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Vets of Tompkins Square battle ready to fight again

By David Freedlander | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

7:14 PM EDT, July 28, 2008

20th Anniversary of Tompkins Square Riots

The 20th Anniversary of the Tompkins Park Riots is on August 6/7 2008. The riots were seminal moments in East Village history as captured here by video stills by videographer Clayton Patterson. (Clayton Patterson / July 29, 2008)

Twenty years ago this week Tompkins Square Park was turned into a battlefield as police officers ran roughshod over homeless squatters and neighborhood activists in a seminal moment in NYPD-community relations.

The dust has long since cleared and multimillion-dollar apartments and upscale eateries line the perimeter of the park.

However, a group of veterans of the Tompkins Square Park Riots who gathered in the park last weekend and are slated to do so this weekend, say the battle for the soul of the East Village is far from over.

"We are trying to start the uprising again," said John Penley, a long time neighborhood activist. "We are trying to create some kind of resistance to the real estate developers. It's the same as '88. Tensions are up."

Penley and others are taking aim at the proliferation of wine bars and attempts by Alistair Economakis, the son of a Greek shipping magnate, to take over an entire East Village tenement for his own use and kick out the long-time residents.

"The developers declared war on us a long time ago. It took us a little while, but we're declaring war back on them," Penley said.

The riots of Aug. 6th and 7th began in 1988 when police tried to impose a curfew and evict encampments of homeless in Tompkins Square.

By almost all accounts, the police, egged on by protesters, overreacted, sending dozens of people to the hospital with injuries.

"This was the last gasp of the hippies and the anarchists," said Ed Koch, who was mayor during the riots and concedes that police created a "melee."

"From that point on the neighborhood really started to change," he said.

Many, however, see the days of the park as a gathering point of radical resistance long since over.

"That was a symbolic battle over how the neighborhood was going to go, and now it's over," said the writer Luc Sante, who witnessed the events of 1988. "We won the battle but they won the war."

Sarah Ferguson, a journalist who covered the riots for the Village Voice, agreed.

"Tompkins Square Park has lost its perch as a place of resistance," she said. "The punks have grown older. Some of us have kids now, and we want a nice clean park to take them to."

On Sunday, a few dozen old-timers gathered to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the uprising with an afternoon punk rock concert.

Alex Fried, 17, came from New Jersey with a friend, and said that although he had heard about the riots; his main interest that afternoon was the music.

"We just like going to shows," he said. "I just heard that in '88 they tried to set a curfew and a riot started. If they tried to kick us out we wouldn't be happy about it either."

As famed local group David Peel and the Lower East Side Band broke into the song, "Die, Yuppie Scum," three women wearing Abercrombie T-shirts and pushing baby strollers began to dance, but stopped suddenly when the meaning of the lyrics became clear.

"Even the people living here don't see it," said Clayton Patterson, whose footage of the melee helped indict the police. "It's so frustrating in a way. You could see all of this coming down the pike and no on was listening."