Anyone with an interest in New York’s radical history–or that of American cities generally–will welcome the publication of the following two books:
* Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side by Clayton Patterson (Editor) (New York: Seven Stories Press, April 2007)
This 624 page, large format anthology is a real treasure. It documents the radical history of the Lower East Side, focusing particularly on the 1980s, one of the most dynamic and least documented periods in the history of urban opposition. The book is divided into six sections (history, housing/squats, Tompkins Square, media, biography, and AIDS). Many of the contributors will be familiar to participants in and students of rebellion in the Big Apple: Bill Weinberg, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Seth Tobocman, Sarah Ferguson, and others make an appearance.
Here’s a quote from the Foreword by Jeff Farrell:
Rarely does a book come along with politics as vivid as its people. Clayton Patterson and the many contributors to Resistance pull it off. With a fine mix of fondness, humor and critique, they document the hodgepodge of incendiary politics and interpersonal engagement that defined decades of New York’s Lower East Side. More to the point, they show us that for the Lower East Side at its best the people were the politics. Making your way through Resistance, you might as well be wandering the political landscape of the neighborhood back in the day, stopping to dig the street players, putting up a poster or pushing a copy of the Shadow newspaper, pitching in to defend a squat or collective garden, cutting through the crowd in Tompkins Square Park, sidestepping a junkie or a cop. Resistance swarms with the movement and emotion of the Lower East Side’s people, revealing a politics invented out of the daily battles with police, landlords, developers–hell, sometimes with each other. Reading the book, you feel like a flanuer, lost to the rhythms of the neighborhood streets and learning something new at every turn.
* The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror by Beverly Gage (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
This book explores a key moment in the history of social discontent in New York City: the 1920 bombing of Wall and Broad streets, which killed 40 people and injured hundreds more. Though no one was ever charged with the crime, Paul Avrich and many other historians believe that Mario Buda, a local anarchist of Italian extraction, bore responsibility. (This incident is the source of the title of Mike Davis’s new and interesting book, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York: Verso, 2007).)