Tompkins Square Park
An Evening of Mourning for the Lower East Side
On Tuesday, in the waning daylight, a small line formed outside Webster Hall in the East Village. The crowd, as likely to sport zebra-striped jeans and Mohawks as flannel shirts and grizzled beards, had come for a special screening of Captured--a film that examines the life and work of Canadian street photographer and artist Clayton Patterson as he followed the Lower East Side's transition from junkie-town to condo-city--to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park Police Riot.
Inside, Machine and Alden Pact, members of rap group Team Facelift, bought drinks at the bar with Captured's art director Paul Lawrence and fellow former Mass Appeal mag writer PrettyLew. The scent of marijuana wafted across the theatre, as two hundred fifty people searched for a seat among the folded plastic chairs.
"In my day I seen some acrobatic junkies," read John Joseph from Evolution of the Cro-Magnon Man, a book he wrote about his days as a homeless kid in the LES. He rambled on about imagined marketing meetings where executives brainstormed different dope names and reminisced about a dealer named "Cool Man" who sold drugs from an ice cream truck parked near Tompkins Square Park. read more »
The Local: From 5-0 to 311
On July 22, just a couple of weeks shy of the 20-year anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park riots, the Parks Department opened a $150,000 dog run, complete with a canine paddling pool, in what was once a refuge for the homeless and all manner of fringe groups.
The inauguration of a sleeker, odorless, more expensive dog run is a fitting bookend to Tompkins Square Park's transition from a lawless swathe of parkland in the freewheeling East Village of the 1980s to the upper middle-class enclave the neighborhood is today.
On Aug. 7, 1988, the police tried, and failed, to enforce a 1 a. read more »
