Rebellious New York: A Travel Map of Left-wing Youth

Stonewall Inn

A famous gay bar in Greenwich (the w is silent) village.

In late June and early July 1969, a riot broke out in this then famous gay bar in New York - the Stonewall riots.

At that time, NYPD raided gay bars frequently. On the morning of June 28, 10 NYPD officers raided Stonewall Inn again. The gays in the bar finally couldn't stand it anymore and threw things in protest. Five or six hundred LGBT people gathered outside the bar and confronted the increasing police force for several days, setting off a gay rights movement that spread across the country. A month later, people gathered in front of Stonewall again to celebrate the victory of the protest. A year later, Pride parades were born and spread to major cities in the United States.

Today, the Stonewall Inn still displays news materials from the time on the walls, and also sells souvenirs related to the Stonewall riots. The entire bar occupies a very small area, with a bar table and three dining tables. Others can only sit on a few chairs near the bar or stand by the pillars. This bar welcomes all adults, and straight people can also sit down and have a drink comfortably. The wine is good and cheap.

John Varvatos

The original site of CBGB, the punk mecca. The hometown of punk godmother Patti Smith.

Now it is a designer menswear brand with high prices. Google reviews mentioned that some store employees are mean and will drive away people who only visit but do not shop. When I went there, I was lucky enough to meet Skye, a store employee, a bassist who has her own band of the same name. She completely understood my passion and generously agreed to let me look around and take pictures.

The store retains many of the original stickers, spray paint, some of the original performance instruments, and the entire performance stage. It's a pity that the former punk mecca has become a high-end designer store that runs completely against the spirit of punk. If it weren't for this, perhaps the once legendary venue would still be locked up now, or it would have been completely renovated and CBGB would have been completely destroyed.

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Spaces (MoRUS)

Even Bill may not believe it, but the museum I look forward to most is not MoMA or the Met, but their MoRUS.

Initially, I chose the hotel located in the Lower East Side (LES) based on my personal liking, so I bought a photo book about LES Squatters and gentrification, Kill City. The photo book shows different aspects of squatting in the 1990s. One of the squats has now become a museum called Museum of Reclaimed Urban Spaces, which preserves the memory of the squatting era and records the struggle and deprivation to this day.

In the 1970s, New York City went bankrupt. Many landlords in the LES abandoned their low-rent buildings and fled to the suburbs (white flight) because they could not pay real estate taxes. Some landlords deliberately burned down their low-rent buildings to obtain insurance compensation. A large number of abandoned houses and dangerous buildings appeared in the community, and the economic crisis created a large number of homeless and unemployed people. As a result, many people living on the streets and other dissidents with political beliefs or cultural pursuits occupied these abandoned houses, taught themselves the technology of repairing houses, and devoted time and effort to turn these ruins that were no longer suitable for living back into people's homes. However, the New York City government believed that they naturally owned these ruins and attempted to sell the land to real estate developers for profit. Therefore, they closed down LES schools, banks, hospitals, and fire departments, deprived them of public services, judged the squats as dangerous buildings and forcibly demolished them, and sent people to set fires to forcibly drive out the squatters. In the end, the residents of a few squats successfully negotiated with the government, retained their houses and obtained property rights in the form of co-ops, becoming the only remaining fruit of the massive squatting action.

After that, the most powerful movement in New York was Occupy Wall Street. In the basement of MoRUS is a bicycle that was used to generate electricity during the Occupy Wall Street period. MoRUS is closely connected with Time's Up, another bicycle social activist organization, and also conducts grassroots social actions to reclaim urban spaces through gardening.

If you go to MoRUS, you must visit the restroom. The only restroom in MoRUS is also part of the exhibition. Several cameras are facing the toilet, and the mirror in front of the sink is surrounded by photos of plainclothes officers. There are photocopies of old newspapers on the door (recording a lot of NYPD atrocities).

MoRUS is more like an archive in general, and all the content posted on the wall is old documents. Although it is only the size of an ordinary store, it takes a lot of time to read all the content. Rather than browsing all the documents, it is recommended to join the guided tour at 3 o'clock every weekend. Bill will take you around several important landmarks on the Lower East Side, introduce the community park, recycling and compost progress in New York City, and take you to some historical landmarks that are of great significance but little known.

Tickets are by donation, Bill will not actively ask for donations. Walking tour is $20 per person, tax-free if paid in cash. Cash purchases of books and souvenirs in the museum are also tax-free.

La Plaza Cultural

This community garden is located across from MoRUS and is a perfect example of mutual cooperation and spontaneity. It is also the first stop on the MoRUS walking tour.

There were no community gardens in New York before. It was the people living on this land, out of their attachment to the land, who sprinkled soil and sowed seeds on the abandoned fields bit by bit, and rebuilt oases in the concrete jungle, providing city residents with a place to work together, harvest together, and communicate with each other.

In the eyes of the New York City government, these oases are no different from abandoned houses that are occupied, and are obstacles to the sale of land for profit. Some community gardens were destroyed by bulldozers sent by the city government, while many community gardens were preserved and legalized through the efforts of activists, lawyers and the public. La Plaza Cultural is one of them.

This garden has plants, fish ponds, beehives, and a kitten that calls the garden home (volunteers feed it every day). It may not look fancy, but the environmental protection concept is outstanding. The perfect drainage system built decades ago has saved the small garden from flooding when the entire nearby area was flooded, and it can also generate hydroelectric power. When concerts are held in this small garden in the summer, the electricity generated by the garden itself is enough to drive the musical instruments and speakers.

There is a small composting site in the corner of the garden. New York City has not yet started a composting project, but environmentally conscious New York residents spontaneously collect compostable food scraps and bring them to community gardens like La Plaza Cultural. They throw their own food scraps into an iron box, and then take out the fallen leaves and weeds from the garden from the iron box next to it and pile them up in a thick layer. After four months, these fallen leaves, weeds and food will become fertile soil and rejoin the cycle in the garden. Almost every community garden provides composting services, and the Tompkin Square Park mentioned below also has an organization dedicated to collecting compost.

Some people may think that if the whole city doesn't compost, what's the point of a few people making such efforts? In fact, New York City's recycling project was originally initiated by the public. Every time there was a proposal to start garbage recycling, the city government rejected it on the grounds that New York City has too many people and it is too difficult to implement. So the citizens who are enthusiastic about environmental protection decided to do it themselves. After the recycling project grew and developed, the New York City government finally believed in the feasibility of this matter, and then legislated to promote recycling throughout the city.

This is what makes New York so appealing: the people here (mainly environmentalists and anarchists in this case) have the ability to judge and execute, and they do not regard themselves as children who need to be educated, managed, and cared for by the government, but are willing to take the initiative to do what they think is right and guide the government to grow.

Tompkin Square Park

If CBGB is the punk mecca, Tompkin Square Park (TSP) is the social movement mecca.

To those who don’t know the history of this park, it is just an ordinary community park. However, this park has been a place for people to resist hegemony as early as 1874. It was in this park that the riot Tompkin Square Park Riot, also known as Police Riot, took place in August 1988.

In July 1988, the Park Service decided to close all New York parks at 1 a.m. and chose the poorest TSP, which had the most homeless and drug abuse problems, as a pilot. Once the park was closed, the homeless had one less place to rest at night, and nearby residents who worked until midnight had one less space to stroll at midnight. People took to the streets to protest this decision, but were attacked indiscriminately by the NYPD. That day, even passers-by who knew nothing about the park access control did not escape the NYPD's stick. Later, the image of the NYPD attacking the public was leaked, and the authorities came under tremendous public pressure and eventually canceled the TSP's 1 a.m. curfew. Ironically, except for the TSP, all New York City parks began to implement curfews.

To celebrate the success of the resistance, punks and anarchists returned to TSP a year after Police Riot and clashed with the NYPD again. Since then, every anniversary has brought friends and bands to perform there.

That same year, a group of dissidents fled to the United States, where they made their voices heard in Tompkin Square Park and even taught the park's long-term homeless residents some Chinese slogans.

There are so many stories about TSP. They once established a bandshell* to integrate various cultures, and then closed the park and demolished the bandshell to prevent cultural exchange and punk gatherings. Under the elm tree directly opposite the bandshell, punk anarchists and communists, as well as cult initiators, have sat.

*bandshell: A shell-shaped building used for open-air performances, often found in parks or plazas.

If you go to TSP on a Sunday afternoon, you will probably run into an anarchist group called Food not bomb cooking and sharing free vegetarian food near the southwest entrance of the park. They welcome everyone to participate in the cooking and also welcome to share the vegetarian food.

There are some relief centers near TSP, which are the destinations for illegal immigrants who have been dumped into New York by red states. When I was listening to Bill's speech, I met West African refugees walking towards me. There were hundreds of them. I wish them good luck, and I also hope that New York can win this challenge, accommodate these refugees and let them live a dignified life.

Christodora House

The high-rise building facing Tompkin Square Park was transformed from a relief house for the poor. As the New York City economy recovered, it was converted into high-end residential buildings, attracting a group of celebrities including Iggy Pop, firing the first shot of gentrification on the Lower East Side.

From the outside, you can see that the first floor of this apartment building is tightly surrounded by security doors from the inside. Because whenever punks, anarchists and other social activists clash with the police, this luxurious residence that represents gentrification and is out of tune always attracts fire. During the confrontation between civilians and the NYPD in 1989, people broke open the door of Christodora house, stole a tree from the front hall and planted it in Tompkin Square Park. In the past few decades, it is also common for protesters to throw eggs, bricks, cans and other objects at this building in the chaos.

Zucotti Park

I know about this park because people lived in it during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I told Bill that I wanted to come and see it, and Bill said that there is nothing to see in Zucotti Park now. In fact, although people lived in Zucotti Park in the end, the entire planning of Occupy Wall Street took place, again, in the great Tompkin Square Park.

As I said this, Bill and I were standing near the original site of the TSP band shell, looking at the big tree with all its leaves fallen (the famous Hare Krishna Tree).

In the summer of 2011, when Bill passed by TSP, he often encountered a group of people sitting together and discussing enthusiastically, right under the big tree we were looking at. Bill curiously asked what these people were doing, and they said it was their general assembly, and they planned to occupy Wall Street. 😭

Brooklyn Bridge Park

The tricky thing about Brooklyn Bridge Park is that it is not located at the foot of Brooklyn Bridge, but at the foot of Mahanttan Bridge. The logic of its name is that this park is on the [Brooklyn] side of Manhattan [Bridge]. So when I finished my picnic and planned to look for the occupied Booklyn Bridge Park for another picnic, I didn't realize that I had already celebrated on this memorable green space.

In the 1970s, with the advancement of shipping technology, the narrow Brooklyn Port was gradually eliminated, and the waterfront area at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge became a wasteland. In 1984, the Port Authority prepared to sell the triangular wasteland connected to the port as commercial land. The surrounding residents united together and spontaneously brought garbage bags to clean up the wasteland and planted grass and trees on the wasteland. After more than a decade of hard work, this grassroots movement finally succeeded. People took back the wasteland and turned it into an urban park for everyone to rest and play.

Bluestockings Cooperative Bookstore

Perhaps for many people, book lovers must go to the Strand bookstore when they go to New York. But for me, going to Bluestockings is a more "New York" experience.

Bluestockings is not only an anarchist bookstore owned by all employees, but also a community. It provides a venue for anarchist and other left-wing activities, and also provides convenience for the homeless people in the neighborhood. They can get cheap food and drinks, free necessities, use precious restrooms, and sleep on the bookstore floor with blankets provided by the store.

Bluestockings has no boss. The employees are friendly and enthusiastic, and each has their own strengths. Alice is one of the employees who knows more about the details of the store and is more involved in decision-making and operations. From how the bookstore operates, to how to first aid people who overdose, to how to deal with law enforcement abusing their power, to how to use the free female condoms distributed in the store, you can ask her for everything.

The bookstore focuses on topics such as anarchism, queer rights, abolishment, women's rights, aboriginal rights, gentrification, etc. There are also many self-published books by local authors and artists, and there are often book clubs for authors of newly published books. (It would be great if you could participate online 😮‍💨)

ABC No Rio

“When the building was occupied by artists, the only letters left in the neon sign ABOGADO CON NOTARIO were AB C NO RIO, so this art center composed of anarchists and artists was named ABC NO RIO.”

ABC was one of the important squats in the 1980s and 1990s. It was widely welcomed by the surrounding neighbors because of its frequent cultural activities and the artist residents' active maintenance of the community.

Five years ago, ABC No Rio was demolished because it was deemed a dangerous building, and the new building is still being rebuilt. Roberts said they will be finished this fall. But Bill told me that the people of No Rio have been saying this every year for the past five years (this information was obtained in February and March this year, but on July 16, 2024, ABC No Rio officially broke ground at the original site and is expected to be completed in 18 months).

So the art center is not online physically for the time being, but it is active in spirit. ABC No Rio regularly holds online events and exhibitions in other partner galleries. It is still a base for many admirable activists.

Museum of the city of New York

On the island of Manhattan, where museums are everywhere, the museums about New York itself are relatively low-key.

You can learn from the Museum of the City of New York how a small seaport developed into an international metropolis and where it hopes to go. The curatorship focuses on interactivity and playability, and the exhibits cover history, politics, society, art and other aspects. For example, one of the exhibition halls uses thousands of screens to simultaneously play various film and television clips related to New York, and another exhibition hall projects a map of New York, and the works of musicians in the corresponding area will be played when stepping on different areas. In the entire museum, BIPOC artists are much more visible than WASP artists. For example, Manny Vega's paintings, sculptures and mosaics (you can also see his works in some New York subway stations), such as art works against discrimination against Asians, and Puerto Rican obituary films and manuscripts. Alice Neel, who I didn't meet at the Met, MoMA and Whiteney, is also placed in a prominent position on the top floor.

On the second floor, they used an entire exhibition hall as an archive, recording the uprising of people of various classes and social identities in New York, including workers, women, Irish, Chinese, blacks... The oppression and resistance people suffered were all recorded and discussed.

Some people like to live in an "America" ​​that erases all traces of minority existence and seems to be only white. The New York Museum is the opposite. Every exhibit here reminds you that minorities actually live on this land and they are the foundation of this city.

It is worth mentioning that the staff of this museum are very happy when introducing exhibits and activities. Occasionally, when I gaze at an important exhibit alone, they will come over to celebrate that I have found a real deal. Their expressions and tone show that they are proud of their work and this museum. The New York City Museum should be fair to its employees.

Tickets are by donation, and the recommended donation for adults is $20. It is entirely voluntary. The only souvenirs related to the museum are refrigerator magnets and erasers. The rest are generic New York souvenirs sold in all gift shops.

Tenement Museum

This is also a LES treasure museum that I am looking forward to.

This museum was converted from a low-rent building, and the exhibits are about the real past of the people who lived in this low-rent building. Because there were always people running a store on the first floor of this building, the building was not abandoned or illegally occupied throughout the Great Depression in New York, but was just vacant and preserved like a time capsule.

LES is the settlement of immigrants in New York. Germans, Irish, Jews, Chinese, etc. have lived in this low-rent building. Immigrants came to New York with hope and carefully decorated the dilapidated rooms to look like home. There are up to 40 layers of wallpaper in the low-rent housing, representing the lives of generations of tenants who have carefully decorated their lives with limited budgets.

The museum's researchers have used various materials to identify more than 400 families who have lived in this building, and then selected the most representative families to make their family histories into a themed tour. Visitors are led by a guide into the corresponding themed room, including the original house remains and the restored room. The guide will tell the story of the family who lived here during the one-hour guided tour. You cannot visit on your own during this period.

This is in stark contrast to the Museum of the City of New York, which, although interesting and meaningful, does not seem to be a good place to work. The docents are said to be paid shockingly low wages, and while I was waiting I felt that the public areas on the first floor were cramped and chaotic, and most of the staff were in a bad mood.

Tickets are expensive compared to other museums and in terms of time and content, probably because of the high operating costs. Guided tours are in short supply, so it is best to book a few weeks in advance. It is recommended to book the earliest time of the day to avoid the previous guided tour group overtime affecting the experience.

Museum at eldridge street

A very beautiful synagogue, built in eight months by crowdfunding during the Jewish Migration, it is extremely exquisite. In today's world where it takes several months to wait for approval to renovate a kitchen, it is an architectural miracle that cannot be replicated. The second and third floors were abandoned for a long time, and were only renovated and repaired in the last 10 to 20 years and opened to the public as a museum. The left wing is not very left-wing. The synagogue still does not allow men and women to pray in the same room, because they believe that the presence of women will interfere with the main body of prayer - men. The unevenness of the floor just after entering the second floor hall is the traces left by people staying here and kneeling for decades.

However, the synagogue located in the center of Chinatown is also like a time capsule, just like the interior of the public housing exposed after the wall was damaged, with cultural traces of other ethnic groups from long ago. Very romantic.

The museum currently has a silk exhibition about 12 women from the Lower East Side. Each huge piece of silk is printed with a woman related to the East Side, including Chinese actors from the Qing Dynasty, Emma Goldman, etc. The synagogue has entered my left-wing map with this exhibition.

Left bank books

It is also in Greenwich village, and is included in this map because it has a collector's edition of all 5 volumes of The Occupied Wallstreet Journal. I wrote about it on the radio before, but probably no one would be interested except me and my friends who had seen the radio at that time, so I won't elaborate on it.

New York Public Library

It is both magnificent and bureaucratic. Walking into it is like walking into the Paris Opera House. The bureaucratic atmosphere forced my favorite writer to curse in his letters to friends. But I still included this library in the left-wing map. First of all, it is because of this brick on the floor of the main entrance of the library.

When Martin Radtke, who was in his thirties, set foot on this land, he did not know English and had no education. He was poor but tenacious. He went to the New York Library to educate himself day after day, learned English, culture, and business, and then became successful with the knowledge he learned by self-study. On his deathbed, he decided to donate his inheritance to the New York Library that gave him all this, on the condition that the library's door should be open to everyone, no matter how poor the other person was.

In the exhibition hall of the Library on the first floor, there is the cane that Woolf used to commit suicide by the river, Dickens' writing desk, a letter opener made from the specimen of his beloved cat's arm, and Washington's great farewell letter in which he voluntarily resigned. "Washington surrendered military power not because of external pressure, but because of his inner morality and personal beliefs. He voluntarily gave up the power he had gained by serving the battlefield and conquering the world. This was unique and precious in that era and environment."

Seward Park Library (emma goldman)

Located near Seward Park, it is now a very common community public library. It is included here because Emma Goldman (a famous feminist and anarchist), a woman who made the East Side proud, gave a speech in the activity room on the first floor.

Bullet Space

The squat was once legalized, and the upstairs is occupied by residents. The first floor was generously rented out by the residents for free, and thus this art space called Bullet Space was established. Bullet Space is connected to a backyard, and is quiet in the busy alley. It has homemade swings and tables and chairs with a rough and rebellious temperament from the illegal squatting period.

Hess Triangle

A landmark that is easily missed. When I took my friends to see it, a New Yorker pointed it out to several other New Yorkers. They lamented that they passed by this street every day but never thought that there was a story behind it.

Hess Triangle is in front of the cigar shop opposite the Gay Liberation Monument. When I visited in March 2024, the cigar shop had closed permanently, leaving only a blank storefront with pale lights shining through the glass.

On the concrete floor in front of the cigar shop is a mosaic triangle that reads "Property of the Hess estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes."

The story goes like this. More than 100 years ago, due to urban planning, the New York City government forcibly expropriated Hess's property and intended to demolish it to make a road. Hess fought for many years but still failed, and moved out of his home in anger. Later, the city government discovered that due to their calculation and planning errors, they left behind a small triangle when they forcibly expropriated Hess's property. The government advised Hess to donate the small triangle to the government. Due to his long-standing dissatisfaction with the government, Hess did not agree, but instead marked this private property with mosaic tiles. He gave the government a middle finger on this bustling street.

It wasn't until 1938 that a cigar shop opposite the Hess Triangle bought the land from Hess for $100, and the mosaic on it remains to this day.

Liwenliang bench

A bench in tribute to Li Wenliang. Near Rudin Family Park.

This bench has now become a gathering point for local Chinese. The location of this bench is very thoughtful, with an evergreen tree behind it in the entire circle.

New Museum

The entire third and fourth floors of the museum are devoted to Judy Chicago. It talks about how she re-used traditionally masculine elements to create feminist artworks in a male-dominated industry. It also talks about how Judy Chicago brought back feminine elements such as flowers, butterflies, and sewing, which were traditionally considered unacceptable in art. She also reclaimed the female narrative and female sexual organs, no longer allowing them to be played with and viewed by men, but rather as neutral entities that appear in the feminist works of female artists.

Judy abandoned her father's and husband's surnames and used the city where she was born as her last name to express her desire to take herself back from patriarchy and husband's power. She also collaborated with her photographer husband on works on Jewish themes.

Another exhibition is that of Aaron and Harold Cohen, about the earliest AI art in human history.

The above two exhibitions have ended, but the New Museum currently offers neighborhood artist tours several times a week.

Also included are the left-wing strongholds that I really wanted to visit but never had the chance to visit:

Lesbian Herstory Archieve Hope to meet you next time

East Village Books next time

Printed Matter Next time

Rubulad next time go

The Base (permanently closed)

Beaver16 (almost no activity since David Graeber's death, probably not open to the public, probably no longer exists)