Frances Goldin

Lynn: This is Lewis and I recorded this interview with Francis on January 5th, 2009, in her apartment on the Lower East Side. I was working with a collective — with other community organizers on a book project that was intended to include the analysis and experience and lessons from community organizers around the country.

We were interviewing folks, and transcribing the interviews and sharing it back with the narrators in the hopes of creating a collaborative kind of chapter [featuring] each of their work. It was done on a teeny tiny tape recorder. The sound isn’t always great. The audio is not always great, but Frances is.

It’s missing what you would find in many oral history interviews — her early life history, and those types of things. But it does offer a really critical early history of the Cooper Square Committee, of which Frances is a founder, and the Cooper Square CLT and MHA which emerged from that work. And so to that end, it’s meaningful to include it as part of this oral history collection. I’m grateful to her daughters, Sally and Reeni, for giving permission for us to use it here as part of the Housing Justice Oral History Project.

All right. So, Frances, could you talk a little bit about the environment, the political environment in 19..., the late ‘50s, when Robert Moses, announced his plan — and tenants were actually notified that there was an urban renewal plan, and they would be affected. How did the Cooper Square committee — how was it actually born? What happened between folks being notified and there actually being an organization?

Frances: Well, I had been involved in urban renewal for — I don’t know how many years before 1959 when we were formed, but it had to be between five and ten years before. The first urban renewal in the city was Lincoln Center. And there was a guy whose name I forget. It might have been Gomez — he was a pretty good organizer, a pretty young Puerto Rican guy who became the focal point of fighting back in Lincoln Center. And a number of people offered to help, because we were against what was happening.

I don’t know if you know that the physical blocks — the area around Lincoln Center was the only Black and white community in the city. Because Harlem was all black, other places were all white. In other places there were tokens of minorities, but not really.

But that area, Lincoln Square, was the home of Black and Irish longshoreman, and they lived there with their wives and children, of which they had many. And they walked further west to unload boats, and put them into whatever they put them into, to ship to A&P [supermarket] or whatever factories. Because they lived together, there was very little discrimination because they watched each other’s back. It was an amazing community. And that’s the community that was completely, and totally wiped out because of Lincoln Center.

And I know that Lincoln Center is very pretty, and a lot of people use it, but my anger against it was destroying a very unique, amazing community in New York that defied... There was no discrimination there. They were brothers and sisters and men and women who watched each other’s back. And we fought that fight and lost, lost. We said, ‘Go away. It’s bad. You’re going to destroy the people who live here.’ Whatever we said, didn’t work.

The next one was Seward Park, where I did live, right across the street. I lived at 249 East Broadway. And on the other side of the street they were going to tear down twenty—five hundred apartments for poor Jewish, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Russian, Italian — poor families.

You have to understand that where I am is historically one of the most important places in the United States. Because, when people were poor — from Ireland, then Germany, then the eastern... Then the Italians and the Jews and the Poles. And then the people from Puerto Rico, and then the people from the black belt — from the southern part of the United States, and then the people from Puerto Rico and Chinatown. If you were poor, you came to the Lower East Side. If you had money, you did not come to the Lower East Side... Castle Garden — you went elsewhere.

But it was an amazing community — not only of people who were poor, but people who were escaping some kind of oppression. Hunger, religious oppression, political oppression. So the people who came were not nitwits who sat with their rosary beads, or davening en shul. They were people who were activists. So, here develops on the Lower East Side, a community of people from all over the world, all of whom are poor, and all of whom are feisty.

It’s an amazing community, which we are little by little, losing to gentrification. But its historic significance to the growth of the United States has been overlooked — mainly by Bloomberg, by the city. Because it doesn’t have to — it can be revered. It can be encapsulated as a way to live. Instead, it’s being destroyed.

Okay, so I come to the Lower East Side from Queens. Where there were thirty—five hundred Christian families, and nine Jewish families. Of the nine Jewish families, we were excoriated because they were all shopkeepers, and my father came home in overalls. He was a worker. He worked for the IRT — the subway system, for thirty—seven years. He was my Paul Bunyan. He was my hero.

And so, when my mother lit candles on Friday night, our windows were broken. So, I couldn’t wait to get out of Springfield Gardens [Queens]. And I was twenty — I married, and I moved to 11th Street, and I found Nirvana. I was thrilled by the community I moved into — which was integrated, which was basically not rich. If not poor, it was certainly very low—income. And everybody was friendly to everybody else, because like the original people who came to the Lower East Side, we needed each other in order to survive.

And I married a communist. I became a communist, I became an activist, I became an organizer. And it was organizing, and activism — was part of the air we breathed on the Lower East Side. It’s a place that never let a slight go by. We might have hit the wrong guy, but we didn’t examine our navels to determine what to do. We just did it! it was heavenly. I just really thought it was the best place in the world.

And so, I fought urban renewal at Lincoln Square, and lost. I — meaning I, and many others fought people urban renewal in Seward Park, and lost. At which point I decided we can’t go in there and say, ‘Bad, bad, go away, go away.’ It’s not a good plan. At that point, I realized that we had to embrace it, but do it our way, not the city’s way.

And when we heard about Robert Moses coming in, and we would have had twenty —four hundred families— two thousand, four hundred families in the area that he wanted to displace — would have been gone. We said, ‘It sure as hell ain’t going to happen here.’

And a few of us — _a very few of us, maybe _five or six people, got together. We asked Thelma Burdick, who was the director of the Church of All Nations — a wonderful little lady who came from... Where’d she come from? Maybe Minnesota. She had a father who was a socialist. She had a heart as big as an elephant. She was just a phenomenal woman. Tiny. Wonderful.

We met in the first room you came into, at the Church of All Nations, on the left — with maybe seven people. At that point, Staughton Lynd, who had been a professor at Yale and was kicked out because he went to Vietnam with Jane Fonda, and lost his job. And then he went with his wife to some commune in Georgia, and then they decided to join the real world. And he became an organizer at the oldest settlement house in the United States, called the University Settlement, on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side.

And while he was downtown, near City Hall one day — he met a couple of planners who were talking about this plan by Robert Moses to destroy the Lower East Side. One of the planners was a guy named Walter Thabit, who was an advocate planner. He did not plan — if you are a planner for a corporation or a city, you are a person who does gentrification. There’s no question about it. You get paid a lot and you cause an enormous amount of havoc and damage.

And he knew that long ago. He was a stellar graduate of MIT. He had three degrees from Brooklyn College, and from The New School. He was an Arab, and he threw his lot with communities that were under siege. So, he didn’t work for corporations, he didn’t work for cities. So, he was usually dead broke. Fortunately, he had a mother who had a lot of money.

Lynn: And she had a rooming house, right?

Frances: Rooming houses — she owned thirty—five rooming houses, and she floated her son. So, he paid his rent, and he paid his wife and children’s food, and stuff — and he survived because of the generosity of his mother.

So, Staughton was at the meeting, I was at the meeting... I think — Lois Dodd, who was an artist and had a house on Second Street, was at the meeting, maybe Mike Layton, who was a young man then, was at the meeting, and Thelma Burdick. I don’t remember all of the people. I think we have records that might be more accurate about who was at the meeting.

But this active communist had already become an organizer. And we decided to fight Robert Moses’ plan because we didn’t want our two—thousand—four hundred families to get kicked out. And what we said was, ‘We love urban renewal, but we want it to serve the people who live here, not make them the victims.’ And our first guiding principle — which is the most important principle we have ever had, was the people who live in Cooper Square will be the beneficiaries, and not the victims of any urban renewal. That was the bottom line, _the very bottom line. _

In order to do that, Walter said, ‘You have to plan by stages. You have to begin with a vacant lot.’ Which many areas don’t have. We had the whole city block from Houston to Stanton as an open air car garage. It wasn’t a garage — it was a parking lot for cars. So, there were no people on that block. We had a block that was empty because it was a car parking block. And he said, ‘If you build a house on that empty land, that will take in everybody from 1st Street to 3rd Street, and they move into the new public housing that we build on Houston Street. Then you tear down from 1st to 3rd Street and put more housing — only of the cost that people can afford from 4th, 5th and 6th Street, and you plan by stages. That way no one gets evicted. You build by stages. So, that was the second, bottom line — rigid rule. First of all, we will be the beneficiaries and not the victims.

Secondly, there is no dislocation of the tenants that live there. We don’t mind if they all get apartments, and there’s enough apartments for people of middle income to come in as well. We believed in mixed incomes — _to an extent. _Mixed incomes — not filthy rich, but people who might make thirty to sixty—thousand a year — also needed housing! And in my neighborhood, at that point — maybe 5% were middle income. Everybody else was poor, poor, poor.

So, one was — they have to be the beneficiaries. And two was — there would be no dislocation, and in order to do that, you have to build in stages. You can’t knock down the whole thing, and start over. It cannot be done. So, what happened with the third urban renewal thing on the Lower East Side — which was us, is that we embraced urban renewal, as long as it was our plan, not the city’s plan. And it took us a hundred plus meetings, for one year. One hundred plus meetings to create an alternate to the Moses plan, which was called The Alternate Plan for Cooper Square.

Lynn: And when was that done?

Frances: From 1959 to 1961.

Lynn: I have a copy of that, that Walter gave me. I have it at home.

Frances: There are two of them left. I made a big speech at Pratt two weeks ago, and they are reprinting the Alternate Plan — which every planner in the world should memorize.

Lynn: I have a copy of it at home.

Frances: I have one right here. I had two, and I brought one, and I said, I’m not going to have... I spoke to two graduate classes. I said, ‘I’m not going to speak unless Pratt agrees to reprint this Plan.’ And they did.

Lynn: Nice! Should we make copies of that for the conference on Saturday?

Frances: Well, it’s a big plan. You have one at home. It would be very useful, because it’s an impeccable... It’s not done on the cuff. It was done professionally. It’s in four colors. It’s... No matter what argument is raised, it’s answered in that Plan. It’s an amazing plan! it’s used in Holland. It’s used in England. It’s just not used in the United States.

When people — when our plan came out, people downtown, in the government offices of Housing said, ‘Do you realize that this says that the people on the site have to be the beneficiaries? We never said that! That would bankrupt us! You know, they’re building for a higher income group. You can’t build for the people who live there. That’s outrageous!’ it’s not outrageous. It’s humane. It’s appropriate. It’s the right thing to do as Obama would say, ‘It’s the right thing to do.’ And we did it!

The point there is that the area reacted by organizing ferociously fast and well, to defeat Moses’ plan. We had organized... It’s very good if you have, on the ground — people who are willing to devote their lives without getting a penny for it, to a struggle. And we, in that area — in that part of the Lower East Side, _that was not so hard. _When Esther Rand joined forces, this blockbuster woman — it made it only stronger. I mean, we had radical women — mostly women, but some men. We had... Well, I have my theories about organization, but that’s another story.

Lynn: Tell me that.

Frances: Okay. I think the only way you can win a struggle, any struggle, any struggle — is to have four parts. If you don’t have the people who are affected, by whatever it is you’re fighting — you have nothing. If you do not have the forces on the ground, of the people who are going to be hurt by a plan — if they’re not involved up to their eyeballs — quit. Don’t start. _You can’t do it for them. You have to do it with them. _

And everybody in Cooper Square was poor. They had apartments that were being shittily handled by the city. They weren’t getting their services. But it’s all they had, and they were not going to lose their apartments. They were ready to fight to keep their apartments. Number one, we had the troops. If you don’t have the troops that are affected, you have nothing. Even though everything else is terrific, you’ll fail. If you don’t... Like, if you don’t have your homeless activists, you have nothing. Nothing! Okay, that’s number one.

Two. You have to hire people that speak the language of the enemy. You have to hire professionals, like planners, like lawyers, like accountants, like media people — who are ready to do what you want. Not what they were trained to do, but what you want. They have to do your bidding.

It took us a year to do the Alternate Plan, because every sentence was very carefully examined by the people in that room. And we fought like tigers to have it done _our way. _And he was smart enough, and small enough  so we could jump all over him...

Lynn: Walter...

Frances: So, you have to have professionals.

The next thing — I don’t know if you want to do on camera. We were arrested a lot of times. But once we were arrested, and we had a up and coming Democratic wannabe as our lawyer — very bright, Jewish — wanted to be a big shot, got what he wanted eventually. He was our lawyer, and we were all arrested. He had a talk with the captain, and he came back to us, and he said, ‘Look, you plead guilty of a minor offense, and you’ll be sprung.

And we said, ‘What are you talking about guilty? We’re not guilty. The city is guilty. We’re demanding our rights. What do you mean, guilty? No, we don’t plead guilty to anything.’ He said, ‘You can get... You can go home now. You’ll be finished.’ We said, ‘No! We are not guilty. The city is guilty! And if you won’t plead us in that way, we’ll get another lawyer. So, go back and tell them that we’re not guilty. That we did nothing wrong. That the city did wrong. And then you can be our lawyer.’ So that’s what he did. And we won.

But we were ready to dump him! Because if these people — whether they’re planners, or accountants, or lawyers, don’t do the bidding of the troops — we don’t need them. We educated a lot of professionals to be much better professionals. So that’s number two. You need technicians that can do what you want in the language of the bureaucrats. That’s two.

Three. If you don’t have organizers — on the site, people who actually know how to organize — how to call a meeting, how to write a leaflet, how to bring the troops out, how to speak and get people excited about defending their homes. If you do not have organizers — you don’t need a lot, but you need a couple. A couple can sway hundreds. We did on the Lower East Side.

And I was one of those. I was a Communist who left the Communist Party when it became the Communist Political Association, because I didn’t think you could make a revolution being the tail of the democratic dog. And I dumped the party because I thought they had gone soft. And I regret never having found another radical organization that I could call home. It’s been a real lack in my life.

So, that’s three. You need the troops. You need the professionals to do your bidding. You need organizers to organize the movement. And the fourth thing you need is you have to know how to manipulate the media, because the big shots — the mayor, the governor, the president, the Board of Estimate — will not move unless they are embarrassed. If they are not embarrassed publicly, in the [New York] Times and the Daily News and whatever, where people say, ‘How could they do that to people? You know, what’s going on? Where are they coming from with that kind of policy?’ You have to make them embarrassed by exposing their stupidity. And if you don’t know how to do that, you’re not going to win. And it’s only one of the four points, but you need all four of them. You need all four of them. And we knew how to be very creative, when we had our demonstrations. They were not boring.

Lynn: Give me an example or two of creative demonstrations. That were really effective.

Frances: Alright, but not one or two. We’d start with a petition — that didn’t work, we’d maybe bring a couple of hundred names and give it to them. If that didn’t work, we’d maybe have a demonstration, where it would be colorful. But I’ll give you a specific. But if that didn’t work, we’d use crowbars. If that didn’t work, we’d get arrested. I mean, you can always get attention if you get arrested.

We didn’t want to get arrested, but if there were no alternatives... We built it up to the point where _we did what we had to do. _We didn’t stop because we’d get our hands dirty, or we’d get arrested. We had to keep upping the struggle, or we wouldn’t win. And also, you can’t get into a struggle for a year and think you’ve made it. You got to do it until you win, or until you die. You can’t give up.

So, I’ll give you two examples. We... It was Christmas. They were raising rents, or _— they were doing something stupid. _And there were only about twelve of us. It was a small group. It was just before Christmas, and we rewrote the Christmas carols. [sings] Deck the halls with low rent housing. Fa la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. That’s the future we’re espousing. Fa la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. We wrote them — they were gutsy.

We were singing in front of our state assemblyman, Louis DeSalvio, who was in office and running to stay in office. He had a liquor store, on the corner of the Bowery and Houston Street. Right across the street from his store, my daughter had her guitar. We passed out words to — wonderful words, ‘Louis, The Two—Faced Liar’ because he sold out to Robert Moses, who wanted to build a thruway through Little Italy and Cooper Square, taking away _our block for low rent housing, _which would have meant no displacement.

And he promised to give that site to Louis DeSalvio if he supported the thruway. And Louis bought it. And the San Gennaro Association was going to build a middle income co—op _on our site! _So, one of the songs was Louis the Two—Faced Liar. It was sung to the tune of Rudolph the Red—Nosed Reindeer.

Lynn: We did the same thing in front of the tree at Rockefeller Center, because you can sign up as a group. So, we signed up as a group. We didn’t tell him what kind of group, and our Rudolph the Red—Nosed Reindeer version was Bloomberg, the Red Nosed Mayor.

Frances: That’s great.

Lynn: I’ll have to send those to you there. It’s fun to do that!

Frances: And I have the words to these songs, that are so wonderful. So, we sang and sang at the top of our lungs, and we got a lot of newspapers... Then the cops came. And they said, ‘People are not going in his store because you’re creating such a ruckus.’ We said, ‘Good. Let them get their booze elsewhere. We have a right to sing in front of his store.

So, he went into — Louis, and he said, ‘They say they have a right to be in front of the store. And what’s more, if I arrest these people, my wife won’t let me come home, because she wants to live in Cooper Square.

At any rate, we all wore hats with pompoms, and we were dressed up like Christmas carolers. And we also gave them the words to the song. And two or three papers not only carried pictures of this demonstration, which I have in my files — but they took the words to the songs and reprinted some of them. It was wonderful. That was what how we used the media.

Once, when we lost the site — it was around the same time. We lost Houston Street; it took us nine months to get it back. And how we got it back was the best story in Cooper Square of all — which I don’t think you’ll want to hear for this tape, but I’ll tell it to you privately. [Frances decides to share this story at the end of this interview]

On Thanksgiving, which is when  — it was Thanksgiving, and we were going to have a demonstration to get back our land. So, we took a card table, and we covered it with black crape paper. That was our Thanksgiving dinner table. And the man who owned the Second Avenue Deli gave us the carcass of two turkeys, which he had sliced and put back to give to people, so they didn’t have to bake a turkey for Christmas. [Thanksgiving]

So, we had two carcasses, and we had matzoh on the table — this bony carcass and matzoh. And when the press came, we said, ‘We are mourning the loss of our land. _We have nothing to be thankful for.’ _The sad part of that story — and which it got coverage. I mean, in the middle of this empty lot, was a black covered tablecloth with two turkey carcasses.

What happened after the press left — which had me weeping, is that the men from the Bowery came by and said, ‘Could we have the matzoh and the bones?’ [Frances begins crying] And that’s a true story... So, you know, we took advantage of holidays to turn it into what we needed. And the last, best thing we ever did resulted in ten of us getting arrested. But that’s the long story, so you don’t need that one, okay. [Frances shares this story at the end of the interview]

Lynn: So, you know — this was all happening in the early, late, you know, ‘59, the ‘60s.

Frances: It was the ‘60s and the... All of this was the ‘60s and the ‘70s. It was early ‘70s  when [James] Felt gave us a green light to proceed with the Alternate Plan, which is two years.

Lynn: And the neighborhood was really racially mixed. How was it that you were able — the early organizers were able to include, people of color, non—English speaking people in the leadership of the work.

Frances: I guess the fact that I was a communist, and that I had certain convictions about racism. I knew that nothing like that comes easily. You just don’t walk in and have a totally integrated leadership. So, it was a principled position of all of us, that the leadership had to be the people who are living in the buildings. I lived on 11th Street, that was on 4th Street, but that was my home for, you know... For fifty years. I’m known better on 4th Street, than I am on 11th Street.

But there were people — we sometimes picked the wrong people. But from the very beginning — in my neighborhood, the biggest minority were Puerto Ricans, some Dominicans, but mostly Puerto Ricans. There have always been — as chair or vice chair, and some of the other positions, Puerto Ricans in the leadership. We also had some tenants who were amazing, who were Black, who were pulled into the leadership, and stayed until they died. Many of them — we’re talking very long ago.

Lynn: Yeah.

Frances: But they — it’s typical, you know, our buildings were not all Puerto Rican, or all white, or all Italian. They were just mixed. So, our leadership was Puerto Rican, it was Black, it was Chinese. It was what we were. But it didn’t come by nature. It came because we insisted that it be integrated.

Lynn: So, to help organizers that are working now — because hopefully they will be reading and learning from their elders, what are some elements that you think that organizers — and leaders, should insist on so that an organization reflects the leadership —  at the brains, right? is reflective of the folks that are directly affected, not just the troops, but the people that are planning, and making decisions.

I think it has to be a basic understanding — before you start, that if your troops are integrated, if your troops are of a certain background or religion or color, they have to be part of the leadership. Just — and that does not happen naturally. It doesn’t!

So, what did you guys do to make it happen?

Frances: So, like we found out — the first thing Walter did, when he was taken on by us — of course, without pay — was, he did a survey of a lot of the tenants on our site. And that survey determined that 93% couldn’t afford the co—op that Robert Moses wanted, but 7% could. So, we put our lot with the 93%. For starters, that’s what we decided. If that’s who lived there, that’s whom we would accommodate.

When we started to go into the buildings, and knock on doors to tell them who we were and why we wanted them to join at the incredibly expensive rate of a dollar a year to be a member of Cooper Square — which fifty years later, is still a dollar a year.

We would find young black women who were articulate, or older Puerto Rican men who were articulate, and we would — a little light would go off in our head, and we would say, ‘You know, we really need your help. And if you could come to the next meeting and just listen, maybe, maybe you could be a secretary or maybe you could be on the newsletter committee. But we really can’t do this without you. We need help.

So, when we met people who sort of got it, we nurtured them. ‘Let me tell you about Cooper Square. Can we have lunch tomorrow?’ Or, ‘I see you have a new baby. I want to bring you a copy of Goodnight Moon. Can we talk? When you find somebody who you think might have potential leadership, you develop them! You just don’t walk away! You say, ‘This was a great interview, but I have to talk to you again. So, next week, maybe? I only need half an hour, or twenty minutes.’ And you bring them to meetings. Now, they’re not in the leadership, but they go to a meeting, and they hear what’s going on. It has to be very carefully planned. It doesn’t happen automatically.

Lynn: Now, during this time, you had a job?

Frances: I’ve always had a job.

Lynn: And you had two daughters.

Frances: Right.

Lynn: And you had a husband.

Frances: Right.

Lynn: And so, you’ve been able to sustain this level of engagement all this time.

Frances: Right.

Lynn: So, one of the things that I know people talk about — or lament, with organizing and, maybe even social justice work in general, is that it’s hard to sustain it. So, what advice would you give to organizers? And in a way, you’re a community leader, not a paid staff organizer, although you were organizing.

Frances: Nobody was paid.

Lynn: So, what advice — what wisdom would you share, with folks who are younger and who are feeling burnout, or get discouraged about protracted struggle — that it’s very hard to win things, or even on Sunday, David McReynolds was on a panel with one of our leaders, and he was talking about... They were talking about reform versus revolution, and he was sharing that he pays like three—hundred and some dollars a month for rent. And that that isn’t — it could be seen as an example of reform, because revolution would mean everybody pays that low rent, but that it was worth fighting for. Because you have to show you can achieve some things and build on that.

Frances: He’s on our board.

Lynn: Yeah. So, what advice would you give to folks who are engaged in struggle, who don’t see an end, or feel overwhelmed, or what have you…

Frances: First of all, the organization has to convince people that seem like they might be potential leaders, that if they have children that they will pay for their babysitter. You cannot expect people who are very poor — first of all, if they’re very little we say, ‘Bring the baby to the meeting. We’ll make sure she or he’s comfortable.’

Lynn: You used to tell me that.

Frances: What?

Lynn: You used to tell me that.

Frances: Yeah! Bring your babies to the meeting. We’ll make sure that they’re comfortable. But, if you have other kids and you’ve got to stay home — we will — we paid babysitters throughout our life, so that we’d get people to come to meetings. Or, if they had to travel, we’d pay their fare — their public fare.

Don’t marry the wrong person. When I was young, I had two little kids. I never left them — _rarely _left them with a sitter. I’d go to a meeting when Morris didn’t. Morris would go to a meeting when I didn’t. So, we’d be there, or we’d get a babysitter. And, early on, if it’s a woman — you have to know that this guy is going to make you an equal, and you’re not going to be the wife, the cook, the homemaker, the blah... You know, which most women are. They do it all.

So, it helps to make your husband know — that if you want a roof over your head, I have to go to meetings, and you have to be here with the kids. You know, it’s a struggle! it’s a struggle. You have to — sometimes we’d have to get a tenant in a building to be a babysitter, so that somebody we wanted would come to a meeting. And there were older women who wanted to do that. They weren’t getting paid. They were just helping out the way they could. I think that — it’s part of being an organizer because it doesn’t happen just because you want it to happen. You have to organize to make it happen.

But I think that for me, I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t have this history. I mean, once you’re in it, you get more out of it than you put into it. I mean, for seven months when I was on my back, I would not have survived without friends. And a lot of them came from the struggle! You make the best friends. You were at my party! The best friends in the world come from comrades, when you made a friend through struggle.

So, you can’t look up the pike and say, ‘Why will I get out of this ten years from now?’ But I can tell you that if you invest in making people’s lives sweeter, _it’ll come back to you. _My father was an amazing man, and he had his own way of interpreting words, and the Bible and stuff. He used to say, ‘Girlie, if you cast your bread upon the water, it’ll come back cake.’ And, you know, he was saying, "Do a lot of good, and you’ll get a lot of good back.’ And, how true that has been.

Lynn: What do you — how would you assess the housing movement today, in New York? And what would you like to see? What would you like to see happening?

Frances: Well, I think it exists. I was a founder of the Metropolitan Council on Housing. Before I was kicked out, I quit. Because I knew I was going to be kicked out. And it was over a split about ideology. It was about ideology. They were deeply into rent strikes. Rent strikes are good things. I didn’t think their kind of rent strikes were good things. They believed that you take your rent, and you put it in escrow, and then you fight like hell to get what you want. And when you lose — all that money is in the bank, and the landlord gets it.

Which is, it was a guaranteed, ‘you’re not going to get evicted rent strike.’ There’s no guarantee when you struggle that you’re going to win. You can’t guarantee that if you go on strike, you’re going to get a wage increase. You just have to do the best you can.

It was my feeling, that if you live in Harlem or in East Harlem or on the Lower East Side, and you’re not paying your rent and you’re freezing because there’s no oil in the boiler, that you call an oil company, you fill the boiler and you have heat, so you don’t die, and you have a receipt for that oil.

And when you get an eviction notice, you go to the judge and you say, ‘I have children who were freezing. Here’s the bill that we paid. I think that we had a right to stay alive. It was the landlord’s responsibility. He didn’t take it. We did. And here’s the receipt.’ They wouldn’t buy that. They didn’t put oil in the burner. They didn’t fix the roof. They didn’t put in a new door. They turned the money over to the landlord. I didn’t think that was radical enough. Is it better to freeze and have a child die of pneumonia?

Lynn: No.

Frances: So, that was a struggle. So, it was a matter of — one was very radical and the other was very not so radical. But I’ve always had the more radical view because it works. It works! I’m a socialist at heart, and I want things to be equal. And that’s what guides me.

Lynn: What would you like to see happening in the housing movement?

Frances: Oh, yeah. We were talking about radical — yeah. I think that — there are two main things; Tenants and Neighbors and Met Council, both of which I support. I go to the hearings. You know, I send them money, I do what I can do. I think that they’re certainly not radical enough. They are not radical enough.

They don’t picket and carry on at the head of the — What’s the Board that determines how much the rent increases?

Lynn: The rent stabilization...

Frances: Rent Guidelines Board. That’s what affects me, because I’m rent stabilized, not rent controlled. It’s very interesting, because down the hall, the ladies rent controlled. I’m rent stabilized. Her rent is higher than mine. She gets seven and a half a year. I get whatever, every two years. A couple of hundred dollars less on my month [rent], than hers. So, rent control has not helped her as much as rent stabilization has helped me. But I don’t think that we’re gutsy enough about.

Lynn: You mean with tactics?

Frances: With tactics.

Lynn: And what about demands?

Frances: Well. I think the demands are good. They said, ‘No rent increase.’ That was — rollback, that was a good demand. But, it wasn’t said loud enough or strong enough! You have to... Particularly in houses where a rent increase is going to affect their standard of living, seriously. Maybe a whole house has to go on a rent strike. You know, we don’t want to get kicked out. We want the landlord to reduce the rents. That’s not being done.

I’m not talking about putting it in the bank and giving it, you know... I’m talking about using it to stay alive! I don’t think the tactics of the housing movement are radical enough to make a difference. Because you’re dealing with the most entrenched bureaucratic level of society, which is real estate. And it controls everything, and it controls every fucking representative we have! Every one of them — with a few exceptions, like Rosie. With a few exceptions, they’ll do the bidding of the person who put them into the office, and that’s corporations!

So, what do we expect? I have to expect that these bad things will happen. Just like with what was happening in Washington. You know, there was a sell out to the drug [manufacturers] before anything started! it’s very hard. But, if you don’t make waves, if you don’t get publicity, if you don’t embarrass the city, or the landlord, or whatever...

It seems to me, that in some of the buildings in the Lower East Side, but even more so in Harlem and in East Harlem — some of the conditions in which people are living — you’ve seen them, the holes in the ceiling….

Lynn: My building is like that!

Frances: Sitting on the shitter with an umbrella... If you don’t take pictures of these, and go to the place where the guy lives, and if he’s Jewish, you do it on a Saturday. If he’s Christian, you do it on a Sunday. And you say, ‘This guy should be in church, praying for his salvation. Because this is what he’s doing to fellow human beings.’ And give it to everybody in the neighborhood — I think that he would be _so embarrassed. _But we’re not just picketing. You have to educate them to why you’re picketing. You have to use terrible pictures that show the devastation. We’re not doing it. I don’t think we’re being clever enough in our tactics to _embarrass the bad people. _And that’s troubling. I’m not a Democrat. I’m a registered Green.

Lynn: I want to talk a little bit about demands. Because, one of the things that we at Picture the Homeless have been — I won’t use the word discouraged, because we just try to like, keep finding the path. But when we — especially in the early years, people in groups didn’t want to relate to us as a housing group, because homelessness was kind of put in the category of social services and shelters. So it was like, ‘Well, this is a housing meeting.’

But a lot of the [housing movement] demands have to do with things that — like with no rent increases — that helps people that are tenants. It helps prevent homelessness, but it doesn’t really help people that are already homeless. And, and there’s a housing shortage, right? And so one of the things that we’ve been trying to do with our housing campaign, is look for ways to create _new sites for development. _So, that’s why we have our Housing Not Warehousing campaign.

And I’ve been thinking — I’m going to interrupt you for one minute. It seems to me that if you have a house which is warehoused — a whole one, it’s the kind of thing where the city will give a group like Cooper Square, or maybe your group, I don’t know. It used to be Harlem Restoration would do that. Give them the building in order to create moderate, or low income apartments.

And, you’re in a position — if you find a building which is totally warehoused, the city now is so eager, because they promised fifty—six thousand apartments. They’ve given us shit! They’ll give... We’d move to East Harlem, to run a building — because we believe that our strength is in getting more affordable housing. That’s all we want to do is get... So, we have new buildings that we never thought would be ours.

Well, I talked to Valerio [Orselli] about this a couple of years ago. And he wasn’t so sure that Cooper Square would move out of the [Lower East Side].

Frances: No, I don’t know that we would. And God knows, we have enough crap on the Lower East Side. Because we’d have — we have our own maintenance men, and they’d have to travel. It would be difficult. It would also be hard to convince the city to give us a building that’s not in our area.

Lynn: But that’s why we — we approached Tom Angotti, and I talked to Peter [Marcuse] about this too, about... And it looks like we’re moving forward with Tom and this group that’s organizing the conference on Saturday. We want to create a — and we’re just calling it, but it doesn’t have to be the name — Homeless People’s Community Land Trust [This was one idea during this period at Picture the Homeless].

Because we want to have a legal entity, that then we can say to the city, ‘Donate those buildings to this land trust, and we want to create MHA’s out of them. And our Chase campaign — because they are warehousing so much land and buildings, they’re not the only culprit, but you have to have a target.

Frances: Yeah. You have Chase that has a building, that’s giving them no income and causing them grief — push them to give you that building. You can get the city to give you some money. It’s doable.

Lynn: No, that’s where we’ve settled because we want...

Frances: But if you don’t do it with a land trust, I’ll be writing letters saying it stinks.

Lynn: No! Want to do it with a land trust!

Frances: We have a hundred buildings on the Lower East Side. Every fucking one of them is private. They went co—op. They got money from the city. They were paid very low rent. And then they — more of the people on the board were greedy. And they said, ‘We can sell our apartments.’

Lynn: And so, unless you have a land trust, you know, we can’t assume that poor people are any more heroic than rich people in

Frances: Honey…

Lynn: A capitalist country!

Frances: The greed is... You know, you want…

Lynn: I mean, it’s silly to think that people won’t try to make money. That’s our — that’s the predominant culture. And so, you know, people do that, and we have to have an infrastructure. I was so happy at the Left Forum conference when you said that we have to create a structure for the buildings and the land, so they can’t be — we can’t have smart, greedy people take over.

Frances: There are a third of the people on the board are CLT people, a third of us. When we hear a hint of somebody wanting to go private, we slap it down! And if they argue with us, we say, ‘You know, you own the buildings. We own the land. So, take your building and put it elsewhere, because this is our land.’ And we stop it before it starts.

Lynn: Well, this is one thing we’re working on. And with Right to the City — you heard also on the panel, Esther [Wang] from CAAAV [Committee Against Anti—Asian Violence] and I’m interviewing her Friday morning. A lot of people, because they don’t know, they think it’s complicated.

And so, we’ve been pushing within Right to the City for a community land trust model for the vacant condos, that we’re trying to get from the city.

Frances: Right.

Lynn: And, a lot of the Right to the City folks, because they don’t know about it — are really going for this 30% of AMI ]Area Median Income] and all kinds of bullshit —  which is much higher than what most of our members earn anyway, so we don’t want it. But the disposition of the properties is critical. We can’t just count them, and we can’t just say they’re there for low income people today, unless they’re for low income people forever. We have to. So I’m really glad you’re coming to the conference.

Frances: I don’t know why more people aren’t raising — with the governor, and the mayor, and the president. Why are we not taxing the rich? They have had their taxes reduced and reduced and reduced. And if they paid 3% more, if they earn from a hundred—thousand to two—hundred and fifty thousand, and 4% from two—fifty to a million, and 5% over a million. We have our fucking problem! But that’s not touched! I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. It’s almost not — you don’t hear about it anymore. They’re looking everywhere to cut, and the kids have to pay — who are not paying now, to get on transportation. But they won’t tax the rich.

Lynn: I want to go back to a couple of these questions.

Frances: Okay.

Lynn: What do you see as the goals of Cooper Square today?

Frances: Well, to maintain our properties appropriately for the people that live there. And to find additional buildings to create more affordable housing. I think that’s very important.

Lynn: So, you guys are looking to expand the number?

Frances: Well, there’s a building on 3rd Street, which is ours. There’s a building on 1st Avenue and 21st Street, which is ours. When an opportunity arises, there are people on the board who say, ‘Look, we’re not doing a good job with what we’ve got. How can we take on more?’ I think that the only way we can survive is by taking on more.

Lynn: Okay. And then, where do you see... What do you see as Cooper Square’s role — since Cooper Square has made some unique achievements. Looking at other tenant organizing models and other models that are of not for profit housing developers, it seems that Cooper Square is unique. How do you see that? Do you see that as a responsibility, in terms of your place in the housing movement? I mean, you go, and you speak — you’re going to speak on Saturday. Do you really think that... Is Cooper Square doing it, or should they do more of educating other groups?

Frances: Well, our greatest weakness has been not letting the world know what we accomplished. Because, people want to fight City Hall. They don’t know how. We not only fought City Hall, but we beat them. And we never had the desire, or the energy to let everybody know what we did, and how we did it. Even though there was a desperate need for people to know there was an alternative to losing.

And I think that the thirty minute movie that’s being made by Hunter, is going to be a big step in that direction. And I have a very dear friend who helps me get to death row four times a year, who lives in Pittsburgh, who is a professional documentarian. And he’s going to make a seven, or seventeen minute piece, out of the thirty minute piece, that can be used to raise funds for the organization and to build the movement. And we should have done that all along, and we never did. We just went about doing what we had to do, and we never blew our own horn.

You know, there’s a thing on television, on many stations, where they show either the person of the week or the area good — the good deed of the week, or something like that. I’m sure we would have gotten on, and told them how we beat Robert Moses and saved the community. And we can do it in five minutes, or four minutes, or maybe three minutes! But we never did. We never called to make those appointments, to spread the word that with good organization and people needing their roof over their head, you can beat City Hall. And I think that’s a weakness. A serious weakness that we had, which quite late, we’re beginning to correct.

Lynn: Okay. All right. Is there anything else that you want to tell me for this interview? And like I said, I’m going to type it up and send it back to you, for you to review. So, if there’s anything that you want to take out, or that I got wrong or that you want to add, you’ll be able to.

Frances: No, but I don’t know if it has anything to do with this. But one day I want to tell you the best Cooper Square story of all, because it’s like a one act play.

Lynn: Could you tell me now?

Frances: I can tell you now.

Lynn: Okay.

Frances: As you know, Robert Moses made a deal with Louis DeSalvio, and they took away our vacant land, without which we couldn’t have done Cooper Square. So, we went to the Board of Estimate every month and begged to get our vacant land back — and didn’t happen. Didn’t happen, didn’t happen, didn’t happen.

On the eighth month, or the ninth month, we decided we were going to plant our feet, and not give up. We were going to bring a lot of people to speak, and we were not going to let them have the hearing if they didn’t give us back our land. It was enough. Nine months the baby was ready to be born.

So, I was the spokesperson, and we had maybe forty people in the audience that were going to speak. And the place was jammed because they were like a hundred points on the agenda. And, so I make my pitch, and I said, ‘Now, you’ve got to give us back this land. It should never have been given away.’

And at the same time, a wonderful thing happened. Mary Perot Nichols found a letter in the files. She had a mole in the city government. And it said that Louis DeSalvio agreed to vote for the thruway, in order to get Cooper Square’s vacant land. So, the deal was now in the public. So we said, ‘Here’s this dirty deal that’s made. We lost our land. We need it back.’

They said, ‘All right, we’ll take it under advisement.’ And I said, ‘Well, take it under advisement very fast, because I’m not stepping down.’ And they said, ‘Miss Frances:, you know, it’s been a long day. We will, I promise you. We’ll take it under advisement.’ I’m holding the mic. The mic is in a little alter, you know — a little... I said, ‘No, we want to hear that that land is ours, so we can proceed with the Cooper Square plan.’

So, he calls the cops, and they come to my shoulders, and they start pulling me away. I’m holding the mic. Of course, when they pull me, they pull the mic and the mic comes out of this thing, the table topples and wires... I don’t know what happens to the wires. Genoveva Clemente jumps up, and goes with me to the…

Lynn: I remember her.

Frances: Squad car, she doesn’t want me to be alone. Blessed friend — she accompanies me. As soon as I am pulled out, there’s a big commotion and when he bangs the gavel to continue, Ernesto Martinez is at the mic. And he said, ‘Mr. Martinez, were you called?’ He said, ‘No, I was not called. But I’m here to demand that that land be given back to Cooper Square.’ And they said, ‘We’ve been through all that. Now, you’ve got to leave right now — or you’ll be arrested.’ And he said, ‘I’m not leaving. Cooper Square has been waiting for nine months, and this land has to be given back to Cooper Square.’ So he says, ‘Troopers, come arrest this man.’

So, Reeni, my daughter and her friend and nine people — one guy and eight women — no, it was eight people. One guy and seven women, grab ahold of Ernesto. The cops are pulling him one way. They’re pulling him another way. They’re pulling him. They’re pulling back — and he arrests all of them. So now Ernesto, and eight people — nine people, I was arrested first — are all hauled off to jail. The picture that you see there, walking there. That’s Reeni getting arrested on that event.

Okay. We’re all gone now. There are thirty—eight people in the room, that are just waiting to speak on Cooper Square, and another fifty people that are waiting to speak from the five boroughs. It’s the Board of Estimate. Okay. There’s calm. All the troublemakers are arrested.

And he says, ‘Okay. Mr. Williams...’ An older Black man from Brooklyn. ‘You’re number four, six, three, five. You’re next.’ He gets up and shuffles over to the mic and says, ‘I yield my space to Cooper Square.’

Lynn: That’s hot.

[Tearing up] I didn’t know him. None of us knew him. He saw what was going on with what the city does to a group that’s trying to save their people. ‘Okay. Sit down. You’re going to lose your turn.’ He said, "I don’t want to lose my turn. But I want to give my time to Cooper Square.’ Okay. ‘Mamie Jackson from the Bronx. You are next.’ She gets up and she says, ‘I yield my time to Cooper Square.’

Lynn: And when was this? What year was that?

Frances: I think it was in ‘82. Reeni knows the date. He bangs the gavel, and he says, ‘This hearing is adjourned.’ That was the end of the hearing. But can you imagine the solidarity of these people, who have been waiting for months to get on the agenda, who see what’s happening and yield their time to Cooper Square? It was fabulous. Is that a one act play?

Lynn: That’s a wonderful story.

Frances: It was wonderful. I’m very close to a Ernesto’s kids.