitting, sleeping, eating and watching television. The result was a flow of observation, interaction and performance on the part of both viewer and artist. We observed that during the day, passersby were more likely to interact with us with the aim of gaining information about the project and the items to be given away. At night, however, passersby were more likely to interact with us in a performative way, enacting dramas, dancing and singing for us as we observed from the comfort of our living room. It is certain that the effects of alcohol and the bright lights we shined on the sidewalk were a significant influence on the performative interactions that took place. In his essay “Society of the Spectacle,” Guy Debord asserts that the spectacle constitutes the antithesis of human interaction and reflection of what is real.

"One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle that inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness." (Debord, 1967)

These performative and observational interactions transformed the Urban Homesteading Project from a performance art piece to what could be considered an “anti-spectacle,” in which the relationship between spectator and actor is fluid, and the real is not inverted so much as it is inserted into an unexpected place. The Urban Homesteading Project can be a vehicle for reflection on sustainability and waste and the potential for this waste to foster social interactions or create emotional attachments. It can also create a portrait of a neighborhood through the documentation of a homestead using video, photography or prose. It can be a way to protest a lack of public space, or pay tribute to those who informally claim public space for intimacy and celebration, or as a matter of necessity. It is precisely this fluidity that we hope to expand upon in future Urban Homesteads.

 

Bibliography

http://freegan.info What is a Freegan?
http://www.riverkeeper.org/campaign.php The Greenpoint Oil Spill in the Newtown Creek
Debord, Guy. Théorie de la Dérive, Internationale Situationniste #2 (1958)
Campo, David. Brooklyn’s Vernacular Waterfront. Journal of Urban Design, Vol 7no. 2
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, (1967 )