BY SAM SPOKONY | After more than a year of planning and tireless work by its staff and volunteers, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space — which seeks to tell the stories of East Village squatters and community activists — held its first open house tours on Saturday and Sunday, both of the museum’s interior exhibits and the surrounding area.
It was an unofficial opening, since MoRUS co-director Bill Di Paola noted that there’s still some work to be done within the museum’s space in the storefront of C-Squat, at Avenue C and E. 10th St. But the tours, which were hosted in conjunction with Open House New York, a citywide nonprofit organization, marked an important step forward in presenting the history museum’s unique concept to a wide audience.
MoRUS co-director Bill Di Paola — with other co-director Laurie Mittelmann, behind him — introduced visitors to the museum’s first open house tours on Saturday.
“It was an amazingly successful day,” Di Paola said on Saturday evening, after the first tours finished. “A lot of our volunteers were up all night just trying to get the place ready, and we really didn’t know what to expect, but people seemed to really understand what we’re trying to do here.”
In fact, the museum’s new windows — made by two C-Squat residents, Popeye and Shayne — were installed only hours before the space opened that morning, and other cosmetic preparations were also completed barely in time. But the first day went off without a hitch, as visitors browsed photographs and artwork documenting the struggles of those who worked to save community gardens and squats and fight for cyclists’ rights over the past three decades.
Bill Weinberg, a longtime East Village activist, led the museum’s first walking tour on Saturday afternoon, speaking to a crowd of about 30 people as he explained the living history of some of the movement’s most iconic sites.
After beginning just outside the museum at the Ninth Street Community Garden and La Plaza Cultural, the tour continued on foot to places including the former CHARAS / El Bohio Cultural and Community Center at E. Ninth St. and Avenue B — which served as a gathering space for the neighborhood until being handed over to a developer a decade ago — and Bullet Space, at E. Third St. between Avenues C and D, a former squat that became legal in 2009 and has since come to include a vibrant art gallery.
Along with providing an encyclopedic slew of information about the history of riots in Tompkins Square Park, as well as gardens like El Jardin del Paraiso and the Lower East Side Ecology Center Garden, Weinberg infused the tour with plenty of anecdotes about his own presence during those struggles.
Di Paola later noted that the personal touch is both MoRUS’s key selling point and its best claim to the kind of authenticity that has been stressed throughout the entire project.
“The real idea is that it’s not some history museum that’s just coming from a hired tour guide,” he said. “It’s coming from the people who were there, who really lived through these experiences.”
Weinberg joked that leading the tours was just another good way to get out of the house and spend some time in the gardens, but added that he hopes to continue giving them as the museum grows.
“They’re good for my state of mind,” he mused.
Those on the tour also got to check out an actual apartment within the former squat at 209 E. Seventh St., which became legal three years ago as a low-income Housing Development Fund Corporation co-op.
The apartment’s owner, Steven Prestianni — who now goes by the moniker “Pastrami” — explained the decades of renovation work squatters put into the building, even as they survived without heat or hot water, as well as the underlying reasons for devoting themselves so passionately to the space.
“We were attracted to it because it was sovereign entity,” said Pastrami, who had previously hosted informal MoRUS tours in his apartment. “The police didn’t come in here, the city government didn’t come in here, and we were all really just seeking freedom from that.”
After the two-hour walking tour had concluded, some of the visitors voiced their overwhelmingly positive impressions of the experience, one which most of them had gone into without actually knowing what to expect.
“It wasn’t just interesting; it was really worthwhile,” said Bob Epstein, who came from Long Island to explore MoRUS and take the tour.
Another visitor, Dan Zajackowski, who came from Bushwick, explained that he’d already had some experience with the East Village squatter movement because his rock band, Marvin Berry & The New Sound, played a show in the C-Squat basement last year. But he added that the tour provided valuable insight into the history of something that he’d previously only known in passing.
“It’s incredible that the people who lived through this want to share what they know, because it’s such an overlooked part of our city’s history,” Zajackowski said. “Above all, it’s just great to keep raising awareness about it.”
Zajackowski also went on to say that he’s an urban planning student at Hunter College, and his studies lead him to believe that part of MoRUS’s true value is not just as a history museum, but also as a spark for present-day applications of the tenets that supported the squatter movement.
“New York just isn’t the kind of working-class city it used to be,” he said, “and I think the museum is a great way for people now to learn about other ways of thinking about private property.”
