BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | While others might roast marshmallows at a campout, at the Campout New York Post in Tompkins Square last weekend, developers — a.k.a. “real estate maggots” — Mayor de Blasio and the police all got a good grilling.
The idea for the event was sparked by the police observation tower that was brought into Tompkins Square Park last month — hot on the heels of articles by the New York Post claiming an uptick of homeless people sleeping and hanging out in the East Village park, plus a likeminded New York Observer editorial, “Take Back Tompkins Square Park. And New York City.”
The surveillance tower was overkill and unwanted, and the reasons behind it dubious, many East Villagers protested. A petition to remove it garnered hundreds of signatures. After less than a week, the “eye in the sky” was removed on July 28. But the campout, which organizers had already started promoting, wasn’t canceled.
The campout coincided with the weekend-long punk rock concerts marking the 27th anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park riots.
Things kicked off at midnight on Friday evening, with “campers” buying copious amounts of cheese fries at Ray’s Candy Store on Avenue A across the street. They “watched” a cardboard TV while relaxing on cardboard seats and couches, or could listen to speakers standing on a soapbox (a plastic milk crate) talking about issues like gentrification, homelessness and police-community relations.
About 100 to 150 people came out Friday night, which was the biggest night of the campout. After the park’s curfew, they continued to hang out on the sidewalk outside the park.
“People didn’t go to sleep. They mainly stayed up all night,” said John Penley, one of the organizers. “And people loved that cardboard furniture.”
A former longtime East Village activist, Penley came up from North Carolina, where he now lives, for the weekend.
“Over the course of the weekend, between the concert and the campout, I saw every single person that I’ve known in this neighborhood,” he said.
There were no incidents with the police, he said. One homeless man not associated with the campout obliviously pissed on a police van one night, but nothing happened.
“They didn’t even arrest him,” Penley said.
Watching the action on Sunday and talking to the likes of LES documentarian Clayton Patterson and others, Deputy Chief James McCarthy, executive officer of Patrol Borough Manhattan South, said things had gone smoothly.
“It was nice being out today and seeing a lot of familiar faces,” said McCarthy, a former commander of the East Village’s Ninth Precinct. “People are enjoying music and enjoying themselves. No issues whatsover.”
The weekend’s highlight, Penley said many told him, and he agreed, was the performance by the Living Theatre at the end on Sunday evening. A troupe of young dancers enacted a piece written by the late Judith Malina, the theater’s legendary co-founder. The work spanned from the Lenape, who were Manhattan’s original inhabitants, back to Adam and Eve — with the dancers portraying the pair stripping down to flesh-colored briefs — then forward again to texting and computer hyper-madness, to an Orwellian police state.
The dancers started in a huddle with an increasingly loud, droning chant, then spread out through the park, interacting with and drawing in spectators, who soon found themselves participants.
Speakers during the weekend included the likes of Aron Kay (“The Yippie Pie Man”), cartoonist Seth Tobocman, Fran Luck and activist Carl Rosenstein.
“Everybody spoke,” Penley said. “It was like old days.”
Nevertheless, despite the good tunes (especially if you were a crustcore fan) and good vibes, some were calling it “the end of an era.”
“This year, I was feeling… the feeling was ‘done,’ ” said Lina Pallotta, who lived in the neighborhood during the tumultuous 1980s.
Penley — who crashed for the weekend in a former squat where he has friends — agreed with those sentiments, to an extent.
“I don’t know that it’s the complete end,” he said. “It was like a last gasp. All of us are getting older. Every year there are fewer people at the riots anniversary. There will be people who aren’t there next year. People are dying, man.”
But the tightknit community feeling that East Village activists, anarchists and squatters had is still strong, and is something that the neighborhood won’t see again, he said.
“Unlike the people that live in the community today, they don’t have a community — we do,” Penley said. “We went through a lot together — the Tompkins Square riots, the squatter evictions, the homeless Tent City in the park, many art shows in community centers, squats and community gardens, and the nightlife scene, which a lot of us and the people in the bands were into. The World, especially Save the Robots — it was the most famous after-hours club in the city of New York.”
Asked about the police tower, Deputy Chief McCarthy said, “We put SkyWatch in here. Some people didn’t want it, so Inspector Venice” — the current Ninth Precinct commander — “said people didn’t want it. It was Inspector Venice’s decision” to remove it, he said.
Asked why the tower was put in the park in the first place, McCarthy said, “We use SkyWatch all the time. This is a busy area over here, especially Avenue A.”
Told of that, Chris Flash, publisher of The Shadow, who organized the punk band performances, said, “That’s bull—. They were being baited by the New York Compost and the New York Observer — and Jared Kushner, the publisher of the Observer. The police were basically being baited by these two right-wing, real estate newspapers. I’m here every day with my kids — nothing. The guy that was hitting people with a hammer in Midtown — did that get a tower? How many people on Hippie Hill” — the small rise in the middle of Tompkins — “are homeless? Ninety-nine percent of them, if not affluent, at least have a home.”
Asked his thoughts on the campout, Paul DeRienzo, the event’s co-organizer, said, “It was a success for me the moment that Police Commissioner Bratton announced you can’t arrest your way out of homeless problems. Also the removal of the tower was a great victory. The New York Post will never surrender, but that’s understood.”
There are plans for ongoing weekend campouts in Tompkins, but Penley and DeRienzo are not behind them. These are reportedly being “self-organized by homeless crusties and anarchists.”
