Museum of Reclaimed Urban Spaces (MoRUS)
City Lore
Fall, 2020
Lydia Cohen Harris
Written by Lydia Cohen Harris for Place Matters and the Fall 2020 History, Identity, and Place course of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies MA Program
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space sits on occupied Lenape Land, quietly tucked away on Avenue C between 9th and 10th Streets, in the neighborhood now known as the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Alphabet City. Walking
past, you’d hardly notice its unassuming façade, were it not for the bright signs
proclaiming the site as a “radical history museum.” In fact, MoRUS calls itself a “living history of urban activism,” and what is more radical than that? Through decades – centuries, really – of gentrification, the neighborhood today known as the East Village has seen hundreds of communities and millions of stories change its essence. MoRUS workers strive to archive and preserve that essence, positioning their work as a revolutionary act in a part of the city that is growing wealthier and forgetting its history more every year. The building was restored in 2002, has housed the museum since 2012, and contains displays on all sorts of grassroots urban activism.
By the late 1980s, the East Village, which had been thriving with squatters for the past few decades, had seen most of them evicted. Luckily, a few were allowed by the city of New York to pass into the hands of their residents once they were brought up to code.2 Among these was C-Squat, the building that now houses MoRUS, co-founded by Bill DiPaola and Laurie Mittelmann. The residents of C-Squat and other buildings in the neighborhood were primarily artists and musicians, a demographic that contributes to the widespread perception of the East Village as a traditionally artistic community. This legacy is evident today in the street art that permeates the neighborhood and in the design of MoRUS itself.
The East Village has also been known as “Loisaida,” a Nuyorican term coined by the poet Bimbo Rivas in his 1974 poem of the same name. Here is an excerpt:
A ti, mi hermosa Loisaida
O what a town….
even with your drug-infested
pocket parks, playgrounds
where our young bloods
hang around
waiting, hoping that
one day when they too
get well and smile again
your love is all
they need to come around.
Loisaida, I love you.
Your buildings are
burning up
that we got to stop.
Loisaida, my love,
Te amo.
This name was an attempt to reclaim the neighborhood for the many immigrant communities who have called it home over the decades. In the May 17, 1987, edition of The New York Times , Lisa W. Foderaro wrote of the tension between old and new identities overlapping in the neighborhood: “One is Loisaida, indigenous and struggling; the other is Alphabet City, arty and affluent.
By the time squatters moved into the building in 1989, heroin was king and punk reigned supreme.5 There were frequent fires (in fact, one tore through C-Squat itself in the 1970s) and the corrupt police were, unsurprisingly, of no help. Landlords would set fire to their properties and claim insurance money from the city, rather
than continuing to pay taxes and maintain the squats.
Before C-Squat, the building had been in city ownership since 1978 after being built more than a century prior. As the neighborhood has continued to gentrify in the 1990s and beyond, the residents of the East Village have found themselves unwitting advocates for their neighborhood. Even though Rudy Giuliani attempted to get rid of squats, C-Squat remained solid and was one of only eleven squats able to purchase the building from the city in 2002 for one dollar, agreeing to bring it up to code and restructure it as a cooperative.
In 2012, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space was founded. It is volunteer-run and donation-based, as part of its mission to remain accessible to the community it serves and whose stories it tells. Currently, they have exhibits on squats, community gardens, and radical quilting, and they are associated with a community garden across the street. The museum is dedicated to radical history, including standoffs with the cops and gentrifying developers, squat houses, and bicycle activism.
MoRUS also focuses on community outreach. For example, when thousands of people lost power during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, residents of C-Squat gave out free food in Tompkins Square Park and set out a bicycle-powered generator as a communal phone-charging station. Bill DiPaola, one of the museum’s co-founders, noted the difference between this kind of activism and the corporate storytelling of other museums. According to him, it’s a living testament to people who have survived oppression and gentrification and acted radically to preserve their stories in the face of their being washed away. DiPaola and the museum’s other co-founder, Laurie Mittelmann, were involved with the environmental organization Time’s Up when they decided to found MoRUS. In fact, Time’s Up donated over 400 hours of footage to the museum. DiPaola and Mittelmann found this footage important because it showed direct action, which is typically glossed over in history-telling, so they wanted to make space for it at MoRUS. They had met squatters at actions and protests before, so the community was heavily involved in getting the museum up and running.
Perhaps surprisingly, DiPaola and Mittelmann have not been met with resistance from squatters in the neighborhood; instead, everyone has been extremely friendly and engaged in their work. One of their goals is to destigmatize squatters, who had to vote the museum into existence by permitting it to take up space in
C-Squat, thus indicating their trust in the project. This shows how MoRUS has been a community effort from the get-go, and also demonstrates the museum’s commitment to honoring and respecting its neighbors. All of this highlights the attempts to include what’s historically been excluded from the table.
These reclamations and transformations of space are visible in the museum’s exhibitions from across the decades, but as already noted, there is high priority placed on sustainability and preservation.12 According to Mittelmann, MoRUS was “established to, among other things, tell the story of how activists in the East Village took over abandoned properties and over the years transformed them into permanent housing or community gardens.”
As part of this endeavor, posters, fliers, and stickers, displayed on the walls of MoRUS, are “artifacts of a rebellious time when that neighborhood was the setting for contentious battles over development and homelessness, police conduct and
control of its central public space, Tompkins Square Park, in the
East Village.” Some fliers are specific to activist groups in the
neighborhood, such as RAGE ON (Revolt Against Gentrification Erasing Our Neighborhood) and Loisaida Intifada. They depict movements against the gentrification of the East Village, advocating protest in the form of direct action. Seth Tobocman, artist and MoRUS exhibition organizer, noted, “The street is the most common area we have.
There is merchandise for sale at the museum, but only that by artist-activists involved in recent movements to reclaim urban space – the documentation of MoRUS does not go back to the beginning of the building’s history, but begins in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Per DiPaola, “The museum has a rule: we’re not gonna go back that far that we haven’t seen it, because we feel strongly that history should be the richest version of history. The way that history is reported is never really that accurate, especially when it has to do with direct action and policy. New York City has a way of co-opting history very fast.”15 The museum was not initially intended to be anti-city, but New York has forced it into that role because of its history with silencing activists, unhousing people, stealing from squatters, and
generally abusing its poorer inhabitants. DiPaola also spoke of the
struggle with whether to call the museum a “history” museum, since its
history is ongoing and constantly evolving. In addition, he talked about
the historic underrepresentation of grassroots activists in mainstream US
culture, and how MoRUS is dedicated to preserving their legacies. People
in the community donate their photographs, art, and other resources to the museum’s archives, which are primarily stored digitally due to its small physical space.
Despite the museum’s and community activists’ efforts, there have been some adverse effects on the neighborhood, in part due to gentrification by New York University. According to DiPaola, “Some of our volunteers go to NYU, but they let out so many people into this neighborhood. And those people need to look for housing, and the Puerto Rican families that used to live here have had to move out.”16 So the museum’s activism is ongoing, and they have partnered with other direct action and anti-gentrification organizations across the city.
At the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, identity and place are indistinguishable. Above all, the place epitomizes how radicalizing history can sometimes mean merely preserving its identity, in its own space, against all odds. “Much of the history has survived only in people’s memories and photographs, each harboring its own version of the truth.” It is something of a testament to what’s been lost by its community members – evicted squatters, bulldozed homes and gardens, arrested and murdered bicyclists – as loss is something worth preserving. But even more than that, it celebrates the survival of rebellion.