Chris Brandt

Rendón: Today is June 15th, 2024. And I'm here with Chris Brandt at The New School. Thank you Chris for having this conversation with me.

Brandt: Thank you for doing it.

Rendón: So, Chris, tell me about yourself. Tell me, where were you born and where is your family from?

Brandt: I was born in Oregon… In Corvallis, Oregon, in the northwest of this country in 1943. My father was a refugee from Hitler. He grew up in Vienna, and he and his immediate family managed to escape in 1939, which was cutting it awfully close, but. And what happened to the rest of our family? We have no idea.

I mean, we know what happened to them, but the details no. And he met my mother, who was the daughter of Danish immigrants.

So both sides of my family were migrants. One [side] economic refugees in the early 20th century and the other political refugees in the 1930s. And my father was working for the war effort. He wanted to join the military, but they wouldn't allow him to do that because he was an enemy alien.

And so he was working as a riveter in a shipyard and then got called because he had a PhD in German language and literature, he got called to train paratroopers to speak German that was believable. And so they could be dropped behind the German lines, and he trained them. So if he called [the paratroopers] up at 3:00 in the morning and they answered the phone in English, they failed the course.

And of course, they sent them over the Pacific, naturally… And then they hired my father as a writer in the OWI, the Office of War Information, which is the propaganda arm of the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] and the two organizations... I don't remember what they stood for... The two organizations, the OSS and the OWI, merged in 1947 to create the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. One of the biggest mistakes we've ever made in this country.

But he was in London putting together these pamphlets to be airdropped over Germany and putting together radio broadcasts and so forth.

He was there for the latter part of 1943 and the early and in the first half or so of 1944, and then came back, and he was teaching at William and Mary College in Virginia, but his asthma, which he was afflicted with from childhood, got very bad, and they advised him to go to teach in a dry climate. So he got a job at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and moved us out there. And that's where I grew up, [for] 14 years of my life, my adolescence, my childhood and adolescence. And then, well, it was an idyllic childhood existence, running around unsupervised in the hills because we lived slightly out of town.

Rendón: Do you have siblings?

Brandt: I have two brothers, and we were hell raising all over the place during that time.

And then came high school and college, and I applied to several of the best colleges and got into almost all of them and decided to go to Princeton for all the wrong reasons. I was told that Princeton was a country club school. And I thought, the country club is the one place where I could not get in, in Colorado Springs. So if I went to a country club school, maybe I could become a country club person [laughs]. It didn't work. No. The true blue-blood boys at Princeton recognized immediately that I was not one of them [laughs]. And then came Vietnam, and that began to politicize me. And I went to... After college, I had to get a job, and I got a job teaching.

Rendón: What was your major?

Brandt: English language and literature… When I went to Princeton, I wanted to study Southeast Asian languages, International Law, and apply to join the CIA, which would have been a dreadful mistake. But fortunately I failed Chinese and didn't do very well in international law either. So I changed my major to English language and literature and studied languages. Then [I] taught for two years in high school, Tennessee, and then went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, where I began to get more radicalized. There was a poet there who, a very lovely, shy man, one of the great unrecognized American poets, Robert Francis.

And he had begun the vigil, the weekly Sunday vigil, from noon to 01:00 PM on the Town Common, standing there by himself. He didn't try to organize anything, and with a stick with a sign on it saying: “I am standing here for 1 hour in silent protest to our involvement in the war in Vietnam. And if you want to come and join me, please do. But we're going to be silent until 01:00. If you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them after that.” And within two years there were several hundred people there every day. And he had done nothing to organize it, just stood there himself. I loved that man.

Rendón: What was his name again?

Brandt: Robert Francis. And he was a Thoreauvian, lived in a tiny little house, and he lived radically.

That's the only way I can think to put it. He lived the way I aim to live now. My ideal is to live as if the revolution had already been won.

And so I was at the University of Massachusetts for two years, studying medieval comparative literature, and then got a fellowship to travel to Germany to study for a third year. And that's when I got really radicalized, because it was 1968… 69, and Danny the Red [Daniel Cohn-Bendit] was in his heyday. The Paris occupation… The student occupation of Paris and so on. And I fell in with this group of really, really smart political activists.

And if we can, if we have time enough, I can tell you the whole story… Basically, [the] short version is they wanted somebody to do street theater. I raised my hand, I don't know why, but I did end up dropping out of school, basically, and doing street theater for the rest of that year.

Rendón: What were your influences in street theater?

Brandt: Well, a man named Ernst. What is his name… Schumacher. Schumacher. There was a book that came out in 1971 or 72 called “Small is Beautiful” and that's still one of my bibles. He was a fellow who was... He was very practical. He was an economist.

He was the head of the British Coal board, doing major economic jobs for the British government. And then when he retired, he started this group called the Intermediate Technology Development Group, ITDG, and tried to change the way foreign aid was granted to third world countries.

And he did that by saying: “You don't import all the machinery to these countries. You go in there and you sit down with the people who live there and listen to them and understand what they need or what they think they need. And then you can help them create that project because you have certain knowledge that they maybe don't have and you import only one item.

The rules of ITDG are that you could import only one item to complete the project”. So, for example, in Botswana, which is one of the driest places on earth, or was then, maybe it's been overtaken now, they had maybe three inches of rainfall a year.

So they collected, when it did rain, they collected water in ponds, basically ditches, but the water there became contaminated very quickly. So what Schumacher and his group did was to work out a plan with the people there, to build cisterns using just plain stones. And then the imported item [was] a sheet of heavy duty polyurethane and then another layer of stones. That way the water could remain pure.

And then a thatched roof over the whole thing and a lever with a bucket on it to get the water out. It changed the life of the people there completely because their cattle didn't get sick and the children didn't get so sick. They had water all year long and so on… And he did that with several places. Unfortunately, the powers that be don't think that’s a good system. They want a factory to go in with all the new automated equipment and so that they can make a profit. But Schumacher’s idea was: You don't lose money this way, but you don't make a profit. And that's the kind of activism that I follow and would like to do.

Rendón: You were saying that you started doing street theater?

Brandt: Yeah. And so Schumacher told me some stories about the way things were done in Africa, and they were very funny. And so I put together two little pieces and we performed them, and it was quite successful. People really came around and listened, and then afterwards asked questions, and our graduate economists and legal scholars and so forth answered the questions because we were just… We didn't know anything. And it was so successful, it got on German national TV. And then I came toward the end of that year, and I had to make a decision. Do I stay in Germany and do street theater, or do I go back to New York and study theater?

And I wrote to Sarah Lawrence College, which I knew had a very good theater department, and I sent them the scripts from my street theater, and they, by return mail, said: “Do you want a fellowship? We've got one for you”. So I did two years of study at Sarah Lawrence College and got an MFA, but also got ever more radicalized. And ever since my late... Well, that's how I got into the MHA [Mutual Housing Association] also.

Rendón: So you came to New York and you moved, where were you living?

Brandt: The first place I lived in New York, other than [being a] couch surfer, at a friend's place, was on Avenue C in 9th street, where I had a four-room apartment for $68 a month, and with a very, very good, wonderful landlord.

His mother had been given the building as a political favor, and she had willed it to him. And the building was in bad repair and so forth, but it was a place to live, and it was exciting to live on the Lower East Side then, especially in Alphabet City.

Rendón: So what year was this?

Brandt: 1972, when I moved in there.

And after six years there, he sold the building to a guy whose only interest was making profit on it. So I moved out. And it just happened by good fortune that at the same time, a friend of mine who was a member of the same theater company I was in,

was moving to California and said: "Do you want to take over my apartment?" And of course, I jumped at the chance, and it was in the same building where I live now. And the building was in miserable shape. God, it was awful. There was a hole in my floor that I could see down into the apartment below.

Rendón: What building is this?

Brandt: 77.

Rendón: 77.

Brandt: But I was an illegal subletter. John was illegal, too, and then he was illegally passing it on to me. So I kept my head down. But then I went [away] again by a strange chance. I got a phone call from a friend in Germany saying: “Do you want to be [a] crew [member] on my sailboat? We’re sailing across the Atlantic [Ocean]”.

So I flew to Spain and met him and his other crew, which comprised two other people. And we sailed across the Atlantic by wind power.

And it was a fabulous, really fabulous trip. It was great. We got… we put two sails on that were shaped like this... It’s called gull winging, and we just sat there and the wind pushed us across the ocean and we did things like calculate where the exact middle was. And then when we got there, we all jumped off the boat and went swimming in the middle of the Atlantic.

But I had thought we were going to spend a lot of time on the beautiful white sand beaches of the Caribbean. But the captain, on whose boat it was and whose orders one follows unquestioningly as a sailor, had a job offer at IBM in San Jose, and so he was in a hurry.

So he wanted to do the fastest route to the Bay Area, which was all the way, almost all the way out to the Hawaiian islands and then back in, in one huge tack. And I said: “I'm not doing that. I want to see what's going on in Central America”.

And the original plan had been for us to stop at coastal ports along the Pacific coast of Central America and just explore. So I got off in Panama and took a bus up to Nicaragua, which is what I wanted to see, because Nicaragua had just won their insurrection and had established the first four years of its revolution, this was 1984. And so the bus was one of these old school buses, a Bluebird School Bus.

And it kept breaking down on the way from San Jose, Costa Rica, to the Nicaraguan border. And we got to the border and there was the customs shed, you had to show your documents, the usual thing. And there were pictures of the nine commandantes up above the passport control. And they looked very stern. And I thought: “What's going on here? What am I getting myself into?” And they checked all our documents and then they loaded us back onto the bus, all except for five indigenous women from Masaya who had gotten to the bus late in San Jose and had gotten on the bus at the last possible second. And so their names were not on the passenger manifest.

At this point, two soldiers— the indigenous women were already on the bus—and the two soldiers got on [the bus] with AK-47’s slung across their backs. And one of them had a clipboard with the passenger manifest on it [and] read out all our names [in roll call]. We said: “Estamos aquí, estamos aquí”. And then they came to the end of the list. And they said: “Sorry, indigenous women, you're gonna have to get off the bus.” You can't cross the border on this bus. And I thought: “Oh, no, another bureaucratic police force that cannot make up its own mind. There we go again”. And then the most unexpected thing Happened. A man who was dressed in a suit—he was the only one on the bus who was dressed in a suit and had an actual suitcase.

Everybody else just had bags. And he stood up and said: “You can't do that”. And the soldiers were shocked, [they said]: “Well, we're only trying to do our job”. [The man said back:] “I don't care what your job is”. And more and more people stood up in the bus and said: “You can't do this. We saw these women get on the bus. We know where they are from. They're from Masaya. They're going home. You have to let them go”. And the argument got pretty hefty.

And so, you know, those seats have sheet metal backs. And I was down behind one wondering if they would stop a bullet. But I could tell by the soldiers' faces they never even thought of going for their guns. And then another officer got on board. She was carrying a beautiful attache case and had a 45 [caliber gun] on her hip.

And she said: “What's going on here?” And so we had to go through the whole story again. And the argument started getting more hefty again. And my Spanish had given out a while ago, but then all of a sudden, the bus became quiet, and then everybody started laughing. And I thought: “What is going on here?”

[So the] five indigenous women got up and got off the bus, and the soldiers stayed on the bus because they were going back to their homes and villas. And the bus went on across the border and crossed no man's land. And then the soldier was on guard at the end of no man's land, opened the chain gate, and the bus went through and [mechanical noises] then broke down again. But this time, the driver didn't get out and go under the hood and try to fix whatever was wrong.

We just sat there, and the driver smoked a cigarette. And then [the] five indigenous women came walking across the border, across no man's land, and got on the bus, and their seats had been saved for them. And some bright soul had realized that the rules said that if their names weren't in the passenger manifest, they couldn't cross the border on it. But it didn't say anything about what would happen if they walked across the border and there happened to be a bus there [laughs]. And at that point, I fell in love with Nicaragua. And I found this true throughout my stay there, two stays there, that I wasn't afraid of the police or the military. It was the first time in my life that I hadn't been afraid of the police, a lot of which I probably inherited from my father because of the Nazis.

And so I stayed in Nicaragua for about half a year. And my idea was first to join a construction brigade because I was working back here in New York as a construction worker and carpenter, which was the way I made my living for about 30 years. And so I applied for construction… But the brigade wasn't leaving for another week. So during that week, I went and explored some more and went to the Ministry of Culture and asked the secretary: “Can I talk to anybody who's doing theater? Because I've been involved in theater in New York since forever.” And she said: “Yes, go down around the corner. There's a fellow there, Adolfo Baez, who is putting together a theater piece, and he's looking for actors”.

So I went and I thought: “He's looking for actors. He's not looking for me.” But it turned out he was looking for somebody to play Arthur Bliss Lane, the American ambassador to Nicaragua in 1927, in a play about the assassination of Sandino. And Bliss Lane, it turns out, was the one who taught [General] Somoza how to govern, create chaos, and kill people without getting his hands dirty. And so we did this play, and in the cast Baez said: “I've been looking for a gringo actor, there is always a gringo.” So I took the script home that night, back to the hospedaje where I was staying. It wasn't a great play, but I liked it well enough. So we did it.

And then in 1987, during that time, I stayed mostly in Managua because we were rehearsing. And since everybody else had jobs during the day and we rehearsed at night, I would spend the day translating poetry, Nicaraguan poetry. And then when I came back to the states, I visited my middle brother in California and then hitchhiked my way back across the country reading poetry for solidarity groups, and came back here and helped establish the Lower East Side sister city project with a city in Nicaragua called Bluefields.

We sistered the Lower East Side with Bluefields and did fundraisers and consciousness raising and a series of poetry readings, since that's what I was interested in. And in 1987, I went back down to bring some items that we had collected, like baseballs and mitts and things like that, because Nicaraguans love baseball. And the big thing we got was a brickmaking machine, a manual brick making machine that could make heavy blocks with a minimum of cement. That helped the people in Bluefields. Bluefields is on the Caribbean coast and a wonderful town, just beautiful. It was pretty much destroyed by hurricane Joan-Miriam. I haven't been back since. That was in 1987.

And then came back to East 4th Street and got on the board of the steering committee—not the board— the steering committee of Cooper Square. And then...

Rendón: At this time you had an apartment?

Brandt: Yeah. Yes, same apartment.

Rendón: The same apartment, okay. So you return, and then how did you get involved in the board? You have all these experiences in Latin America, and then did you come...or how were you invited?

Brandt: Yeah, I think. I don't think I answered. Somebody just asked me, probably Val, but I don't remember exactly.  [They asked] “Would I be on the board?” And [I said]: “Yes, of course I'd be on the board”.

Rendón: What are your memories from that time?

Brandt: Fighting with the city, a lot of it. Fighting with the city. Most of the really radical actions that had been done in the sixties and early seventies were before my time. But I heard about them and I loved them. And, you know, we closed off the block with a big banner across [that said]: “Cooper Square is Here to Stay, Speculators Keep Away.” And we would go down, we would go to city council hearings and so on and so forth, and we just kept organizing. Now, I didn't do much of the organizing. I have to say this every time I do one of these interviews, because I am a terrible organizer. I am a lousy organizer, in spite of the fact that I've been involved in the organizing of Cooper Square and also involved in the organizing of our union at Fordham, but I'm still a terrible organizer [laughs].

Rendón: So you were joining meetings... What's the context of that banner? Because it is very famous, that picture. Was it like a festival or a protest or march or something?

Brandt: It was a protest, and it was when the buildings were really in danger of being sold out from under us. At first in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that was Robert Moses, but by the 1970s Moses was gone, or he certainly at least had been defeated in part of lower Manhattan. But the city still knew that if they could sell these 21 buildings, they would make a windfall profit and they could sell them to real estate speculators.

And so Barbara Schaum, who had the leather store on 7th Street, she made sandals and belts and leather work. She made the banner for us. And then eventually she moved into the place where the Italian store is now, where she spent the rest of her life making leather things and doing a lot of things for Cooper Square and for the MHA and I think—I'm not sure about this— but I think it was in one of those periods where we were really under threat from speculators. That sign was up for, I think, a year, more than a year. I don't know how long it was. My memory is pretty bad.

Rendón: At that time who owned all these buildings?

Brandt: The city. The city, yeah. When Moses was defeated by this coalition that Fran and the other women had put together—this is the other interesting thing about Cooper Square— this was in the early 1960s. The three primary organizers of the effort to beat Robert Moses were all women, two of them former communists, Frances [Goldin] and Esther Rand, who started the Metropolitan Council on Housing. And the other one, Thelma Burdick, was a church lady. I mean, a real stereotypical church lady with a veil and the white gloves. And she would go to the city counselor's office and ask to see him to talk about the buildings on East 4th Street. And the secretary would say: “Oh, I'm so sorry. He just left the office”. And she said: “It's all right. I'll wait”.

Of course, the guy was inside his office, and he had to leave at some point [laughs]. So the combination of two really well trained organizers —because the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s had tremendous organizers—and this sweet, sweet old lady from... [laughs]I think, South Dakota or somewhere…She had been sent by her church, the Methodist Church, to take over the operation of the community center. Part of which is still there, where the housing is now on Houston [Street], between 2nd and 3rd [Avenues], between Houston and 1st Street and 2nd and 3rd [Avenues]. All that shiny new housing. 

That community center was there. And it had a swimming pool and a couple of gymnasiums and a chapel, which was all lovely. And she ran the place. And she was remarkable because at that time— in the 1950s —what's now called the East Village was still part of the Lower East Side. It was populated by the children of all the people in the area. And the people in the area were Poles, Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Blacks, working class whites, and all mixed together in this community center.

And inevitably, the kids would get into fights and start calling each other names which they had heard from their parents. So whenever one of those things happened—this is what I heard, and I never witnessed any of this—she would stop all activity in the community center, gather everybody together in one of those gyms, talk to the two kids or the two or more kids who have been involved in the incident, and explain to them that this was not acceptable, and they couldn't do it. And, if they did it again, they would never be able to come back to the community center. And, of course, what happened? And she would explain why it was a bad idea to call somebody a Polack or a [N-word, derogatory] or any of those, because those...or Yid...

because those epithets had been around forever on the Lower East Side, there were people who remembered.

There were streets you couldn't walk down if you were Italian, and streets you couldn't walk down if you were Jewish, and so forth. And she would explain to them why this was a bad idea. And then the kids would go home and explain it to their parents. And, as a result, partly as a result of that, the Lower East Side became one of the most tolerant places around. And so all power and all appreciation to those three women. Fran's gone. Thelma's gone. I don't know if Esther is still around.

Rendón: And when you returned from Nicaragua and you established in the Lower East Side, was Fran there?

Brandt: Right? Fran was there, yeah.

Rendón: So what do you remember about those times having her leading the organizing?

Brandt: Fran was the head organizer. There was no question about that. Fran was fabulous, wonderful. But she was not a saint, she had one characteristic which I had trouble with, that is, if anybody disagreed with her, they were traitorous. And that's been a problem among communist organizers [since] forever. And it never became a problem with Cooper Square, because she was right most of the time.

And when she wasn't right and somebody really pointed it out to her, she could take that, but she just… She had tremendous energy. And how she managed to pull all that off, I don't know. At the same time as being a full time literary agent.

Rendón: And mother.

Brandt: And a mother, yeah.

Rendón: And so when you went back—because I know that a certain point the buildings got renovated—were you part of that transformation?

Brandt: Yes. In fact, the first building to be renovated, I don't remember what year it was, but it was in the 1990s, it was 60 East 4th [Street] and people in my building were complaining, saying: “Why weren't we the first? Ah, yeah, yeah. Why didn't we get it?” And I kept telling them:

“No, we don't want it. We want to be the last building renovated”. And that made sense to them. [Because of] working in construction, I know what happens. You know, you make a mistake, you cover up the mistake, but you don't make the mistake again at the next [building] you do, and so on. So you don't cover up the mistake, you correct it. You try to correct the mistake, but if you can't correct it, you cover it up.

Rendón: So was the renovation [of the buildings] done one by one?

Brandt: First the 60 [building], and then I think it went two by two. But 60 was done while the tenants were still living in the buildings, and [they] moved the tenants from the back to the front, and then moved them back to the back apartments. And that didn't work very well, because the buildings were constantly full of dust, no matter how well the plasticked off the section of the building they were doing.

So we went back to doing the whole building at once, which meant that it was harder to organize because everybody from the building had to leave and find other temporary housing. So, for example, while 77 was being renovated, I [was on] 27 on Third street, which had already been renovated, and it was better than the old unrenovated apartment, but still not great. And then I had the choice, do I want to stay there and just have moved once, or do I want to go back to the other one? I chose to go back. 

Rendón: What about kind of like the notions [of people] so far, people like them? Because I imagine that: “Okay, you were living there, the conditions were pretty bad, and you left, and then you returned, and then the building was different”. Were there celebrations?

Brandt: Oh, yeah, the buildings were… When we returned to it, yeah, it was brand spanking new, shiny and everything. We had celebrations, and we had some of the tenants on the third floor and some of the tenants on the 6th floor, on the fifth floor, kind of decided altogether, all of us together, that we were a family, and we've kind of been kind of a family in that building. I mean, one of the good aspects of New York is that you can close your door, and you don't have to talk to your neighbor when you don't want to, but in our building, you can whenever you want to, if they want to talk too.

But, oh, one thing, when the plan was first being proposed going, and the word went out, which wasn't actually true, but it was true in a technical sense, that we were going to own our apartments, I thought: “How great, I can sell my apartment for a million dollars”. And then I thought: “You know, the thought just came into my head, unbidden, and I thought, if that thought is coming into my head, it's coming into everybody else's, too. We've got to do something to make sure this doesn't happen”. And when Marty came up with the idea for the Community Land Trust, [We all thought]: “Yes. Yes. Yes, that'll do it”.

Rendón: How was that communicated? Was it like in a community meeting and discussion?

Brandt: Endless board discussions.

Rendón: It was a new concept, no?

Brandt: Yes, it was ours, the first CLT [Community Land Trust] in Manhattan, and it may have been one of the first on the East Coast.

And we communicated it first in board meetings, endless board meetings, and often quite boring. But that's the way those things go. And then in block wide meetings where people would come to one of the big spaces, the theaters and so on, and [we would] explain it all, and explained that the whole idea of this was to keep these apartments available for low-income renters exclusively, forever. And that's what the structure does, the way we have the structure now. But as I was saying before, as long as we didn't have it, and we're fighting with the city to get it, people were very involved

and very militant and willing to go to demonstrations and talk to each other and so forth. Now that we've had them for 20 years, well, almost 25 years now, we don't feel under attack anymore, so people have become much less militant. So part of my being on the CLT board is I want to explain to people in ways that… And one way we thought of doing it is to create a comic book, a comic book with the history of fighting for. I mean, a very simplified history of fighting for the MHA and the CLT, and an explanation of what speculators would do if they got their hands on these buildings.

Because even with something as nearby as 3rd Street, as the Economakis mansion on 3rd Street. Do you know about that? I think it's at 47 East Third Street, something like that, 43 something. It's on Third Street, just west, just east of 2nd Avenue. And it's a double wide building. I think it's four stories, so it's large... And they kicked people out who had been living in it, who had been born in that building, and lived there ever since. Like this one guy in particular, who was severely autistic and who was going to be traumatized by being kicked out and moved into another place. They had all kinds of demonstrations to try to keep them from doing it.

But the Economakis’ had the law on their side, and they kicked everybody out of that building and took it over for themselves. And that's what we want to prevent happening. And people have forgotten about that threat, and we have to educate people that it's a real threat. And just because it's underground now doesn't mean that it won't happen again. And particularly, we have to tell this to the young people on the block, because they're going to be the ones who [will be] there when the next threat comes.

Rendón: How have you perceived changes? Because inside the community now, like you said, the buildings got renovated, then that was a win, and you fought for it. And then, I guess, they had more of a calm period. But also, I don't know if people have left and others have come.

Brandt: You know, some people have left and others have come. And there was a process for getting new tenants because some people, when they moved out of their building, got another place to live that they liked and wanted to stay there, because moving in Manhattan is a pain in the butt. So there was a whole process for interviewing new prospective tenants that had to be income eligible. They had to make a good impression on the interviewers that...there was a committee of the board. I forget what it's called… whatever it is. And the board had, that board committee, then had to certify that they were eligible, and they had to make some kind of a commitment. Now, I'm not sure how heavy that commitment was because there are people who have now illegally sublet their apartments.

I believe there's at least one of them in my building. And, you know, we're reluctant to go into these people and call the police, but at the same time, if people aren't paying attention to the bylaws and the rules that we've set up, they gotta go. But part of the benefits of the MHA and the CLT is that that block and the other buildings that we administer, in which we've had some shares, have become— People have lived there for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years. And we know everybody. We don't know everybody, but we [know] a lot of us.

I went to the Apollo, that trip we took to see the new Apollo Theater, and Olga, who lives in the Cube building and whom I'd met years ago [said to me]: “Oh, Chris, hey, hey!” And it's amazing, you know, we recognize each other on the street. We may not know each other very well, but it’s a little village.

Rendón: And do you think that that is happening also with the kids? Because, some are not kids anymore, right?

Brandt: Not sure it's happening with the kids because I'm not sure the parents want to relive the horrible times. And many of them may not have thought through

that they have to militarize [meaning train] their kids in order not to lose this [the community and the buildings], in order for the kids not to lose it. I don't know. I know one kid on the block who has become friendly with me, and he was born on the block, and I asked him about these things, and he knew none of this. He knew none of the history of it. I'm sure somebody had told him once, and he was a kid, [but he probably was]: “Eh… Eh… close your ears. It's just old people talking”.

Rendón: Well, you mentioned that you have seen some of the challenges. One of the challenges is this one, to transfer this knowledge to the younger generations. But what other challenges have you seen these last ten years or so?

Brandt: Well, I guess mainly the fact that I don't know any of the new people or very few of them, and I would like to know them better. I would like to know the new people, the tenants who have moved in through the lottery, as well as I know Josefina on the third floor of my building, and I would like to know them, to urge them, if they are interested and willing, to become involved, and to know the history of the place. One of the things that's bothered me about the MHA and the CLT from the very beginning, and it's not our fault, is that there's no publicity about it.

Everybody in New York should know that they can do this if they really want to. Everybody in New York should realize that they don't have to curse the landlord and live in the darkness, that if you have a plan and you organize well and you put it together and you fight the city and you have 30 years to spend doing it, you might get the same thing that we've got, where you can set your own rents. And, I mean…Knowing what the profit margins are is one of the greatest advantages of the MHA, because my apartment, a studio apartment, a basic studio apartment, it's about. Somewhere between 300 and 400 sqft.

There's an apartment on Orchard street or at least there was a couple of years ago that was renting for $3,500 a month, and I'm paying $650, and my apartment is beautifully renovated. And once you know the kind of profits that landlords are making on these buildings… You know, you want to go out and fight them with your bare hands.

Rendón: Yeah. And how much do you discuss with some of the new [residents]—I mean everyone knows—about these [apartment] prices? Not everyone knows about all the organizing that was [involved]. If you think about back then and today, the values or the principles that have kept the community together, one is fighting developers and the city and all that.

But it's also not easy to be part of a community. There's disagreement and agreement. So what are the values, the principles, that you think are shared?

Brandt: Working out our problems, our interpersonal problems, by talking rather than fighting. I'll give you one example. Early on in the process, I think it was in the nineties or in the eighties, there was a serious drug problem, and people were selling drugs on our block. And we'd call the cops and the cops would come and they would run away like cockroaches. And then cops would go away and they would run back like cockroaches. So we put, we, we got together and we discussed this, because you have to talk these things through before you take action. And we decided that we would have a civilian patrol,

drug patrol, and we realized that there were certain risks involved in this, but we decided that there was worth the risks. So we would go out late at night in groups of three, for, I believe, and we would walk through the streets, and when we would see somebody dealing drugs, we would go up to them and we would say: “You know, this is our block. We live here. And if you want to deal drugs, that's your business, but you can't do it on our block”.

And it turns out this is exactly the same thing that the people of Tepoztlan do about the narcotraficantes who come there, because it's a beautiful valley. And down in the valley outside of the town, they build their mansions and so forth.

And then a delegation of campesinos from Tepoztlan will go and very respectfully sit down with the gentleman and tell them: “If you want to do this, we're not going to try to stop you, but you can't do it in our town. If you do, we will kill you.” And since this is the town that Zapata came from, and his white stallion is still running around the mountains there… They are serious. They know they're serious. And Mexican campesinos are serious people. They're fucking serious. I mean, you think gangs in LA are bad? I would take a rowdy gang in LA over a quiet campesino, threatening me in Tepoztlan any day [laughs].

Rendón: Anything else that you would like to share, Chris, about your experiences? Because you were a board member of the MHA a couple of times.

Brandt: Now, a couple of two or three times.

Rendón: I don't remember how long now you have been in the Cooper Square CLT.

Brandt: For three months. For three months, yeah. When was it? Yeah, I guess it was in December that I [started].

Rendón: How do you feel returning as a board member and now with the CLT?

Brandt: Well, like I said, the CLT board was the board I wanted to be on, and I lobbied for it. I don't remember how many times I told various people that I wanted to be on the board of CLT. And Harriet [Cohen] was the first one that said: “Yeah, yeah”. No, I'm very glad to be on the board of the CLT.

Rendón: And anything that you would like to share, because we mentioned before how building leadership with the younger generations is not easy. So what is it like to be on a board?

Brandt: Well, I think I have an advantage building leadership among the younger people since I spend my working life among younger people and I have a fairly good ability to talk with them. I mean, a lot of people my age are intimidated by younger people, and young people can be quite intimidating [laughs].

But once you start talking with them and you talk to them without looking down at them… that's the problem, I think, and the reason a lot of older people feel constrained to talk to people is because they think, in fact, they know they know more

because we've lived longer. That's all it is. It's no special thing. It's just I’ve lived 50 years longer than you. So I know a few things that have happened during those 50 years, but I really want to get some, at least two or three younger people involved in board activities, because they'll bring in more. And I've got my first candidate already, [the] fellow I was mentioning who was born on the block.

Rendón: Anything that you would like to share about your experience as a shareholder, as a board member?

Brandt: Well, yes. Learning why, for example, rents have to go up every year and learning how to do that and how to negotiate that with people, I mean, it's not easy because we're getting a five and a half percent raise in July, and I don't want to pay another five and a half percent of my rent. Yeah, no. But, I went through the process, and it's necessary. Okay, it has to happen, bite the bullet. And I would like us to become a community, and how we do this, I don't know. [To become] more together so that we could, for example, join other political movements, like right now, the anti genocide movement in Sudan and Gaza.

And the other political movements like the Supreme Court… trying to get the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics model and so on, that are really none of our business, but they are our business. I mean, they're none of our business as an MHA or CLT, but they're our business as people, and therefore they're the business of the community that we're in. We can't do it as an official MHA or CLT statement, but we could create a hub for new ideas, new political ideas... and also not necessarily for political things,

because I'm starting a poetry workshop on the 25 June, and if it works, that's another community thing. And then the block party today is a community thing, and the various potlucks that we sponsor and so on… That was one of Fran's great, great, great innovations. I'm not sure she invented it, but for every meeting, for every board meeting, there was food and it was either potluck and we each brought something, or it was ordered from outside from a local restaurant. And by golly, that made a huge difference because when people are eating together, they can't argue together. And so I want to get back to that as well.

Rendón: I like all those ideas and propositions that you have because you are really thinking about the younger generation, by thinking about that comic [book], poetry, bringing people together.

Brandt: And climate change and climate crisis, because the young people are the ones that are going to get hit by that.

Rendón: And as you said, It's a way of organizing in the block, but people can [also] use those skills at different levels for different causes. Well, thank you so much Chris for this conversation. It has been very valuable.