Jessica Fielding

Gabriela: I'm here with Jessica Fielding at The New School. Today is March 9, 2023. Thank you, Jessica, for being here with me. I'm going to start with some personal questions. Tell me, where and when were you born and where is your family from? Tell me a little bit about your family.

Jessica: My family has a long history of being on the Lower East Side. From my father's side, really. We're from East Fourth Street to East First Street. My grandparents actually met on East Fourth Street when they were younger. My grandmother was the first of her family to be born in America, from Sicily. And she moved with her grandmother and her father, and she lived with all of her aunts.

So there was about six, seven, eight people in a little apartment over on East First. She described it as the Coldwater Flats, right on Extra Place, on East First Street. It's still there. It's a little alley. Now there's art in there and everything. From there they moved to Brooklyn and then they came back to East Fourth Street and she was there living there with her grandmother at the time. And my grandfather is from the Ukraine. Originally his family's from Pennsylvania. They moved down to New York City. And while he was in the Navy, his mother lived on East Fourth Street, and he came around and he met my grandmother. They ended up falling in love. They got married at the Old Nativity Church, which is now unfortunately gone. That was our family church. They were married there in 1956. And they lived on East Fourth Street.

My family– my father, Charles, and my aunt Roseanne, who still lives in the community, were born and raised at 65 East Fourth Street. They went to school PS 63 and Most Holy Redeemer School. When my father was a teenager, he met my mother. Once again on Fourth Street. And I was born. For the first few years of my life, I lived with my mom. She is from the West Coast. Mm-hmm. So she's from California. She came to New York, met my father, they had me. And then, when I was about six years old, I came back to live in New York with my father and I lived with my grandmother [laughs] and my aunt. So it was, again, history repeating itself. A grandmother raising her grandchild and all her children with her. I went to school here on the Lower East Side. I went to the old St. Patrick's Cathedral School, which was in Little Italy, which is also now gone.

We grew up playing on Ford Street Park, playing stickball, turning up the fire hydrants. And so that was really the New York that my father knew. I got a little bit of that in the ‘80s and ‘90s before, you know, gentrification came about and all of that. We had like long history roots, especially with my grandmother growing up on East First Street. She was friends with Fran Golden. Together, and all of their friends, they rallied for affordable housing to keep speculators out. There were a lot of protests during those times way before me. A lot of arrests [laughs] happening. They helped found the food co-op, the Cooper Square Food Co-op, on Fourth Street. They also were the beginning of the Cooper Square Committee, which is the birth of all of our organization now.

Gabriela: Do you remember any stories from that time?

Jessica: I do remember–what was great about growing up on East Fourth Street, especially our block, was all the theaters. Back then they were more community-oriented, I wanna say. The kids would be running in and out of the theaters, especially [one], which is now the New York Theater Workshop. We used to call it the Truck and Warehouse. They would have shows there on Saturdays and all the kids would go in. It would be free for the kids. It was just a really great time. Everybody was always hanging out on the stoop and playing dominoes. Everybody knew everybody. Yeah. And you know, that we had little bodegas in the middle of the block, which we would get our candy from and our sandwiches from. And so those were the memories that I remember calling out of the window, “Throw me down $2, I wanna go to the store!” Or, “I forgot my keys. Drop the keys!”

There was a lot of yelling out of the windows back then [laughter], throwing things down. Because we didn't want to walk up the stairs, you know? I loved it.

Gabriela: You said part of your family is Italian and the other half Ukrainian [crosstalk]–

Jessica: –[crosstalk] Yes, that is correct.

Gabriela: But what about other families? You were playing with all these kids–

Jessica: During the time that I grew up, there was a change in the population. When my–

Gabriela: –Yes, tell me a little bit about that time.

Jessica: Maybe during my grandmother and father's time, it was a lot of Italian. It then became more Hispanic. I grew up thinking I was Puerto Rican, Dominican, just like everybody else, you know? I loved it. That was what–it's really one of the draws that I love about our community because it was so diverse. It was very Hispanic-oriented and very welcoming. And still very much so. I just really loved it. The culture, the music, the games that we would play, and the friends that we had. We grew up together. We’re still friends today, a lot of us from the block.

Gabriela: What can you tell us about the housing conditions back then? Because your family got into this movement and the activism because of the housing conditions. If you remember anything about that.

Jessica: I do remember quite a bit. I grew up at 65 East Fourth. When I was little, my father had the apartment downstairs and my aunt had the apartment above us. I would communicate to her through a hole in the pipe, bang on the pipe, “Come downstairs, I wanna see you.” That was how we spoke. Our bathroom was in the hallway. I just remember distinctly as a toddler trying to learn potty training. I couldn't go in the bathroom. We had to use a pot in the house because the kitchen sink was also our bathtub.

I just thought that was–we had a pull chain toilet in the hallway. I just thought that that was how it was everywhere. And then slowly the conditions of the building did deteriorate. Then it became almost unlivable by the mid-’90s, to the point where floors were falling through and we just couldn't stay there. They ended up temporarily relocating us to East 21st Street. We had a building over there. We stayed there until they had renovated the buildings. I do remember during the renovation project there were meetings. “These are the blueprints. What do we want for our building?” [Laughs] Back then it was kind of like a different contractor for a different building. So, not everything was done the same. Not everything was done at the same time. We were just happy to get some sort of livable home. I remember in 1997, we did move back to 65 [East Fourth Street] and we had a bathroom in the apartment.

The configuration was a lot smaller than we were used to. We were used to railroad apartments, front-to-back. They had, I guess, to put bathrooms in the buildings, and in the apartments they had to restructure some things. But growing up, we did have the marble steps. We had the wrought iron banisters through time. Those have worn. The original–we had stained glass windows in some of our buildings. It was very beautiful. You can look at the architecture now and see that there was some sort of format. There were sculptures on the outside of the building, marble steps, and all of that. With the renovations, we lost a lot of it. I think it was more, let's have a home and we'll just skip the aesthetic. But it was really sad to lose a lot of those pieces. You can see some of the buildings still have it.

A lot of them, they're called sister buildings. They would share a boiler, but they would also share walls. So, the format of the way the buildings were all very much the same kind of architecture. It was weird to just have different construction people come in and do one building and then do another one differently. That was a little bit–it was sad, it was upsetting. I do remember being relocated. I do remember my father and my aunt crying because of being locked out of our apartment. We were locked–one day we came home and we couldn't get into our apartment. It was a big lock. They were throwing our stuff in a dumpster. It was just a major uproar within the block. You know, “Where's my stuff? You can't do that!” That was during the time, maybe early ‘90s, late ‘80s, squatting was happening. It was a big problem in our neighborhood and in probably a lot of parts of the city.

Gabriela: When you mentioned that they rehabilitated the buildings and this happened. Who was doing that work? Was it the city? Or was it–

Jessica: –It was the city. I remember it being the City. I do remember a lot of times Cooper Square arguing with the City. The idea was [that] the big threat was NYU [New York University]. The threat was NYU [New York University] was gonna come in, buy our buildings, and make them all dorms, make them all schools. The fight was really there. Signs in our windows, “Speculators, stay away.” “We don't want you, NYU.” We had banners over the block because we were almost helpless. Fighting a battle against a city. Money. ‘80s, ‘90s. They wanted to gentrify our neighborhood.

During that time the drug epidemic was pretty bad, and the homeless [sic] was pretty bad. They just wanted to clear us all out, for lack of a better term. It was really a big struggle. I was a teen at the time. I was old enough to understand that struggle. It was really that time. It was the fight that my parents were doing.

Gabriela: Yes. That was that period of the nineties. And then, Cooper Square being in the middle of everything. It was so precious. Then your grandmother was working with Fran Golden, you mentioned?

Jessica: Yes.

Gabriela: Was your father also like involved in the moment?

Jessica: My father, not so much.

Gabriela: More your mother?

Jessica: Not my mother at all. My mother stayed on the West Coast. She never came back to New York. But my father, not so much. My aunt, his sister, my aunt Roseanne, she was also a part of it. And more so my grandmother at that time.

She would've been in her fifties or sixties. I think she had ultimately made the decision in her sixties that my grandfather couldn't do the stairs anymore. Iit was just too stressful. They ended up moving to Village View, which is a Mitchell-Lama [housing development] on First Avenue. They moved there and they left us on Fourth Street [laughs], which I was fine with at that time. I was old enough to start going to college. It was kind of like, “All right, everyone's growing up.” My father and my aunt remained behind, and retirement was happening for them. They kind of hung up their hat[s]. Fran never hung up her hat, ever. Never, ever. I give it to her. My grandmother was done with it. Fran then kept the charge going.

Gabriela: How did you get involved with Cooper Square? You have a family of activists. Seeing all these things happening to your neighborhood. I know that now you're very active. Tell us a little bit more about it, but how did you start?

Jessica: I want to say really getting involved in maybe 2010, with a call from Fran Golden. She called me and she said, she was crying, she goes, “I need you.” She goes, “You're young, you need to do this. You need to get on the board.” At the time, I was a building captain in my building, and I was living in 89 East Third, which is in a standalone building that we [Cooper Square] have. And it had just become a part of Cooper Square. I was living there, my first time on my own studio apartment, in my twenties. I realized that I really wanted to help and give back. And it was the time that we were trying to co-op. It was the turn of, she would explain to me, “Fifty years of fighting to get affordable housing, we really need your help.”

As a building captain, part of our jobs was knocking on doors and asking people to become shareholders, and why it was so important to not be a renter anymore. Why the TIL [Tenant Interim Lease] program isn't great, because that was another program that people wanted to do. “Well, we wanna own our own building.” Especially in 89, because they had the 89 East Third Tenant Association. They were already their own association. They decided to join Cooper Square, but a lot of them were still like, “We don't want to do this. We want to remain independent.” We did a lot of door-knocking, and we needed to have a critical mass of people for the Attorney General to approve this. When that finally happened, it was almost some sort of a miracle. I was on the board at the time when it went from being a rental to a co-op. And at the time, I believe I was the treasurer of the board. So a lot of those stock certificates have my signature because I was there signing them too, which was a really big deal.

Such a big part of history. And it was just, “Okay, we made it.” [Laughs] “We finally made it here.” Yes. What a moment. I continue to stay on the board on and off. I'm on the board now, as you know. I'm currently the vice president of the board. But I've always served in some sort of capacity. When I did take a step off of the board, I did sit on the [Cooper Square] Community Land Trust board as a shareholder appointee. So I was almost always meeting in Fran's house [laughs]. I really loved that. I wanted to serve in some sort of way. And that was the way that I could do it at the time.

Gabriela: Yeah. That's an incredible story. Because the Cooper Square CLT (community land trust) was formed in 1994.

Jessica: Right.

Gabriela: So you were one of the first members of the board– No, because this is like 2000 already.

Jessica: Right, right.

Gabriela: So when you arrived, who was on the board?

Jessica: When I got there, the president of the board was Maxine Fee. She has since passed away. She was a wonderful president. And Maria Torres-Bird. She was the vice president. Maria was the vice president. And I was brought on really scared [laughs]. Because these are people that I looked up to. Also older. And I felt like, “What am I gonna bring to the table? I'm 20 years old. I'm in my twenties. What can I contribute?” And I realized that really my strong points were helping keep minutes and keeping organization. I ended up doing a lot of meetings, chairing a lot of meetings. So it became a hobby that turned into some sort of defining moment of who I am as a person. And independent in my own way.

Gabriela: Can you share a community or personal organizing moment or anecdote that made you feel proud of being part of Cooper Square? You enter there, you are very young, you have these fears that you have seen for years, doing all this work, and then you're learning all that. Do you have a moment that you were like, “Yes, I have to continue this fight”? Like, “I'm the next generation of activists.” Do you remember any moment?

Jessica: I think, some key moments, serving on the board. I also tell people this is a volunteer position, I’m working full-time. At the time I went from being single to being married to having kids during this whole time of serving** **the board and dealing with those things.

But I want to say that some of the proudest moments that I have, one would be advocating for a grant that Cooper Square Committee wanted. They came to our board asking for money. Because they were building, or they were helping build, the Bea Arthur Homes for LGBTQ youth. They needed like, maybe $10,000, $20,000. They came with a proposal plan. And at the time, the people sitting on the board, “No. We don't have any money to give to anybody else right now.” We're worried about ourselves. And I just stood up and had this moment. I was like, we have to give to other people, because if we don't do that, why are we here? Yes, it's a hard balance to take care of our own, but also still continue to advocate for the community at large. Eventually, it did pass.

We were able to give them that money and they were able to build that. And I just thought it was such an amazing thing because never in my life did I think that I would be able to stand up to a bunch of people who were very adamant about not doing this and speak up. There were a lot of sour grapes in the room at the end of the day, but I felt really good. And then years later when it was finally built and it came to fruition, I was just like, this is amazing. Like, wow, so glad this happened! There was always that lingering fear of, we wanna protect our own, but we still wanna help those [other projects]. And I think another moment would be when there was the explosion on East Sixth Street and there was a gas leak, building blew up. It was the night that we were supposed to have an actual board meeting. And I think it was a very important board meeting. I was the president of the board at the time, and I remember running into Val [Orselli], who was our executive director, and I said, “Did you see what happened?

We have to do something. We can't have a meeting tonight. We have to see A, if our families are gonna be okay, because we are two blocks away. And B, who can we help? And from that moment, we were bringing in people– we had some spare apartments. So we were able to bring in people that actually ended up serving on our board years later because they were so grateful to have a place to go. But that was what we were all about, to me, to keep the mission and the heart and still continue [laughs]. It's a double-edged sword.

Gabriela: That's incredible because there is already a lot of work, just keeping the buildings, running them and all that, organizing the new leaders, and then serving the community. It is necessary, but another layer of complexity. Then you lived like this too; the construction of this new building and giving homes to the neighbors when they needed them.

That is amazing. In your view these are some of the most important accomplishments, together with the signing of the deed. You live very important parts of the history of Cooper Square. How have all these experiences changed you? As a person or a neighbor and a community member?

Jessica: I think it's changed me in the fact that I'm worried more of the bigger picture. It's taken me out of just what me and my family are doing for ourselves. But what we're doing for the community, I'm trying to teach my children that it is our responsibility to advocate for those who do not have a voice.

And as our generations are getting [laughs] older. So it is up to us, really. That's been the biggest struggle for me right now, is trying to get people more involved. Younger people that can actually move us to the next direction. Because I always said that when we co-op– and I told the board, I said, “We did that first fifty years. Now the next fifty years is maintaining it and growing it.” I'm training then the new generation and training a new generation of what it means to be here.

Gabriela: In your view, being now for more than twenty years being really involved, what are the core principles or values that have nurtured and sustained Cooper Square?

Jessica: I think the core is the caring heart that we have. It takes a certain person to live here and to work here. It's not for the money that we do this and I always say that to our staff. Who I appreciate so much because they put their blood, sweat, and tears above and beyond the paycheck. You are not doing it for the money, you are doing it because you care. Having the thought of, I haven't seen my neighbor in a couple of days. Let me knock on her door and see if she's okay. Thinking beyond your home, because we are a family, and as you see, I can walk down the block and say “Hi” to ten different people every single day. They are my family. I also know that when my kids walk down the block, they know who they are and there's a safety net here. Everybody has their part. Good, bad or indifferent [laughs].

Gabriela: What do you do for a living? Is it something related with this ** **type of work that you do or is it completely different?

Jessica: [Laughs] It's completely different. I work for a business management company and we handle finances for musicians. But I was able to take my skills that I work with accounting and apply it to my knowledge to [sic] the board when it comes to budgets, when it comes to modernization with banking, and streamlining. Because I had worked in a small office and it has grown, I am now able to give examples of how we can modernize and how we can save money and grants and all that stuff. I am kind of backwards working. Cooper Square has formulated my position, and now I'm trying to give back to them what I'm learning on the outside and to continue to go.

Gabriela: I imagine that you're bringing a lot of the things that you have learned in Cooper Square not to your work. That humanity and care for others.

Jessica: It's true about the company I work for. They do care about their employees and it is a family situation. There is a sense of balance when it comes to the work that I do at home and the work that I do professionally.

Gabriela: Jessica, you know that the cost of living in the city and housing is insane. And it is just getting worse and worse. By living in Cooper Square MHA, what have you been able to do that you might not have otherwise done?

Jessica: I think first of all, I was able to go to college. I'm the first in my family to be able to go to college. My father was able to send me, because the rent was so affordable. I don't think we would have had that opportunity anywhere else. I'm hoping that that will be something that I can do for my kids.

Leave their legacy and do things, for instance, I'm making them go to Rod Rogers on the block for dancing. I make them participate in the Third Street Music School so that they have a sense of community and they have those experiences. We're just very lucky to have it all in our neighborhood, where most people don't.

Gabriela: That's beautiful. Talking about your kids, how do you envision the future of Cooper Square? You are now twenty years there. You have seen very heavy activists past, and you see the kids of all of your neighbors and all those new activists now. How do you see the future now? What do you think will strengthen or improve Cooper Square at this point? I'm thinking about also the context. All the gentrification, all the development. Things are different from–

Jessica: Yes, absolutely. I'm hoping. My vision is not only do we have the buildings we have now, but we have expanded our model to really reach out into other neighborhoods to help keep it affordable and to keep local businesses. The commercial businesses that we do have, I'm really proud of. I really want to keep those. I also do not want something that can be a chain coming in. I really appreciate the mom-and-pop dynamic that started our community. Perhaps even giving our shareholders the opportunity to learn a trade, to start a business. That was always the goal for us, is to kind of be able to take care of our community and also educate them and give them resources. Give the children resources of places to go. There isn't really any kind of community room for them to go.

When my grandmother and Fran Golden were younger, they had the Church of All Nations, which was on East First Street, that was for the community. That's where all the kids had their dances, they met each other, they got married. That's where all our parents, grandparents got married and everything. We really are missing that now with all of these pop-up buildings and office spaces and restaurants that are really expensive. I want to be able to go somewhere in my neighborhood and afford it, [laughs] pretty much. And I want my kids to be able to do that. Slowly but surely, I think that the group of people now that we have on the board and the community, now, is starting to realize after the pandemic. There was nobody for us, but ourselves. We had to take care of ourselves.

Everybody else left. All the people that had the money to go, they left and it was just us maintaining and we did a great job, but I want us to be able to do better, you know? That's always the goal [laughs].

Gabriela: Of course. This has been an amazing conversation. Jessica, I don't know if you would like to add anything?

Jessica: The only thing that I would add is, I want to thank you because I think this is fantastic. I think preserving oral history, preserving our history, will make it that much more for our kids to understand where we came from and to lead by an example. If anything, I would say I would love to lead by an example. I would love to continue to grow our community and keep it the family that we're used to living with.

Gabriela: Thank you so much.

Jessica: Thank you. [I] appreciate it. Thank you so much.