What New York's Lower East Side looked like before gentrification

I lived in the city back then, and I was there that night of the riot. My partner Chris Karma and I were providing the city with a vital public service; we were its main source for shrooms in the park that summer. I shipped them from my friend Cricket in Marin County, California and we distributed them in the park every evening. That night I was hanging out at the International Bar on 1st Street, a cool place where the old people sat in the front and drank and the kids sat in the back and smoked pot and everyone was friendly, it reminded me a lot of Amsterdam.
My partner came running up to say the cops were trying to kick people out of the park. We had been expecting the cops to do something like that for weeks; there had been rumbling signs that the local yuppies were tired of listening to the late night concerts in the park. In the hot humid NYC summers it did not cool off some nights until 4 am. So the only place to go if you were poor was the park. The rich people went to the Hamptons. Tompkins Square was our Hamptons. Plus there were a lot of people squatting in the letter blocks especially avenues B, C and D. Avenue A by then had been gentrified.
So I threw my stash bag to the bartender, told him to keep an eye on it for me and a bunch of us finished our drinks and out joints and headed over to the park to defend our little piece of paradise. I saw some of my Yippie buddies like the Pieman there and some of the Anarchists from the center around the corner and the squats. Also others like John Communist and Depperman, junkies, punks, pot dealers, street people, squatters and even crack heads all came together, people who normally would be battling it out over turf, NYRican gang kids, Dominicans, Chinese came up from Chinatown, the whole gamut of the street and community except the yuppies whose complaints had initiated this police crack down were all there.
The cops waited at first. They let us gather our strength while they positioned their snipers on the roof tops, got the mounted cops ready to charge and the helicopters out to direct the cops on the street. There were thousands of us and we linked arms to face the police charges. And charge they did. We went back and forth with them all night long, using dumpsters and trash cans, marbles, and whatever we could find to protect ourselves. It was a night of charges and counter charges, The community did not give up until near dawn, Many of us were having the time of our lives, others just didn't want to give up the only place that was green and a little bit cooler in that hot city. Besides the park had a tradition of being the radical park, there had been in 1874 another police riot. Greenwich Village had been lost to the yuppies we were damned if we were going to loose our last bit of green in the city to those racist white rich bastards.
Just a couple nights before I had been sharing a 40 oz with that punk icon El Duche, may he rest in whatever peace he can find. On the sidewalk at the edge of the park and now we were battling for the right to be there at all. It was in my mind the last bastion of hip alternative culture in Manhattan. It symbolized the destruction of the alternative culture in every major city in America, the same thing was happening in the Haight in San Francisco where I had led the battle against gentrification as a member of the Mindless Thugs anarchist affinity group, although that was not what we called ourselves. And now by happenstance here I was fighting the last major battle for alternative turf in the city. The modern battle had started in the sixties in People's Park in Berkeley and Stonewall in NYC for the gays. These were battles for our rights to exist as an alternative to capitalist domination of the physical space. Recently here in LA where I live there was another battle over the Farm in south central LA. Generally these have been loosing battles for space, what has happened has been the development of a theory of alternative spaces called TAZ's, Temporary Autonomous Zones. Territory that is liberated as briefly as in a block party or a demonstration, held until we are done with that specific event and then released. But it represents our ability to hold space for the free expression of the human spirit without the rules and structures of capitalist exploitation. Someday perhaps they will be more than temporary; until that day comes we have to fight for our right to party, as our friends in the hip hop world would say.