DIY on the Lower East Side

Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis

Andrew Strombeck

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438479828
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The severe financial austerity imposed on New York City during the 1975 fiscal crisis resulted in a city falling apart. Broken windows, crumbling walls, and piles of bricks were everywhere. While, for many, this physical decay was a sign that the postwar welfare state had failed, for others, it represented a site of risky opportunity that could stimulate novel forms of creativity and community. In this book, Andrew Strombeck explores the legacy of this crisis for the city's literature and art, focusing on one neighborhood where changes were acutely felt—the Lower East Side. In what became a paradigmatic example of gentrification, the Lower East Side's population shifted from working-class people to Wall Street traders and ad agents. This transformation occurred, in part, because of high-profile local artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, and Kiki Smith, but Strombeck argues that neighborhood writers also played a role. Drawing on archival research and original author interviews, he examines the innovative work of Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Miguel Piñero, Sylvère Lotringer, Lynne Tillman, and others and concludes that these writers still have much to teach us about changes in the nature of work and the emergence of a do-it-yourself ethos. DIY on the Lower East Side shows how place and politics shaped literature, and how New York City policies adopted at the time continue to shape our world.

Chapter 1

David Wojnarowicz, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Fordist Crisis in 1970s New York

As the long networks of the Fordist economy broke down, the writer and artist David Wojnarowicz scoured the remaining landscape for evidence of new life among segments of the population that were quickly being labeled an unproductive underclass impeding its recovery. Other accounts, mostly those advocating for the city’s redevelopment toward a post-Fordist economy of service work and finance, rendered the underclass as a problem to be solved, to be displaced from neighborhoods like Times Square, the Lower East Side, or the waterfront. Wojnarowicz, though, attends to the small, limited networks among these figures. To read Wojnarowicz’s The Waterfront Journals (1996, written 1978–80) is to experience simultaneously the withdrawal of the welfare state, the impetus toward self-creation necessary for post-Fordist work, and the momentary falling away of Fordist discipline. These short works meditate on the possibilities of life in the ruined city, in the cracks and fissures left when capital withdraws its energies.1 They represent the possibility of life persisting even when rent from the social fabric, with all the lassitude, terror, and fragility such life entails. My reading of them will establish some of the core problems of DIY on Lower East Side: how, in the wake of the fiscal crisis, culture workers like Wojnarowicz developed projects that refracted, scrutinized, and suggested alternatives to the official narratives of the city and the financiers advising it.

The broken buildings and rubbled lots on this ground were both inspiration for the crisis’s dominant narrative—that the city’s welfare state had failed—and a product of its constrained vision of the city’s life. As landlords walked away from more and more buildings, New York began to seem a wild place where anything could happen. As I’ll show, “anything” had quite different meanings for city planners, real estate developers, and culture workers. These groups’ different approaches to the post-crisis landscape alternately merge and diverge. If what eventually emerges—gentrification driven by art—now seems inevitable, it was not so in the 1970s, and Wojnarowicz’s work suggests alternate possibilities, a city that listened to and provided space for its most desperate citizens.

As I will for other authors in later chapters, I read Wojnarowicz’s monologues as performing a kind of amateur ethnography. Wojnarowicz wrote the monologues as the city and the national economy were undergoing vast changes, which, for the purposes of this study, are best thought of as a shift from the Fordist regime of manufacturing and a relatively strong welfare state to a post-Fordist regime of temporary contracts and weaker state safety nets. Within both the specific context of New York and the wider context of post-Fordism, artists play important roles, variously documenting such shifts, taking advantage of abandoned space, and serving, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello observe, as the premier figures for post-Fordist work regimes.2

I’ll set Wojnarowicz in a paradoxical relationship to Gordon Matta-Clark, the sculptor-architect who intervened within the city in larger-scale ways, often highlighting the degradation of the built environment from which the impoverished and working classes suffered disproportionately. Such degradation was accelerated by the crisis, prompting calls for redevelopment that would be answered by private developers. Matta-Clark was intensely interested in the possibilities for new modes of life afforded by the landscape, and he pursued these possibilities across a range of collaborative projects, including cutting into buildings, creating sculptures out of refuse, and founding a restaurant, FOOD, that served SoHo’s rising arts colony. While Matta-Clark engaged the problems of the built environment more visibly, Wojnarowicz’s monologues, with their documentary impulse, left a more lasting critique of the effect the crisis had on the city’s abject populations.

In divergent ways, both Wojnarowicz and Matta-Clark theorize the relationship between humans and their built environment in 1970s New York. Their diverse paths to becoming artists and their varied works take shape within the changed cultural and economic circumstances signaled and furthered by the 1975 crisis. As Lefebvre emphasizes, such a relationship is by no means simple or direct. Like all space, urban space is “at once result and cause, product and producer.”3 Nor can the future effects of any such relationship be easily predicted. Lefebvre describes such as a “stake, the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies, and hence also the object of wagers on the future—wagers which are articulated, if never completely.”4 Though both foreground a collision between human life and the built environment, I argue that Wojnarowicz asserts a more halting, more tentative, but ultimately more comprehensive account of humans surviving in the cracks and fissures that appeared after the collapse of Fordist modes of life.

The built environment was inextricable from the dynamics of the 1975 crisis. Business interests not only benefited from the welfare-state-cutting political agenda imposed in the wake of the crisis, they arguably precipitated the crisis by backing the city-supported office building boom of the late Lindsay administration, including the World Trade Center. Such projects helped raise the city’s long-term debt by 48 percent between 1970 and 1975.5 New York’s problems were experienced by cities nationwide. But New York had a particularly high profile, as well as a deserved reputation as a city with an empowered working class, which had advocated strongly for its weakest citizens.6 Across the postwar era, the city provided its residents a rich welfare state, including a robust public health system, strong schools, affordable housing, and direct benefits that helped many of its residents maintain a living wage. These characteristics put New York in the crosshairs of a rising turn against the welfare state among conservatives.

The crisis somewhat infamously resulted in Gerald Ford refusing federal aid to the city. On October 30, 1975, the Daily News headline read “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” This headline has become infamous as an index of tension between New York and the federal government. Often less remembered are the ways that Ford’s administration used the 1975 crisis to further a wide attack on the welfare state for which conservatives had been agitating since the New Deal. Ford himself had long voiced opposition to both the welfare state and the organized labor supporting it. And his opinions were mild in comparison to a powerful movement in the Republican party toward reduced taxes and smaller government.7 While California’s 1978 anti-tax Proposition 13 is sometimes remembered as the most important precursor to the Reagan revolution, all of the dynamics around Proposition 13 were already operating on a federal level, and New York’s crisis was an excuse to force these dynamics. Anti-welfare-state conservatives saw New York’s potential bankruptcy in positive terms, as an event that would tell local politicians, labor leaders, and welfare activists that, twenty years in advance of Bill Clinton’s use of the phrase, the era of big government was over.8

Under pressure from these voices, the Municipal Assistance Corporation became a vehicle for a range of conservative (and, often, liberal) voices who asserted that the programs of the War on Poverty and Great Society had not only failed, but had in fact caused the crisis. In a 1977 New York Times editorial, for example, the board’s head, Felix Rohatyn, flatly asserted that “Federal programs aimed at eliminating poverty do not work.” He framed the “core-city population” as out of “society’s mainstream,” a realm from which they could only return through the alchemy of private enterprise: “Manufacturing facilities financed by the Development Corporation but operated by private corporations should be set up in industrial parks created for the purpose in cleared, now vacant ghetto areas.”9 Turning away from the long-term, structural causes of the fiscal crisis, Rohatyn and others blamed the welfare state and its beneficiaries.10 Holding the inner-city impoverished (and city worker unions) responsible for the degraded environment in which they lived, accounts like Rohatyn’s framed the underclass as irredeemable and abject and presented privatization as the only solution to their problems.

By all measures, Wojnarowicz himself started as one of the abject, someone who, but for willpower and luck, would have been counted among the underclass himself. As Cynthia Carr documents in her biography, Wojnarowicz emerged from a background of poverty and abuse.11 After migrating to New York as a teenager, he struggled to survive in the late 1970s, first hustling and then working odd jobs, relying all the while on what Lucy Lippard calls “the tenderness he seems to have brought with him to even the most sordid encounters”12 to make the allies that would eventually yield success. Wojnarowicz was a writer, artist, actor, and musician, perhaps most famous for his clashes with the Christian Right in the late 1980s. In the spirit of the downtown New York of the 1970s and 1980s, he was a polymath, producing visual art in a number of styles, even as he experimented with punk rock (3 Teens Kill 4), acting, photography, and film. Before he was any of these things, during the years when he toiled in obscurity, Wojnarowicz was a writer. Between 1978 and 1980, he produced a series of vignettes that he called “monologues.” Cheap to produce, and highly portable, these monologues formed the initial core of Wojnarowicz’s bid for artistic fame in the years when he lived hand-to-mouth, moving from one cheap apartment to another. Published in various forms over these years, they were collected after his 1992 death into The Waterfront Journals. Each of the forty-five vignettes catalogs a fragment of an underclass life. Wojnarowicz described these as “a collection of voices”13 that he’d heard or overheard from “people once met and then left suddenly such as in car rides cross-country, early-morning rail encounters, overheard coffee shop conversations.”14 As you can likely hear, Wojnarowicz was influenced by Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Herbert Huncke, but he applied the formal techniques of these writers to a more sociological purpose, a project that became urgent in the context of the fiscal crisis. As I’ll explain below in my reading of the monologues, it is here that I see Wojnarowicz as working in a kind of Latourian mode, anticipating the work of sociologists like William Julius Wilson and Loïc Wacquant.

Queer theorists like José Muñoz and Jack Halberstam have usefully theorized the lives of men like Wojnarowicz in terms of their slant orientation to normative time and space.15 Halberstam, for example, describes such lives as inhabiting “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices,” which contrast with the “long periods of stability” of so-called “productive citizens.”16 Muñoz similarly praises queerness’s “ecstatic and horizontal temporality,” which he views as a “path and a movement to a greater openness to the world.”17 Both critics figure queer life as opposed to “the practical and normalcy desiring homosexual” life of regular hours, heterosexual marriage, and child-rearing.18 As Melinda Cooper has demonstrated, the middle-class white family was a regulating structure under Fordism, and continues to shape approaches to poverty in the post-Fordist era. Here, Wojnarowicz’s work—with its focus on impoverished, nonnormative citizens—offers a productive site of connection between theorizations of queer life and theorizations of the underclass.

Much of the debates around the crisis concerned whether New York should be a city dedicated to normative time schedules and “productive” citizens, or whether it should instead welcome and support many different forms of life. As Wilson observed in his landmark The Truly Disadvantaged, by the late seventies, a mostly conservative narrative about the inner city—that its residents were fundamentally other to productive American life—had emerged in a wide swath of criticism. Works like James Q. Wilson’s Thinking about Crime (1975), George Gilder’s influential Wealth and Poverty (1981), and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1984) made similar arguments. The problems of the inner city stemmed from “different group values,” and that no amount of government programs would alleviate the inner city’s problems.19

Wilson’s work specifically intervenes in a debate whose terms, by 1987, had become relatively fixed.20 There is, then, a congruence between Halberstam’s notion of queer space, as outside the “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance,” and the notion of a “culture of poverty” ostensibly opposed to such values.21 The lives of poor African Americans and the lives of working-class homosexuals are, of course, sociologically much different, and yet they converge in Wojnarowicz’s work. Wojnarowicz depicts a city that already harbors productive lives, even as these lives are unruly and disaccustomed to the normative time frames discussed by Halberstam. If the inner city, in the 1970s, became both a symbol of the welfare state’s failure and a site of renewal for bored middle-class artists, Wojnarowicz’s work complicates both dynamics in several important ways. Listening to the voices emanating from an ostensibly obliterated landscape, he catalogs the very desire for survival that Wilson so elegantly frames in his structural account of inner-city poverty. The voices in The Waterfront Journals want neither to give up nor to die; they actively seek something better for themselves, even if “something better” is unrecognizable from the standpoint of normative time.

My reading of The Waterfront Journals casts the account of queer life offered by Halberstam into histories of development, working backwards from Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s “Sex in Public,” which surveyed the New York landscape after the city had taken a post-Fordist turn and Times Square had undergone its near-total transformation into a site for middle-class heterosexual entertainment.22 Warner and Berlant bemoan the heterosexualization of city space, a heterosexualization that drew on the legacy of urban theorist Jane Jacobs as much as it did Robert Moses in fostering neighborhoods that were “safe” for middle-class residents and tourists. In what follows, I inquire into the rough world that emerged after the Fordist city and before the post-Fordist city, and ask what shards of possible futures lay embedded in the disused spaces of manufacturing, futures not conscribed by the logic of renovation and redevelopment. Art historian Fiona Anderson has read Wojnarowicz’s cruising in terms of its anthropological effects, arguing that his work “activated … past narratives of the waterfront.” For Anderson, this means the symbolic imaginary of the port as a “ruin,” as well as the history of the piers themselves, but her words apply equally well to the project of unearthing small histories of the underclass.23 Blurring fact and ficti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 David ­Wojnarowicz, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Fordist Crisis in 1970s New York
• Chapter 2 The Puerto Rican Working Class and the Literature of Rebuilding
• Chapter 3 Semiotext(e), Kathy Acker, and the Decline of the Welfare State
• Chapter 4 The Rise of the Creative Economy: Art, Gentrification, and Narrative
• Chapter 5 Between Fordism and Post-Fordism: The DIY Literature of Between C & D
• Afterword: ACT UP and the Divergent Possibilities of DIY
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover