New York City / Photography / Truth
Hardcover, 8 x 10 inches, 120 pages, 60 tritone photographs
ISBN: 978-1-57687-451-6
$35.00
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| Other Books By Q. Sakamaki: | | Child Soldiers | | |
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Tompkins Square Park
Photographs by: Q. Sakamaki
Essay by: Bill Weinberg
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You better hold on, something’s happening here
You better hold on, meet you in Tompkins Square
—Lou Reed, “Hold On” (1989)
Summer 1988. Tompkins Square Park, which long served as
a makeshift home for the homeless and a center for social
unrest, erupted in violence when the New York City Police
and hundreds of rioters clashed over ideological differences.
Residents of the Lower East Side, historically home to
diverse immigrant communities but facing gentrification,
united to protest the 1 a.m. curfew the city was attempting
to enforce on the park, in effect banishing the homeless and
closing off many areas of the park that were once public.
Over the humid night of August 6, protestors carrying signs
that read “Gentrification is Class War” and chanting “It’s our
fucking park, you don’t live here!” clashed with police armed
with riot gear. The violence lasted until the next morning.
The August 6 police riot—so called because the consensus
was that the police overreacted to the protestors—and
subsequent Tompkins Square Park riots were the manifestation
of a larger concern of the over-gentrification of the Lower
East Side. The Lower East Side has a long history of liberal,
and at times radical, movements that attracted artists,
intellectuals, anarchists, activists, squatters, immigrants,
and even exiles. Many in the community, unlike in other
more passive communities facing gentrification, stood up
and worked together with the homeless to protect housing
rights and human rights, as well as their own lifestyle. By
1991, the estimated 300 homeless people living in Tompkins
Square Park were gone and the park was forcefully closed for
renovations. Twenty years after the police riots, the park now
boasts one of the best dog runs in New York City.
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