Lynn Lewis

Gabriela: Okay. Today is June 13, 2024, and I'm here with Lynn Lewis, in her place in Harlem. Thank you, Lynn, for having this conversation with me.

Lynn: Of course. Glad you're here.

Gabriela: Lynn, let's talk a little bit about your childhood. Where were you born? Where's your family from?

Lynn: I was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1960. And I was raised by my paternal grandparents. My parents were teenagers when I was born, and we lived with… when my mother had me, when she found out she was pregnant, she moved in with my father's family.

And my father was 17 and my mother, I think, was 15. There's discrepancies about how old she actually was but they had already fudged his birth certificate, because he was kind of a delinquent, so he started shipping as a merchant seaman when he was 16. And, my mother really didn't she didn't have any support from her mom. And so she moved in with my father's family, and they were… both of my grandparents' families were German. My great grandparents immigrated from Germany. So my one great grandmother, my grandfather's mother was born in 1890 in the belly of the ship coming over. And my other great grandmother, her parents were from Hamburg.

I had both of them living until I was an adult. And so I'm the 1st person to not have a baby as a teenager and, you know, the generation of my mother and grandmother and great grandmothers and going back forever. So the generations are kind of short in my family, but I've always felt really blessed that I had my great grandmothers and my great uncles and all of them on my father's side growing up.

Gabriela: Oh, no. They were really young. And, do you have siblings?

Lynn: Yes, so my grandparents made [my parents] get married, but as often happens, that doesn't always work out. And, so, from my father, I have a brother from another woman.

A very nice woman, I'm gonna see her next week. And then he got married again, so I have a little sister.

And then on my mother's side, she left Baltimore and moved to New York. She lived in the South Bronx on Longwood. She was in prison for a few years in Baltimore and then moved here and lived in the South Bronx in the sixties, in the mid-sixties, and then moved to California. So I have a sister from her also.

Gabriela: And how was your childhood?

Lynn: It sounds kinda crazy, but, actually, I had a really - I feel like I had a really wonderful childhood.

I always lived with my grandparents. My grandmother was 36 when I was born, and my grandfather was 48. So at first, we lived in Baltimore, we lived in the Liberty Heights section of Baltimore, and I went to Liberty Heights Elementary School. I learned to read very early before I went to school.

I think my grandmother's mission in life was that I was going to not be a teenage mother, and I was gonna go to college. And so my grandparents really doted on me. You know? And, they really, you know, they loved me. I felt very loved.

I was probably very spoiled, not materially, But actually, I think everything they had, they gave me. Right?

So I remember, like: I had a childhood encyclopedia set, you know, and I loved to read. You know, when I was a kid, they used to call me bookworm and all of this. So my grandparents always made a big deal about, you know, that I was smart.

And we moved to the Eastern Shore when I was 7. They had started busing white kids to the elementary school I went to in Baltimore. You know, because of racism and gains made by black people as a result of the civil rights movement… the school system in Baltimore, they started integrating the schools. But the school I went to was almost completely black.
 
Gabriela: Mhmm.

Lynn: Because of white flight. And so they you know, we had the National Guard people there,

and they had put all this razor wire on this fence, the fence around the school. And we said they looked like elephants. Like, they had these big tear gas masks. They had, a hose, these old timey ones.

And well, that was then. That was what they had. And so my grandfather painted cars, fixed cars, and, someone that he knew when he was young, also a German immigrant or I don't know who his parents were, he had moved over to the Eastern Shore and was buying land and wanted my grandfather to come over there and work for him. So he owned a house that we lived in, and my grandfather had a little shop where he fixed cars. And so we moved over there. And it was, you know, it's a beautiful place, but it's very conservative. It's still very conservative.

It's still, like, super Trump country. And there was only one elementary school for the island we lived on and one middle school, and the high school was far away, one in every county, basically. So it was very hard, you know? I always felt like an outsider in a lot of ways. And, you know, my family… It’s also a kind of place where if you're not from there for, like forever, then you're an outsider. And so it was hard. You know? Girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school. I wanted to play drums. Girls couldn't play drums. There were just so many rules. You know?

If you were born, you know, a particular gender and race and class and all these other [things] it was like you had a lane that you were supposed to stay in.

And you know, part of me being really, I think loved by my grandparents and my family was: “Okay, girl you know, you're a girl, but you can, you know, you can”. And my mom never really talked about the women's movement, but I think also in the sixties, there was a lot of opportunities that were opening up. And so it was: “You know, you can do anything. Yeah”.

And my mom would always say: “If I was you, I would wanna be an astronaut”. I don't know if that was her thing. But because I was the first one to finish high school in my family, the [many] professions they would talk about - “you could be a doctor. You could be a lawyer” kinda thing.

And, the island I grew up on, Kent Island, was very beautiful and, you know, we would go fishing and crabbing. My daddy pretty much worked 7 days a week.

And he was you know, I always kinda describe him as a hillbilly anarchist because he was very anti racist. He was opposed to the Vietnam War. He didn't trust the government.

I remember I wanted to go to church, and he would say: “Well, you know, you can go, but I'm not gonna take you”. You know? And I would walk to church, and it would be winter, and he would pass by me driving on a Sunday to go to work because he went to work, like every day. Then he'd wave at me, you know? And then when I quit Church. Yeah. When I quit church, in a drama, he was like: “what? I told you”. You know? And so I got a lot of early political education.

Then my great grandmother, his mother, had lost their farm, and so they reverted to tenant farming. They were tenant farmers.

And, my uncles had worked at Bethlehem Steel, but a lot of those jobs were lost. So those are kind of the things that they talked about when I was growing up.
 
Gabriela: And what was your mother doing during the high school years?

Lynn: Well, after I was born, she became addicted to drugs and went to prison. I know when she got out of prison, she moved to New York. Her brother was here. She had one brother, John. She lived on Longwood in the South Bronx, and she was in the methadone program there.

Also, the methadone program, if you test positive for other drugs, you get kicked off. So, you know, she got kicked out, and she had my little sister, and she used to write letters to me.

My mom [I mean] my grandmother, I always call her mom, saved them for me and some things that she had of hers. And so when I was growing up, what my mom told me was that, you know, my mother was very young when I was born, and she really loved me, but she couldn't take care of me because she was so young. And that's why I lived with them.

So my grandmother was very kind. You know? I mean, other... that could have gone down a completely different way. And so I don't know exactly where she was. I know when she was in New York my sister was born in 66, and we had letters from her from the Bronx with her new married name. I remember the envelope. She had very nice handwriting, and I could picture it.

But she moved to California. Her brother had moved out there, and so she moved out there. You know, she had a rough childhood, and she wanted my sister to have something nicer. And, so my uncle was like: “oh, move to California. You know, it's so nice out here”. So, anyway, I think the South Bronx was very similar to Baltimore in a lot of ways for her, and she wanted maybe a new start for herself. I don't know.

Gabriela: So then she was here. You were in Baltimore with your parents, you know, with who you called your parents. And then, how they call those experiences like in, you know, like elementary school, middle school, and then having your mother away. And having such loving parents or grandparents that would push you to, you know, to go ahead and to study and all that...

How did that shape your decision to go to college?

Lynn: Well, one thing that happened right before I went to high school, my grandfather, you know, my dad, he died. He literally dropped dead at work. And we never had health insurance when I was growing up. We never went to the doctor… a couple times I went to the doctor, but I was luckily not very ever very ill. And so we had to move.

People that we rented the house from were his friends, but when he died, they came, like 3 days after he died and basically told us we had to move or buy the house, which there's no way we could buy anything. And so, anyway, that had a big impact on me because, we sold all our stuff.

But, you know, it's like a little island. Everybody knew everybody. And, my mother… I found her when I went to college, which is a funny story.

But, anyway, I think those things shaped me in a lot of different ways. One - my father, I think, as a merchant seaman… I mean, he used to shine shoes when he was a kid. You know? Like, they didn't have a lot, and so he was kinda rough. He was rough.

And my mother, also her experiences… And then at the same time, I had this very sheltered, loving kind of household. And so I think that gave me a lot of different kinds of folks [laughs].

To be honest, I'm much more comfortable with folks that maybe have some issues and maybe perceived as a little rough, than I am with rich people, for example. So, I can move in different worlds with some level of understanding and appreciation for the strength that people have that are dealing with different kinds of things. But I also was very clear, you know, I didn't want to be like, you know, my mother. I didn't wanna have a drug problem. I didn't wanna have an alcohol problem. I had my children young. My father also was an alcoholic. He died of cirrhosis of the liver. A lot of merchant seamen are alcoholics and heavy drinkers and have a hard life.

So, anyway, those things shaped me because I know that people can be in some really dire circumstances, because those are the conditions of their lives. So some of it are choices we make. But if you have money, you have a lot of more luxury to make bad choices.

When you're poor, you don't have any room to make bad choices. And so those things were all very clear to me when I was growing up. You know, my daddy worked 7 days a week. He drops down dead at work. And this narrative… So, I graduated from high school in 1978, and Reagan, that was the first election I could vote in for president. And, you know, his whole thing was, people who are poor are lazy, and you just need to work harder and this whole way this country blames people for being poor, as if we don't have a class society.

And that made me very angry because I knew that not only my daddy, but, you know, his friends… he used to barter. Like, if people didn't have money to pay him, they would give us food. They would give us corn. It's a big corn producing area. Or his friend, Mister George would give us crabs, or people would kill geese.

You know, people hunt a lot there, and would give us food. And I remember my mom, I was telling this to my brother the other day… I wrote a poem about this. My daddy came home one night with all these burlap sacks and just dropped them on the kitchen floor. She [my mom] used to get on her hands and knees and scrub and wax the floor, and she was just shocked. And it was 17 dead geese, and geese are really big.

And you know, they hardly ever argued in front of me, but basically, she said something like: “we need money to pay the phone bill” and he said something like: “you can't eat the phone, you don't have to talk on the phone, but you have to eat. And you can eat geese, and you can't eat the phone”. Something like that. And she was so upset, but again, she didn't really say anything. And so all those things really shaped me.

And so when I met my [birth] mother, I knew about the problems that she'd had, but she was also… you know, like, we look alike in a lot of ways, and we had a lot of these same mannerisms. We danced the same. You know, she picked me up from the airport, and we went to a bar, and people were shooting pool, and we were dancing, and we kind of wore big earrings, you know, and had the same kind of, like style.

And so I felt a connection right away. And because she also was so, I think, so nonconformist in a lot of ways and had a very different childhood. Her mother was in Vaudeville and so she was around…

She said when she was a kid, there were, like gay people getting married that were, you know, friends of her moms, and that was a very, very different experience in the fifties in this country than most people have - in the forties, fifties. So, anyway, I saw in her a different kind of woman. She was very different from my grandmother. I hardly had any photos of her, but she gave me a photo of her when they lived in Longwood. And she was standing on a fire escape, and she had on this, like hippie, like fringe jacket.

But, they had a big banner that said, impeach Nixon on their fire escape. And so this whole sense of counterculture isn't always political, although on some on some level, it's very political. And so I appreciated her for that. And sometimes, you know, when you are an outsider you can struggle to assimilate into this conformist society, and then other times, you can just say: “You know, fuck it. I'm gonna be myself. They don't want me anyway”. So it was an interesting balance for me to have the 2 moms, in a sense, be so different. Yeah. And I appreciate that in a lot of ways.

Gabriela: And did you decide to go to college?

Lynn: Oh, yeah. There was never any doubt that I was gonna go to college. And like I had said earlier, I thought there'd be this whole other kind of people that would be reading books and talking about things. I was obsessed when I was in high school with Dostoevsky and Camus and all these existentialist writers, which really helped me think about life in a different way and our choices. And that everything we do is a result of a choice, even if we don't always see it.

And so, I just knew when I went to college, you know, it'd be very different from high school where it was, just hard enough as a girl to just survive.

Gabriela: Where did you go? How was that process? Did you have a scholarship?

Lynn: I had a full scholarship. I guess some of it was, you know, my grades and I was recommended by teachers,

and some was our income, which was very, very low. I never really knew… I never really thought about whether we had money or didn't have money. I mean, I knew we didn't have a lot of money but when I did our financial aid stuff, my daddy had died, so my mom had remarried, and he worked in a gas station. And I remember that their income was, like 9,000 something a year. And you know, I was like: “Woah”. And so whatever I had, they really sacrificed for me to have that.

So, when I went to college though, I had such a culture clash. A lot of wealthy kids, they had tons of money. They were very disrespectful. I'll never forget, they were so disrespectful to like, the cafeteria workers.

Like you know, they'd make a mess and, you know, I'm there, like: ”Hey, people have to clean this up”.

You know? And so I just again, I felt like an outsider. I just didn't see any like… I was like: “Oh, yeah. I'm gonna go to learn this. You know, we're gonna be learning and studying and talking about ideas”. And it was a lot of, partying and parents sending people money.

And I was like: “No. If I'm gonna hang around people getting drunk all the time, I might as well just go back to where I came from because at least they're working class people that aren't, pretentious”. You know? So it was very hard. And I had great professors that really believed in me, and I just had no support. You know?

Gabriela: So was this in Baltimore? Or…?

Lynn: It was on the Eastern Shore. It's Washington College.

I didn't do well. And funny, that's the same year that Three Mile Island happened in the spring. So Three Mile Island was a nuclear reactor that melted down in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the Susquehanna River is one of the main tributaries to the Chesapeake Bay.

So there were people in hazmat suits, like right away, monitoring, cow's milk. You know, it was very rural where I was, and so I was just like: “Holy shit”. And so I had found my mother and went to California to meet her. I didn't go back to that college. I came back to DC. There was a giant protest against nuclear power and stuff, and we ended up coming to New York. I had a boyfriend who was an artist,

and his family lived here. His grandmother was sick and couldn't live alone anymore. And so the way I was raised was, well, of course, you have to take care of your grandmother. And so we actually moved in and lived with his grandmother. And, you know, I was cleaning and cooking and everything, like the way I, grew up. But I had a friend of mine

Gabriela: Where was this in?

Lynn: The Rockaways. In the Rockaways.

Gabriela: What year was this?

Lynn: This would have been in 79. 79 or maybe 80 already. So I had a friend that I had met in Berkeley. I met these 2 guys. They were playing music. 1 was playing the flute, and 1 was playing the sax. And I was just, like you know, had no idea what I was gonna do, but I was like: I can't go back where I'm from.

I have to find my people. Like, there had to be people like me out here, you know?

Gabriela: Oh, yeah. And New York was a very good place for that, no?

Lynn: Yeah. New York was great. And so I met them [the musicians], and we stayed in touch. And one of them came to New York to visit, and there was gonna be a blizzard. So he couldn't go back to Philly where his mom lived. And so I said: “Well, come to where I am. You know?” And he was like: “Oh, no. The family might not like it”. He was black. He was from Philly. And I was like: “it's a blizzard. You know?” Anyway, when I got there, my boyfriend was like: “Oh, no. My grandmother's gonna have a heart attack”.

And I was like: “listen. It's a fucking blizzard and what?” You know, like: “what are you saying? You know?” And I was so mad. I was like, you know, I'm taking care of this person because she's an elder, and she deserves that.

And then at the same time… I was like, and I'm in New York. This is in New York, and I'm like: “Okay. Well, I guess it's just as bad here as it is where I grew up”.

But anyway, I found Empire State College, which was kinda new then, part of SUNY, and I enrolled. And, it was a great place for me because I could do a lot of independent study work, but a lot of the classes were with older people. And, you know people with jobs and stuff and not, like around all this privilege, and I felt much more comfortable. And I had great professors and, that relationship didn't work out for lots of reasons, but that that was a very telling sign that even though he wasn't saying that, it he wasn't as outraged.

You know? Maybe he couldn't be. I don't know. But, anyways, I moved to 9th Street and… 9th or 11th [street] and Avenue A. I had met Alex Harsley, the photographer. I used to write a lot of poetry. My friend that I was still in a relationship with… Alex had come to see a show where we were hanging [photographs] and Alex said to me: “Well, what are you doing? You know, who are you? And, you know, you're not just his girlfriend. Who are you?”

And, you know, and I used to have, like more of a southern accent and more I think like a country girl [accent]. You know, I'm all: “Hey” You know, I'm all friendly and whatever. Not that people that aren't from the country aren't friendly, but anyway. So, Alex and I made friends.

So, he was my first friend that I met in New York. And so, you know, I said: “Well, you know, I write poetry, and I'm gonna go to school, and la la la”. So he invited me to his gallery. He said, well, you're a poet.

Gabriela: Was that your major?

Lynn: No. But I used to write poetry though. So, Alex had an event in the gallery where he is now. He put it in the Village Voice that I was gonna do a poetry reading. And he bought wine and cheese and all this stuff.

And so I read some poems, people came, and then he said to me: “You're a poet”. And I thought, wow. You know, I never totally believed it, but it made me realize that you can find people that believe in you, maybe even more than you believe something about yourself.

So, Alex was my first friend, and that's how I eventually ended up moving to 4th Street and got involved with Cooper Square.

Gabriela: So were you living with him or how did you find that space?

Lynn: Well, my relationship ended, right, with that boyfriend. There was another funny story where I was coming from the Metro North and there was a guy playing the mandolin that looked like he literally just climbed down from a mountain. I mean, I think he had a [long] beard and I was just like: “who's that?” You know – that’s an interesting person.

So I started talking to him. And he said that he was from Montana, and he had never been east of the Mississippi. And he had met a woman in Montana who was a doctor, and he fell in love with her.

And she came back to New York, and he was gonna find her. And I was like: “that's amazing. How can I help with that? You know?” And I brought him home, and this boyfriend was like: “you are crazy”. And I was like: “talk to him. It's amazing. It's an amazing story. Don't you wanna help?” And he was just like: “no”. You know? And so, anyway, the guy spent the night and left the next day.

I don't even remember his name. But, you know, I was very open to people and to meeting people, and I really was kind of looking back… You know, I didn't think about it that way, but, you know, thinking about there are all kinds of people in this world, and you just have to find people that you can vibe with. So, I moved to 4th Street.

Gabriela: Yeah. But tell me a little bit about how the neighborhood was back then? And where did you move exactly?

Lynn: I lived at 73 East 4th Street, one flight up. Now it's a guitar store, but then it was a bodega. And it was a Dominican family that owned the bodega. They had a bunch of little girls. And, the neighborhood, you know, some of the buildings still didn't have toilets in the apartments still.

And some of the apartments had a toilet, but there was a pull chain, and a bunch of the buildings on 4th Street still had the bathtub in the kitchen. 73 East 4th Street had a bathroom. So, the tub was in the bathroom and a sink, and it, you know, it was very exciting to me in a lot of ways because there would be signs all over lampposts, you know, about meetings

and you know, where I grew up, there was none of that. And so I just thought: “Oh my god. This is amazing.”

So, even though I wasn't involved in anything when I got there, you know… And you would see—when I was in high school—when I first went to college, I was in love with Patti Smith, the singer, and I would see her, or Blondie—Debbie Harry. And I was just like: “you can just be, you know, you can just be yourself”. And, as a young woman, that was very different from the messaging I got growing up. My mom, you know, was always kinda scared.

You know? She really pushed me and supported me to get education, but she really wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer and have this… For her, having more education meant safety. And I was not making safe choices to her.

And so it caused her a lot of grief that I didn't understand ‘til I got older, and I feel bad, about that. I wanted her to understand what I was doing. You know? I wasn't rejecting her and doing whatever. I wanted her to come along, because I also saw her choices as so limited. But anyway. Yeah.

Gabriela: That was a very important moment for organizing in the neighborhood. Yeah. So if you can tell me a little bit about that.

Lynn: Well, the, you know, the first person that knocked on my door to invite me to a meeting at Cooper Square was Frances Goldin. Before that, people had been inviting me to meetings. So,Valerio was the director of the Cooper Square Committee.

And Frances, you would see her. You would see other people.

Elba was the book keeper… There were some guys, I don't remember their names, that worked there. You would see signs all the time in the lobby of the building, but I didn't I wasn't involved in anything yet. And my daughter's father… I got involved in another relationship, and he was living on Fourth Street.

So I moved into his apartment and got pregnant with my daughter. I was still in college, and he was very involved with Cooper Square. I remember meeting Valerio when I was pregnant, but it was this very intentional door knocking. I'm coming to your apartment. I'm checking on you, and I'm gonna get you to come to a meeting. That was Frances.

My daughter was, like, 3 days old. And she [Frances] knocked on the door, and I was just like: “Oh my god”. And we didn't have heat. She was born in November of ‘81. It was a freezing cold winter, and we didn't have heat or hot water for most of it. Like a glass of water, if you had it by your bedside at night, it would be ice in the morning. I used to heat the apartment with the stove, a gas stove. I mean, I think everybody did. It was very tough - my [bathroom] ceiling used to fall every couple months.

The walls would just be bulging. Like, they'd come and paint, and then they would just be bulging because there were leaks in between the walls. The conditions were just really terrible. So Frances I mean… I just couldn't say no to her, plus she smelled like my mom.

She smelled like my mom because they both—when my mom ever had anything to do where she wanted to be a little fancy, she and my great grandmother used White Shoulders perfume, and Frances used that.

And I was like: “Oh my god”. And they were born the same year, 1924. But Frances was in many ways the opposite, and not afraid of anything. I won't say she wasn't afraid of anything, but she didn't seem to be afraid of anything. And I was just like: “Woah. This lady” and so she got me to go to a meeting. She says: “We have heat in the office”. Like, “What do you want? You know? What do I gotta do? “We have heat.”

And, so I went, and then she was telling me: “Oh, you know, the person that's facilitating the meeting isn't coming. So, I want you to do it.” And I didn't even—I didn't even know what the word meant, you know, and I was just like: “Yeah”. I was just, so overwhelmed, and breastfeeding my daughter and she [Frances] goes and gets a towel or something, but it was clean. It was all folded up and she put it on me. She goes: “Is that it? Is that what it is? What is it?” She was very hard to say no to. And, so she says: “I'll be right here.”

So, it was like this combination of “do it” that was kind of intimidating, but also loving. So, you wanted to do what she was asking you because also you didn't wanna say no and then get this other version of disappointment, or whatever. So, I got really involved in, you know, this was in the end of 81, 82, 83.

And I got really involved with CHARAS.

Gabriela: Mhmm. These meetings that you mentioned were with Cooper Square Committee, right?

Lynn: Yeah. There wasn't a MHA or CLT or anything like that. They were just in the process, and I don't know what year that really started… But I got very involved. I was elected to the site action committee.

I have an old flyer. Maria Bird and I were co-chairs, and there were over 900, I think, homeless shelter beds on Third Street. There were just homeless folks everywhere in the neighborhood. And, so in my mind, I'm like: “they should come to these meetings”. And people are like: “No. That's different”. You know? And I said: “Well, to me, it's not different.”

And I still think of homelessness that way, that it's like there's a spectrum of housing precarity, or security, and homelessness is the most extreme [in the spectrum]. And, you know, when I went to college, my mom and her husband lost their home in the foreclosure crisis during the Reagan administration.

So I had a lot of things in my life, you know, when my daddy died and the landlord saying we had to move and that happening with my mom and their house. That's how they ended up in Florida from Maryland. And then at Cooper Square, fighting for heat and hot water, but somehow those people that were homeless were, like in a different category? All of these things I was very conscious of. Actually at Cooper Square, were trying to get the city to open up to rent up the vacant apartments in the buildings.

And NYU was just kind of starting to move east. There wasn't any hardly any open businesses between the Bowery and Washington Square Park.

I remember it was very sketchy walking to Washington Square Park. And then the first business that I remember, was a Tower Records that opened up, so that was one of the early signals of gentrification. But anyway, we took applications from homeless folks and people agreed to pay their rent. And Cooper Square set up an escrow account, and we took crowbars and opened up those vacant apartments and cleaned them up and moved people in. In 73 we moved people in. All the buildings had vacant apartments.

Gabriela: Okay. In that part.

Lynn: Yeah. And it was powerful for me to participate in that. I didn't do any of the planning or any of it, but I was, like: “Right on”. You know? I just thought this is the best thing ever. And then another time or maybe it was even the same action, but they took over the offices of HPD. They were across the street and [Cooper Square] took over the offices of HPD. Koch was the mayor, and what I understood was happening was that if our buildings were less than half occupied, they could move everyone else out and take the building. Okay.

And so, it was kind of like: “Well, NYU might gobble up the neighborhood or some other rich people or whoever is gonna take our building, so we have to defend them”.

We had building captains. I became a building captain at 73 Fourth Street, and I just thought this is amazing. This is just great.

Gabriela: And at this point, there were, like, different I don't know if it was at this point or later on that there were different programs. The alternative management program managed at the HPD that it was more like a process. Was this before that or during that period?

Lynn: This was in the beginning of it. I don't know when the TIL [Tenant Interim Lease] program actually started, but I can give you a copy of it. We can make a copy, a chronology of Cooper Square that Walter Thabit put together, and he gave it to me. It's from 1959 all the way I think it's through ‘85 or something. There were tons of meetings.

I think they had hundreds of meetings at Cooper Square of tenants

for us to get together to say: “Do we wanna go in the TIL program, or do we want to do something different?” And they had learned about a model in the Netherlands, and I'm not the best person to tell all that history. In many ways, because I was so young, it was kind of happening to me, and people were bringing me along. It was like: “Lynn, come to this thing or come to this meeting.”

I remember when JASA wanted to build that senior housing on 5th Street in the Bowery… there was a gas station there. And, of course, there were lots of, you know, as I said, people without housing, like with barrels, with fires, and, you know, just on the corner.

Gabriela: Districts.

Lynn: Yeah, just tons of people. And Cooper Square—in order for JASA to get it [a new senior building] approved by the community board,

I believe they needed approval, or it would have helped to have approval, if not necessary to have it, from Cooper Square, because it was on that block. So, they made a deal with JASA that they had to do outreach in the neighborhood and hire someone from the community to do the outreach to get seniors in the neighborhood to know about it and then apply. So, I was hired to do that, and I was totally, like—I just didn't know anything. You know?

But all of those experiences with Cooper Square really shaped the kind of organizer I became. At one point, I left the apartment. It was a very unhealthy relationship, and I went and stayed in Covenant House with my daughter when she was a baby. And, you know, of course, I was telling people,

Valerio and Francis and people where I was, that I trusted and Valerio and his first wife said to me: “No. No. No. Just come and stay with us.”

And that was the kind of organizing that was going on. People were checking on people. When the temperature was freezing, some people got moved to other people's apartments if there was heat in a particular building, blankets... I mean, it was like a war in a lot of ways. And Koch had defunded a lot of tenant organizing.

I remember the staff working at Cooper Square exhausted their unemployment benefits, and then had to find other jobs, and Valerio stayed. And so it was like “we're doing this.” The people that left, they had to have a job.

It wasn't like: “Oh well, I don't get paid, so I'm not doing this anymore.”

I mean, it was really a difficult period, and tenants had to come in and run the office. I remember Frances telling me: “We'll buy a playpen for the baby”, like “Come on. What else are you doing?” like “what do you mean?” You know? And so it was just, “We have to do this.” And it was really—I had never experienced anything like that—the camaraderie and the solidarity, you know - we didn't have words like mutual aid, but that's what was happening. And there were other tenants who were really opposed—you know, they wanted to be able to sell their apartments, or be able to sublet and get a bunch of money.

The neighborhood was gentrifying. And so there were just hundreds of meetings.

Gabriela: But at that moment, all those persons organized were tenants or owners of those buildings?

Lynn: The city owned the buildings.

Gabriela: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Lynn: So, some were tenants. When Giuliani was mayor, Antonio Pagan lived in one of the buildings, and that building, they were opposed to. Then there were people circulating flyers that Francis was a communist and they were very, very personal—scary flyers that the Cooper Square people were gonna do all these things that were bad. Like the way some people were with masks and COVID, like “take away your freedom.” It was really like a war. Yeah.

Gabriela: But you were or —I mean, you're saying that you are organizing, there was a lot of work. And also organizing in one way the senior citizens to be part of that new development, not to live in that development.

Then you have the homeless population that was really challenging. And then, you have the tenants, no? So, for Cooper Square, what was their goal in organizing at this moment?

Lynn: For me, the goal was that everybody can keep their homes and that our buildings would get renovated. That was the through line from the beginning. Remember, in the alternate plan for Cooper Square, some of the neighborhood people would be moved into other buildings. Those [empty] buildings get fixed up and people move back. And to a certain extent, that's the model that they still use with the TIL [program] and then the ANCP [Affordable Neighborhood Cooperative Program] program. They call it checkerboarding, where they'll keep some apartments vacant, move people in, fix up your building. This is what we're doing with the East Harlem and Barrio Community Land Trust.

And so, anyway there was that talk of that, but it was “What's the best way to save our homes?” And what people landed on was bundling all the buildings together. So then, instead of having every individual building be like this one, I mean, 10 railroad apartments in a small building, tenement housing, basically, even if the city replaced all of the systems, like the electrical and the plumbing and the roof or whatever, those things die.

They need to be kept up. And so if you're a TIL [program] building and then you become HDFC, you have to bear the cost of all of that. Whereas bundling all the apartments together allowed for all the rental [and maintenance] income to be bundled, to be able to care for all of the buildings.

I've always thought that was brilliant. And then there's a lot of storefronts, so the income from the storefronts. And, I don't know exactly when, but they formed the CLT [Community Land Trust] in the nineties. I don't know when that idea came into the mix. I left in the fall of ‘85 and went to Nicaragua. I remember Frances being mad at me, like: “we have a struggle here, you know?”

But what I learned over time was even though there was a lot going on in the neighborhood, at first, when I got there, it was like everybody, is doing all [the things] and then I realized, “no, there's only a couple people in in my building who come to meetings.” And that's how it always is, but I was very young.

So I really wanted to know, as I learned about all the wars in Central America and the Sandinista revolution, which was largely about agrarian reform, is how do you mobilize people at that scale? And, what are the conditions that allow that to happen and support that? So, I went and lived in Nicaragua. And it was, again, very transformative in terms of understanding about organizing.

Gabriela: So you just had been organizing these 20 plus buildings to get together. I think that it was quite a challenge. What happened at a certain point for you to be like: “Okay. I'm going to Nicaragua.” Like, what happened in your life at that point?

Lynn: In ‘82, I think, or maybe ‘83, I was still in college,

and I went to live with my mom so she could help me with my daughter, and I could finish. I had a couple independent studies I had to finish, and things were very hard. I was on welfare. They were making people go into workfare, which I didn't mind. I was like: “yeah. I'll go”. One of the options was cleaning Grand Central. I was like: “Yeah. I don't care. I could do that. I know how to clean”.

Like, I didn't mind even, but they had a rule that you had to drop out of college, that they weren't gonna give you public assistance if you were in a 4 year school. And I was like: “this is my shot to never need public assistance again”. This is what I thought. Yeah. And in many ways, it was true. Like: “I need to finish my education, and then I'll be able to support myself. But this is really stupid,” and so I refused.

And [my daughter] Rocio, because of hookups at Cooper Square, was going to Children's Liberation Day Care. And I didn't have to pay. They cut the subsidy, and I would volunteer. I ended up becoming the super in the building, so I was cleaning the building. My rent was $75 a month. It's 73 East 4th Street, and I was cleaning the building, so I didn't have to pay rent. And I had food stamps still, and that's, like, what I lived on.

And so anyway, I went to Jacksonville, Florida where my family had migrated. Somewhere, like, ‘83, I guess it was. And then when my daughter's father left the apartment, Valerio called me and said: “Come back. We need you up here.” When I was in Florida, I met people that were working in Nicaragua.

And I met people that worked on this activist sailing ship that came to Jacksonville, Florida.

So, I don't know if you remember the Rainbow Warrior that was blown up in New Zealand by the French CIA. There's a wonderful film, “Murder in the Pacific”, and this ship was sailing into South Pacific Islands to prevent them from nuclear testing because they were still doing that. They did a lot of amazing things, and I met them in Jacksonville. They refitted - a new ship was donated and they were retrofitting it into a sailing vessel. And so they were there when I was there. And, I've had the amazing fortune in my life to meet amazing people.

And yeah. So in fact, Bunny McDiarmid and Hank Haazen, they were on the Rainbow Warrior and they came to visit, like 2 months ago, because there was a screening of the film. I hadn't seen them in almost 40 years, They were right at this table a couple —maybe a month or so ago. But, anyway, I was meeting people doing things like that.

And so also, being really young and having already propelled myself away from where I grew up, I was like: “yeah. I can go to Nicaragua. You know?” My mom, I thought she was gonna die. But yeah.

Gabriela: Because you were on a short trip to Florida, or did you finish your studies then or not?

Lynn: I did.

Gabriela: You did, and then you were in Florida, you know, after…

Lynn: I was working in a battered women's shelter.

I was living in a little public housing development. My mom was helping me with my daughter, and I came back to New York. I came back but the seeds to go to Nicaragua had already been planted, and so I went.

Gabriela: So you came here and then you decided to go to Nicaragua?

Lynn: Yeah. I got really involved again with Cooper Square, and that's when the site action committee… Cooper Square still has all these committees. And we had elections, community elections for people to represent you on these different committees. So, I was elected to the site action committee, and one of the things that we wanted to do to increase participation by people that live there in all the different work —was to open up the office and have potluck dinners.

There these Catholic priests and brothers, Little Brothers of Jesus, that lived on Fourth Street also. Many of us were very close. Some of them moved to Mexico. First, they moved to Bushwick. When the Lower East Side was gentrifying, they moved to Bushwick. And, I loved them.

Gabriela: Do you remember any names?

Lynn: Oh, yeah. Giorgio Gonella. Patricio is a priest. He's a priest in Nicaragua. Maurizio, I don't remember his last name. He's Swiss. Giorgio and Patricio were Italian. Joe Barnett was in Nicaragua, so they already were working in Nicaragua.

And they were amazing. We all loved them. And, they would have these potluck dinners on Wednesday nights in their apartment, and that was one of the first times in that neighborhood…

I remember going there one night and there was a man there who I recognized, who was homeless. I would see him all the time when I took my daughter to school. And, you know, I say good morning. I still do that. I say good morning to people. So, I saw him [in the Little Brothers apartment] and I said, you know: “Hi”. And he said: “Hi”, or whatever.

And I said: “Well, how come you never say hi to me when I see you out there?” And he was like: “No. No. That's a whole different thing. You know, here we're friends and, you know, we're among friends.”

They used to run a shelter, Holy Name. There's a woman , Marta, she and her brothers came from El Salvador, and she was disguised as a man. And they were in the Holy Name shelter, and Giorgio said to me: “You know, we found out that one of this family, she's a woman.

She can't stay at the shelter. Can she stay with you?”

And I was like: “Yeah.” So, it was gonna be for, like, a day or 2. It ended up being for a few months and she lives in Queens now. We are still in touch. So, those were the kinds of things—these were the kinds of things that happened in the neighborhood, that I think happen everywhere. When people don't have a lot of resources, you share.

I got very involved with CHARAS, with Children's Liberation. Some of the people that work there became very good friends of mine. Maria Elena Barbosa, she's in Chile. She's from Chile. She moved back a long time ago. Gary Cruz, who lives upstairs, who's a filmmaker, he was the maintenance man. Pepe Flores, who has a space on Avenue C and Third Street, “La Sala de Pepe.”

He was a teacher at Children's Liberation. One of the other teachers… oh my god, her name is escaping me. It's not Iraida —Edna—she worked as a teacher there, and she works at the New York Foundation. So anyway, it was in many ways, a wonderful community.

Gabriela: So when you return and you become part of this committee, you know, on Cooper Square. And then there are these priests or brothers. So what at what point of their goals were, like: the Cooper Square Committee, no? Because when you left, they were organizing, I guess, like: in all these buildings. And what happened, you know, during that period that you returned?

Lynn: Like I said, there were lots of meetings. And there were things going on that Cooper Square was involved with.

For example, the Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union. That started then because it was a bank, a Manufacturers Hanover Trust Bank, and they said they were gonna close the branch. And a lot of people had accounts there.

And so what we found out was that people had accounts, but they didn't have a lot of money in them. And this was also during Apartheid, and that bank had roots in South Africa, so we made a big drama about it. And so, basically organized to force them to leave a certain amount of money in the bank.

They closed it down and was turned over to the credit union. I don't remember all the details, but so those were the kinds of things going on, like: “Oh, yeah. Okay. You wanna leave? Well, we‘ll just take your bank”. You know, it's that kind of thing. It was just incredible.

And so there were a lot of meetings. There were parties. There was always food. Across the street there was a social club where people would go out. You'd go across the street, go dancing with your neighbors.

Gabriela: You know? And at this time, I guess you continued in contact with Fran?

Lynn: Oh, yeah. She was always in the office; she was always calling to come do a mailing. You know? You'd go do a mailing because, of course, not like now. Right? No email - everything had to be mailed. So, you're having to stuff envelopes and put stamps and all of that. And she would always have some food that she made, and she would always look fabulous.

That was the other thing. It was like she was so militant, and she was just beautiful and elegant. You know? I mean, she was just amazing.

And Walter, you know - you'd be over there stuffing envelopes, and stuff.

It wasn't like a hierarchy. You know? In a lot of other organizations, you have like, the big people, the important people, or the directors, or the founders, or whatever. And it wasn't like that. Everybody was throwing down.

Gabriela: Walter Thabit was part of this plan. No? He was the one working with you all. No? How was that? How was that past experience?

Lynn: Well, Walter, I can't say. I didn't do any work with him around the plan. Right? I was very green. I was very young. So, I would do whatever, like answer phones or stuff envelopes, but you'd be at a table stuffing envelopes, for example, and Francis and Walter and whoever else was there.

And so the conversations were about the future of the neighborhood, were about what was just, about what the city was doing. So, there were constant conversations about strategy and planning - formal ones, informal ones. I remember I heard this story. I wasn't there, but I heard this story so many times and I loved it, so I can picture it. They were in a meeting with mayor Koch, and Frances was knitting, and she was clicking her knitting needles together.

And Koch was like: “Could you just stop that, Frances?” You know, that kind of thing. And so you could as a tenant, be involved with any of those things. You were welcomed to be involved in any of those things. And anything you wanted to find out, people would sit down and explain it to you.

It was very open, democratic, There was also a sense of these opposing forces and danger. There were people that were… Like this one guy that would come to meetings, and he had a cane and people said he had a bayonet in the bottom of the cane and he was, you know… So there were threatening flyers would go out. It was very intense because you're fighting over land and buildings. In a section of Manhattan between Midtown and Wall Street. It was prime real estate and NYU was moving east, and people were starting to move into what they were calling Alphabet City.

And so it was very - you know, there were buildings with completely open air drug dealing going on. There'd be a hole in the side of a building and a line like a soup kitchen, but it was to buy drugs. So, it was all of that happening.

So, there were a lot of forces and things were changing. And so the idea was that: “Well, we can make sure that it changes in a way that we benefit”. And so it was, I mean, it was liberating. You know? I don't think I would be the same person if I hadn't had that experience with Cooper Square, primarily, but also with the other organizations that I was involved with.

Gabriela: Yeah. And what are those organizations besides CHARAS?

Lynn: Well, Children's Liberation, we had a lot of activities. When Daniel Ortega came to the UN and his wife, who's now the vice president of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, received an award from Pen writers - in Children's Liberation, we babysat their children so he could go to the UN and she could go to get this award.

And, I mean, we were crying - well, he didn't come. She came. We were crying, and she was like: “We're at war, but I trust you with my children”. And we were just… everybody was crying. So these were the things that were happening then. They were really incredible.

Gabriela: And, well, you have all these connections with the Nicaragua people. So how did you decide to go there?

Lynn: The folks that I met in Florida were a Mexican woman and her husband was from the US, and he was a diesel mechanic and she had worked with cooperatives in Mexico. And they had gone down, I guess, like in ‘79 or ‘80. And the government was setting up for each department, which is like the equivalent of a state in the US,

agricultural mechanization schools, because the government there, they just fled. You know, landowners fled and left all their tractors.

And, you know, the majority of Nicaraguans were working with machetes or picking coffee or what have you, but not using - maybe one person, like, my father-in-law drove a tractor, but they needed to learn how to upkeep everything - change the oil, do all these kinds of things. So, they created an agricultural mechanization school in every state. And Fred and Carmen [Royce] were just telling everybody, like: “Go to Nicaragua, help, raise money. There's a war. You know, we have to defend this.”

And I was just like: “Yeah. I'm down with that.” I was you know—the fact that people without formal education could actually say: “This is the future that we want” was very powerful to me.

My grandfather, for example, went to the 3rd grade, but was very smart and had a very keen sense of history.

And so I wanted to help. And also was in a period where I was realizing that even though there were a lot of powerful things happening in the neighborhood, including at Cooper Square, it wasn't a mass uprising. You know, it wasn't the revolution, and nor did I think it was supposed to be, although I wish. Right?

We always wish that. And that was at a time when people still believed that we could have a revolution. Like, Oscar Lopez, you know, was arrested right when I think I was still pregnant with my daughter. There were people that believed that we could still change this government.

It's very different from today, for example. And so I wanted to experience and help in a place where people felt they had that much power and they had built that much power, and you need a lot of people to overthrow a dictatorship. And so I wanted to go.

Gabriela: Yeah. You mentioned your father-in-law referring to someone over there.

Lynn: My ex-husband's dad.

Gabriela: Did you meet someone over there?

Lynn: Well, Fred and Carmen, they were like: “you can come and stay at the school and the village nearby—Chaguitillo, they have a lot of plans, but they need help.” And I was like: “I need help. What are you talking about? What am I gonna do?” You know? And Fred kinda shamed me.

He says: “Look. You live in New York. There's all kinds of people that will pull out a checkbook and write a check.

And so you need to come to Chaguitillo, and document what’s happening and go back to New York, and get the money." I was on welfare, I was like “I can’t even get a subway token. Are you crazy?”

But he gave me a proposal that he had written for trucks and equipment for the school, and he was like: ”Just look. This is like a template. And you need to go. You need to learn. It's good for you. You need to be somewhere where there's actually a liberation movement that has won. You need to see it and—you know, stop whining, basically.”

So I stayed at the school, and every day, I would go to Chaguitillo. On the 1st day, Fred was like: “Okay, everybody's waiting for you. We're gonna introduce you.” I didn't speak any Spanish. And we were in this old Jeep that didn't have a windshield, and it started raining.

So, we had a roof but not a windshield. We got soaking wet and we got there, and it was in the grocery store. And, it was just people —people looking in the windows because there wasn't glass. It was just like an open thing. And I get out. I'm soaking wet. And I was really skinny when I was younger and had my daughter, like, on my hip.

And my father-in-law [later] told my kids this story. He said, look: “When your mom [first came], we're all waiting for her—she's gonna help us and we're gonna build a school and do all these things we wanna do, and we're waiting for this gringa. She's gonna really, you know, come and help us. Then we see Federico get out of the jeep, and then we see your mom. She looked like a skinny rat, like a cat or like a kitten— like, drowned. And we were like, where is the gringa?”

Then Fred introduced me, and then we were like: “Okay. This is the gringa we got. This is the gringa we're going with.” And so they made it their business, they were like okay! I'm sure they had so many doubts about whatever I could possibly do, but they wanted me to know what was up, so I could come back to New York and get them some help. Okay.

But they were—I mean, they weren't waiting until someone came to help them. They had architectural plans for this day care and pre-school. They had all these plans for different projects, but their most important project was to build a preschool, a day care and a preschool, and I was like: “So, we're so smart and sophisticated in the US, but we don't think about daycare as like a cornerstone of economic development.” And here I am —it was so powerful to be somewhere…

As a single mother who had a little kid who got welfare cut off, and was figuring it out and to be somewhere—where like, this whole village was mobilizing to have a daycare and a preschool. So many women there, they would work seasonally during the harvest and their pay—before the revolution, would go to their husband, not even to them. The women, and the kids, and all the money that they earned, would go to the man. Then when the women were working, in a lot of cases, the oldest girl would not go to school and stay home and take care of younger kids. And I mean, a 7 year old kid, 8 year old kid.

So they wanted to stop this reproduction of illiterate women.

They were, I mean, they were just so way, way, way, way, way ahead of how we think in this country about childcare. It was just amazing. I lived with a woman in Chaguitillo named Telma [Jiron] Her husband had been killed by the contras. So, we slept in the same bed, and my daughter slept in the bed with her kids.

She was in the Socialist party. That village had a representative in the National Assembly under Somoza who was a member of the Socialist party, Domingo Sanchez. And he would advise them on how to get stuff done. They formed a non-profit very early so that they had legal status, and they could get their own funding. And so it was just amazing.

Before I went to live there, I went with Oxfam for a couple weeks.

Gabriela: Because what I understand is that after the revolution, there were all these ministries that were formed.

Lynn: Yeah.

Gabriela: One especially for women. Things were changing radically, and as you said, other countries were looking at Nicaragua as an example, what they were doing from below. You know? So, I imagine that should have had an amazing experience, but also kind of scary for you, coming from a completely different environment and you're not speaking the language. So how were you perceived, as an American, not speaking the language, and how did you navigate?

Lynn: Well, even though there was a war, it felt much safer in a lot of ways because there was kids—there were all these child abductions [in the U.S.]

Before I went to Nicaragua, there was a very famous case, Etan Patz, and he just disappeared. And, you know, that was not happening there. In this village, 2 year olds could go to the store with a little piece of money and say: “¿Hay pan?” [laughs] and buy bread.

Yeah. You know, there was a lot of safety in this village, and people were working really hard to make things safer for themselves. You know? And, you know, at some point, we had to do it. I didn't participate in this, but people did guard duty all night. So, I'm not saying it was easy. My daughter learned Spanish really fast. We did a survey. We had to do this door to door survey to document,

how many people lived there, how many kids, what kind of work the dad and the mom did - to document the need for the daycare, and the preschool. My daughter was going around saying: “Dice mi mama”, and then she would translate. But I think having a child made it easier - faster for people to accept me. A lot of the internacionalistas didn't have kids. And also, they [Nicaraguans] had this idea in their mind of what gringas look like—blonde hair, you know, different— and I didn't look like that. So, a lot of people would ask me if I was from Brazil because I had brown hair. I had very long hair. And Brazil, who knows why?

People made it their business to help me learn Spanish. I mean, people were dropping by Telma’s…

She used to sew at night, and she was one of the only people that had a refrigerator, at that time. She would make bags of ice and sell hielo [ice]. She knew how to give [vaccine] shots. So, people were always coming to her house for different things. I would just hang out with her, and I had this book, [of Spanish verbs] and I was trying to learn things and she would help me. And they were just like, “We better get with this one, because this is the one we got.”

Gabriela: So, how long were you in Nicaragua? And what was your main task, because you were sent over there somehow or asked to go there to kinda report back and find some help for the development of this plan.

Lynn: So my main thing…. Their priority was to build a daycare and a preschool. Okay. So, that's what I worked on. We had to document the need for it, so we did that.

I did surveys. I took slides. I took photos. I was there for like 3 months, and then I came back. And I had sublet my apartment [at Cooper Square]. I made slideshows [to raise funds]. I did a slide show [presentation] for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

So, Cooper Square people were helping me too. And Chino Garcia [from CHARAS] would go with me to do these presentations. JuanMa Morales, you know him? He has a band. He's a musician, Sonido Costeño. You probably know his wife, Maria Dominguez. She's a muralist.

Gabriela: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Lynn: So JuanMa, at the time, he was a musician, and we were all friends, and he was an engineer, I think at NBC. So, we made a cassette tape and we made a little beep when it was time to advance to the next slide.

Gabriela: Yeah.

Lynn: We'd send it to people. I didn't know what I was doing, but people were helping me and telling me, like: “you should do this, and you should do that”, and then I would do it. Then after several months, I went back. I raised some money, but they were busy. They raised their own money.

I lived there, and we had to hire women. There were 5 barrios [In Chagüitillo] at that time. And we had to hire young woman who would be enrolled in the Ministry of Education, receiving training and studying to be a teacher. We had to hire one from each barrio to make sure that people would send their kids, because school didn't start there until you were 7 years old.

So, even though kids were running around buying pan, and all this stuff, it was also like: “we're not gonna just give you our kids. We don't know you.” So, there was some suspicion about that. And we interviewed and hired a young woman from each of the barrios to be a teacher. She would end up bringing a lot of the kids from her neighborhood. And, again, the village was small at that time. When we did the survey, there were a little over 1200 people, but half were under age 7. So there were a lot of kids, and it was a very small village, and it's an indigenous community.

Gabriela: But this educational program was something coming from the community. It was not something American.

Lynn: No. No. No.

Gabriela: There were some funders, philanthropists, I guess, donating funds, but it was really created for, and by the people.

Lynn: Right. They created this, La Asociación para el Desarrollo de Chagüitillo.

Gabriela: Excellent.

Lynn: And the president, Carmen Davila, she was a teacher. Everyone called her La Maestra. La Maestra Carmen. It was members of the Agricultural Cooperative, Carmen… They were on the junta directiva of the Asociación. And their main project—their priority was the school, but it was them. It was all them. And I went there working for them. One, I didn't know anything, but I knew I didn't know anything. We don't always know that we don't know anything - but they were amazing. I mean, they were organizing during the insurrection. The agricultural cooperative in Chagüitillo was founded before the victory of the revolution.

My father-in-law was the president of the cooperative. So again, lucky me, I met the most amazing people the first minute that I got there. So they were very, very clear. And the Ministry of Education in Nicaragua were producing all kinds of new curriculum. But we had to make the furniture - the parents. You know, parents that had carpentry skills. There was a little carpentry shop. People made their own furniture. So, parents made the furniture.

We had these tamarind seeds. You could shake them and they're like a maraca. And we used bottle caps to count, and we made all of these pedagogical materials. Marta Gallardo, one of the teachers, became the principal of the elementary school. She's still the principal of the elementary school in Chagüitillo.

And the girls that went through that, some of them are still teachers. And so, it was just amazing. I mean, I could go on and on, but there our whole interview would be about that. No.

Gabriela: Okay. So you are there for a couple of months. Well, a few months.

Lynn: And then I came back. Then I went back.

Gabriela: And you went back, okay, to Nicaragua.

Lynn: Yeah. And I I stayed there, I guess, 2 more years. I came back in December of 1988 I mean, 87. I got married there. My ex-husband, he was in the military, and then he was a member of the agricultural cooperative. A lot of his family were members and involved and yeah—I had health issues there. I had 2 miscarriages. And so, I wanted him to meet my mom.

It was very hard for him to get a visa. Then we came up here, I went to the doctor because I was concerned. You know, I was always really healthy. I had miscarriages. It was really scary. You know, it was during the war.

One time I went to the hospital, and they had the Contras had bombed the source of electric power and the hospital didn't have electricity, and they were boiling, on the side of the hill to the hospital—with big vats, to boil the sheets and they had to give me general anesthesia with this cow—like a veterinarian needle. And then they told my ex-husband: “She needs blood so you can go around and ask people if they can donate, but get her out of here because there's a lot of infections”.

And we had construction brigades coming to help build the school, and I dealt with a lot of that. A lot of the work I did was around organizing these construction brigades and finding families in the village where they could stay , and were doing things that aligned with their interests.

Gabriela: Yeah, because you decided it's time to go home. It's time to return.

Lynn: Well, we came. I wanted him to meet my mom. I mean, [the miscarriages] scared the shit out of me. And so we came, of course, with Rocio and we went to the doctor and they said I was pregnant with my son, Camilo. So I was like: “Oh my god.” And so… he didn't wanna stay. I didn't wanna stay. But we decided to stay because I could have lost the baby again if I went back.

But the idea was we would always go back. I had sublet my [Cooper Square] apartment to my friend, Maria Elena. So she was living there. And…

Gabriela: Where was this apartment? You're still in?

Lynn: On 4th Street.

Gabriela: Cooper Square.

Lynn: I always thought I would go back, but we stayed in Florida [with my mom]. I didn't want to. I mean, I was grateful that my mom was there. I was happy to be around her again. I couldn't even call her on the phone, you know.

In Chagüitillo, there was a little casita with a phone, but you would go - and I remember the lady that was the phone lady, the operator, Alicia. You'd go there, and she always had her daughter with her. They looked so much alike. Then she would pick up [the phone] and she'd say: “No hay línea”. So, then you could hitchhike to the next town, but it was very hard to make phone calls.

Just everything was very labor intensive, and took a lot. Everything took a lot of time, and wasn't always a sure thing. So I was happy to be there [with my mom].

Gabriela: And after being in Florida, when did you return to New York? And did you return to Cooper Square? Or…

Lynn: So, I came back [to New York] in October of 1998. I was kind of forced to give up my apartment at Cooper Square. My friend, Maria Elena, had returned to Chile because her mom was sick. And at that time, I don't know if you had to come back every year if you're a resident, but she didn't come back fast enough, so she lost that. Her boyfriend was living in the apartment, but in the meantime, he got in another relationship.

So, they petitioned to have the apartment, and I wasn't in a position to come back. I didn't wanna give it up, but also, it was like, “Well, you're not here and these other people are here, living there.” And I just felt like it was the right thing to do.

I wasn't in a position where I could say when I was coming back, so it was the right thing to do. [coughs in the background] It's alright. There's some ginger honey in the freezer too. I mean, the fridge. I'll keep answering the question.

So, when I was in Florida, I was working with folks who were homeless. That was when some money had come down from the federal government to do outreach.

The money came down because people with the National Coalition For the Homeless, Mitch Snyder… There was a movement with all the Reagan cuts in the early eighties. They cut the HUD budget by over 70%, and that really is what brought on this contemporary mass homelessness. So, there was a job to do street outreach.

I got hired to do mental health case management, even though I had zero experience in that, and I was pregnant. They basically said, “We'll hire anyone with a bachelor's and a pulse”. But then when I worked there, the supervisor says, “Listen. We're gonna start this new program doing street outreach with folks who are homeless, and you would love it.”

When I came back from Nicaragua and started working in mental

health and then homelessness, mental illness and all of these things, to me—it was like an expression of the harm of capitalism. I really saw it like that. It wasn't like: “oh, all these people are mentally ill, that's why they're homeless”. It was like: “No. There's all these poor people that can't afford housing”. We could barely afford our own apartment. My mom was living in a horrible house.

When you sat on the toilet, it would rock like the floor was gonna break, you know? So, I was like: “What the hell, you know?” So really, to me—homelessness was always about extreme poverty and policy decisions and a lack of funding for housing for poor people. And so, anyway, I did that. I was a founder of the Jacksonville [Emergency Services and] Homeless Coalition. It basically had a longer name...

And the Florida Coalition For the Homeless. I became involved with the National Coalition For the Homeless because they were mobilizing people to go to DC in ‘89, to the Housing Now! march. And I was like: “Count on me. You know, this is great. These people are driving me crazy!”

So, I came back [to New York] in ‘98. I couldn't move to Cooper Square. I didn't have an apartment there anymore, and the neighborhood was insanely expensive. I couldn't move back to the Lower East Side. I mean, there was just no way. I had a job because I couldn't have moved back without a job, and I had gotten my kids in good schools. But I just couldn't afford an apartment, in the Lower East Side, [they] were thousands of dollars. And now, of course, it's much more. So, I moved to Brooklyn.

Gabriela: Wow.

Lynn: But my kids' school was on the Lower East Side, and it was just really hard. You know, it's hard to be a single parent. My ex-husband and I separated and got divorced, and we were married for a long time and that was all really hard. I wanted my kids to not only live in that very conservative Baptist overtly racist place, but it was hard. I guess I lived in Brooklyn for 2 years. And my friend, Fernando, who lives across the hall from me now, moved across the hall and came and got me. This floor and the upstairs of this building were vacant and unlivable. Holes in the floors, holes in the walls.

The building was owned by the city, but the tenants had been in the process of becoming an HDFC. They weren't in the TIL program, though. And they just got - all kinds of drama that you can imagine, happened. So, they offered to Fernando, who's a plumber and electrician, and he could do everything. They said: “Do all this. And you can rent this apartment and, help us find other people that wanna work and make a co-op”. So, Fernando comes to me and says: “You're gonna be my neighbor.”

And I'm like: “Where?” [laughs] And so there's 10 apartments in this building, but 5 were vacant. And so we filled them up with people from the Lower East Side, and then we were fighting just all kinds of craziness. And I met folks [the co-founders] from Picture the Homeless.

I came in October of ‘98, and Anthony Williams and Lewis Hagans founded Picture the Homeless in November of ‘99. So, of course, among my best friends, Valerio [Orselli], Chino [Garcia], reconnecting with friends, and then I met Anthony and Lewis at CHARAS. They had their first [Picture the Homeless community] meeting there. Chino asked them, “I have a friend who's really interested in this. Can I invite her?”

And they were like: “Yeah.”. So, I went with my son. He was 11. There was hardly anybody there. We had this big room with all these chairs set up. But they were wonderful. I mean, Lewis was saying —one guy was complaining about his caseworker, and Lewis said something to him like:

“Well, my brother, I feel for you, and we could talk about this later, but this is about changing the system. We wanna change the system.” And that just got me. You know? I said: “Well, what can I do?” And they came over for dinner. I still lived in Brooklyn then, and my kids were like: “They're homeless mom.” I know. And you know, they were volunteers. I was a volunteer, and I'm talking to people, I'm telling them about Cooper Square.

I was always telling Anthony and Lewis about Cooper Square because one of the things that they were saying was how much the city was paying for them to be in the shelter. They were in Bellevue men's shelter on cots, right? So, it's not like you have your own room. And the city's paying $2,000 a month for each of them at that time. Now, it's much higher.

And they were like: “You know, if we go to welfare, they'll give us $215 for a housing allowance, but they'll pay 2,000 for us to be in a shelter”. There were a lot of protests at the time. Giuliani was mayor. The Esperanza Garden, they got involved with that. They hooked up with gardeners, who wanted to stop luxury housing development. They hooked up with Dave Powell, he was at Met Council [on Housing] at the time, and they got, I won't say involved with Cooper Square, but they had meetings that made them say: “Oh, okay. So it is actually possible. You know, there are models.”

They were looking for solutions. They were looking for answers. And you know, Anthony especially got involved in squatting, and so Cooper Square always kind of played a supportive role with Picture the Homeless.

I remember we had a party here [in my apartment], I guess in 2005 or 2006, and we had counted vacant buildings in East Harlem. We didn't do a report or anything like that. We were always talking about vacant buildings. I remember I had a couch in there, because this was my bedroom and that was my son's room back there. So, I had a couch there and that was the living room. And Valerio was sitting in between Nikita Price and another member, Roosevelt Orphee, and they were like: “vacant buildings!” and Valerio was like: “that's not an issue like it used to be”.

And they were like: “what are you talking about? They're everywhere”. But the reason it's not an issue [like it used to be] is the city doesn't own them. A lot of these owners of vacant buildings, they're paying the taxes. So, the city is not taking them over, like in the seventies. They're paying their taxes. They've got them boarded up or cemented up properly. So, they're legal.

It's legal to keep a building vacant for decades. So, our folks were like: “Well, I get arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk, but it's legal for them to do that so they can make money.” Our folks are just horrified by that. I remember we took a whole crew to Frances's apartment, like about 18 Picture The Homeless members. And here's Frances— they're all kinda like: “who's this old white lady?” I'm like: “Wait for it”. You know? And then she's like: “Why aren't you taking buildings over? What's the deal?” You know? And so they're like: “Woah.”

I think Cooper Square was a huge help, because it was an example of a solution. And maybe not exactly to be replicated, but that there are other ways to do housing, and that's not what you hear.

And there was no, NYCCLI [New York City Community Land Initiative], there was no - really no other CLTs. And, you know, one of the things that Frances said to me many times was “we don't do a good enough story, a good enough job of getting the story out there so that people know about us.”

Gabriela: Yeah. I didn't know about this connection, for instance.

Lynn: Yeah. I'm not saying this to take credit, but to illustrate how movements kind of grow. Because I was involved with Cooper Square and knew about the CLT, I was able to introduce it to Picture The Homeless as: “Here's something to look at”. Because people were looking for answers. They're coming to housing campaign meetings talking about the city spending thousands of dollars a month for them to be in a shelter, and there's all these vacant buildings and what's up?

You know, how can we put these things together? And Cooper Square was always available to come to meetings, or to have our folks go down there to go on tours. It was Valerio [Orselli] and Ken Wray from CATCH and Harry DiRienzo [Banana Kelly] that worked with the housing campaign at Picture the Homeless to come up with Gaining Ground - with that proposal, to really scale up this whole question of using economies of scale and bundling buildings to make housing affordable, and moving money from shelter to housing. We have to have models that people can see, that show us, that teach us that things don't have to be the way that we are kind of brainwashed to think they have to be. And so I think, you know, that for me is was a through line in my own life.

Moving to New York, seeing how people are doing things to resist, to make things better for themselves and other people. And housing plays a crucial role. Housing and land are one of the most fundamental things to make our lives good. You know, we all wanna have a roof over our head. We all want to have security.

And so this whole question, which is also super interesting about home ownership, being a shareholder or being a renter, and the role of land trusts, I think we are all still working through these things because it's really different. It's different from capitalism. You know? It's a very different model.

I mean, we have buildings all over the city, especially Manhattan, where you have storefronts. Well, the landlord is going to charge rent to the [residential] tenants and rent to the commercial tenants and not necessarily use the rent from the commercial tenants to keep the residential rents low. But that is a model that can work in a lot of neighborhoods. So, these are things, I think, that were very important, not just that the model was there, but that folks at Cooper Square really wanted to spread the story and to help and would come up to East Harlem when we were doing all these meetings in Taino Towers about the [East Harlem/El Barrio] land trust, way from the beginning.

We would have Cooper Square tenants come. Valerio and would and Jasmin and Willie Arroyo, they would come up here and they would just answer whatever questions.

It was very powerful because they weren't—they didn’t just talk about it. They actually did it. That was very important.

Gabriela: So, in relation to Cooper Square, and I know that since the very beginning when, Picture the Homeless started doing the vacancy counts and the recommendations, Community Land Trusts were always there. No? That's one of the solutions. I know that many of the folks of Picture the Homeless continued with this path, and eventually created a second community land trust, no? If you can talk a little bit about that process.

Lynn: Yeah. So, we didn't want to just count vacant buildings to count them… or vacant lots. We were being told it wasn't an issue, and it wasn't important. Really, no one else in the housing movement was agreeing with us. It was like: “Nah. You know, you can't really do anything. They're legal. You know, what are you gonna do?”

And so our folks were, saying things like: “Well, slavery was legal.” You know, like: “Unjust laws are made to be broken” and, you know, quoting Dr. King and just not accepting this. And so when we did the Manhattan count, it was very powerful that Scott Stringer dedicated his whole 60 person staff. Jumaane Williams was ED of Tenants and Neighbors. We mobilized hundreds of people, and it sparked the imagination.

People said: “What? You know? “How many are there? Well, that ain't right”. And I remember, we sent all these Freedom of Information requests to 17 different city agencies, and we were getting back the ones that gave us information back. Some were blocks and lot numbers. Some were physical addresses. You couldn't really correlate the data.

And I remember I was having dinner with Peter Marcuse, and I was telling him: “Look, these are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands”. And he said to me—because, you know, Peter and David Harvey and Tom Angotti, you know, Walter way back—here are radical urban planners, but there are also things that are laws and policies. So, they were kinda digging what we were saying, and I think really loving the fact that people without housing were saying these things way early on, not that early… But maybe, like in 2008 or 2009, Rob Robinson and Peter Marcuse and I and one other person, I don't remember who, were on a panel and these things made so much sense to us. So they were those kind of activist intellectuals and planners—those kind of people were very supportive.

So, I remember having dinner with Peter and he said: “Does Tom know about this? Does Tom know about how many?” And I said: “Well, no.” I said: “We're always talking to you guys about this! What are you talking about?” And he says: “No. But now you got this. So talk to Tom”. And I called Tom the next day and it was in December. I don't remember what year, maybe, like: 2000… I don't remember what year. Maybe 2010 or 2011. I mean, I could find out in the archive, I won't pretend I can remember everything. And I was like: “Peter said I have to tell you this.”

And so Tom was going to Venezuela. He was going on break with his wife, and he says: “Well, that is really different from the city data. So… it's gonna cost this much for me to actually hire a graduate student [Angela Tovar] to do this, and we need to get the Pluto data”, which we didn't know what we needed to get, so it was great.

He came up with a little budget, and I raised the money for it, because that was one of my functions at Picture the Homeless. So, it was very exciting.

And we did the Banking on Vacancy, the citywide count. And Angela Tovar, who was the graduate assistant, is now like, the Climate Change officer [Chief Sustainability Officer] for the city of Chicago. She was so amazing and so smart and wonderful to work with and it was wonderful to work with people that actually respect the knowledge - even though they may be the professional with the degree - but wanting to really honor the knowledge and the labor of folks without housing to come up with solutions to the housing crisis. That was very, very powerful for us. But I think it was also very powerful for them. And I remember we gave Frances an award.

Maybe in 2015, and she stood up there - she was kind of frail, so we helped her walk up to the podium. And she's like: “One person, you're just 1, But together, we're a fist”. You know? And she's like, shaking her fist. And people are like: “Holy cow. That lady has fire in her belly”.

People that didn't know her. So, they were always a big part of the work that we were doing and really excited about East Harlem and just endlessly supportive. I remember people from Grounded Solutions, they were giving us TA [technical assistance], and they were like: “well, how are you gonna raise the money to get these buildings?” And I said: “No, we are gonna organize and they're gonna give us these buildings. The city owns these buildings, they could give them to us. They still sell for a dollar buildings and lots. I mean, they do this all the time”.

And the Grounded Solutions people were like: “They're not gonna do that. That's not gonna happen.” And one of them had worked at Dudley Street. And I said: “Well, y'all do that at Dudley Street.” And we went to Cooper Square. And I was like: “just go talk to them, don't—you don't believe me.”

I felt like it was a little misogynist also, these 2 guys, and they were like: “What do you know?” I was like: “No. You need to go talk to the people that—they've done it, and we are gonna do it too.” And we did. Well, they had to buy the buildings for a dollar. But we were having meetings with them, and it was very helpful that Valerio was involved with us with HPD, because they knew him. I remember he told me to talk to someone in the Division of Alternate Management - that now is the division of asset management. Yeah. And the guy was like: “I don't what are you talking about.”

Like: “MHA and CLT. I don't know what you're talking about." And I said: “Well, I don't know. I mean, I [was told to call you by] Valerio Orselli." [And he went:] “Orselli, that thing? That's what you'd wanna do?” And so this guy in HPD, at DAMP—“Orselli” was the term he used for CLTs! I was like: “Oh my god.” And it was important that he was there. It was important that Harry and Ken were there, because they were developers. And they all had track records. Of course, we had no track record. And then they're like: “Picture The Homeless. What do you know about housing?” We were like: “Well, we're gonna figure it out.” You know? So, that you know, to have the support of those 3, in particular was amazing. So, we were at the founding - we called what became the founding meeting of NYCCLI [New York City Community Land Initiative] with Tom and Peter and John Krinsky. And Valerio came.

He was like: “What is this?” So, I was like: “I don't know, but we're gonna make it something. We're gonna make it something.” Dave Powell was there, Ken Wray from CATCH, Pat Swann from the New York Community Trust, who we were on a call with. She was there.

Gabriela: When was this?

Lynn: 2011. 2011? 2011. Then we formed a policy work group, and we were like: “we can't do this without organizing”. We said, “We'll start in East Harlem” because Community Board 11 had already commissioned a report by Regional Planning Association, RPA, about the loss of rent stabilized housing in East Harlem projecting into the future, and called for a Community Land Trust. So, Community Board 11 knew.

George Sarkissian was the director of Community Board 11 then. So, he had familiarity with it. Melissa Mark Viverito was our council person. She became more conservative when she became speaker, but she was very supportive at first. There were some CLTS in Puerto Rico… Something Peña… [Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust]. I feel so bad. Martin Peña. I oh, I'm massacring the name. Yeah. But she knew about them.

But a bunch of them came up here and we met. They came up to some kind of funder meeting, and it was the weekend of the Puerto Rican Festival in East Harlem, so there was nowhere to go that you could talk, because it was a festival.

So, we came up here because it was a festival, and it was amazing and fun. So, we came up here. I have pictures of Rosa Custodio, who's still on the board of the East Harlem Barrio Land Trust. We were here with them. And so, you know, we had support because I do think that people want solutions. You know? People want that.

Gabriela: But talking about this group, Picture The Homeless, who were working with you since the very beginning, and organizing the vacancy counts and everything, how many of them were able to get housing from this CLT of El Barrio?
 
Lynn: Well, no one. Picture The Homeless members didn't get housing. Because you have to go through the lottery.

Gabriela: The lottery. So, there was not any agreement?

Lynn: No. They had to go through the lottery. [Housing Connect] It was the same thing not long ago.

Well, maybe 2 years ago, Dave Powell called me because they had a vacancy at Cooper Square and he was like: “I would love to take someone who is unhoused, but I need all that paperwork. It has to come through the lottery”. And I called Arvernetta Henry who was a member of Picture of the Homeless, a leader of the housing campaign, and really, really, really loved the CLT model and had built her own relationships with folks at Cooper Square.

We met [what became the East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust] at Community Board 11 for two and a half years every week, and she was there and staying in a shelter and, you know, with family - and she was always there. And I was like: “Dave, if there's anybody, let's see if Arvernetta could move in there”. But she would have had to go back in the shelter system, and at that time, she was staying with family [caring for her elderly father], I think.

Gabriela: Yeah. I'm asking this question because it is really unfortunate, no? Like many of these groups are doing so much. You know? And now how many CLTs groups are better?

Lynn: A lot.

Gabriela: More than 12.

Lynn: It's fantastic.

Gabriela: More, but we have, like, these issues. You know? Instead of, I don't know, promoting the groups that are forming as they are doing, these laws are kind of not working. They're working against them.

Lynn: You know? You know, I think you…

Gabriela: You see that?

Lynn: I think these laws, like the lottery, are set up in many ways to prevent discrimination, and so that's a good thing. I mean, you know, otherwise, there's a lot of nepotism and patronage and: “Oh, you're my cousin. Imma get you an apartment”, that kind of thing or whatever, which isn't necessarily good or bad.

But I think the housing lottery, because public funds are used, so it's set up to be fair. You know how many people applied for Section 8? It was in the paper. The Section 8 lottery opened up again, in early June, and tens of thousands of people applied. When Cooper Square has vacancies, you know, there's just so many people that need housing. Yeah. And so I guess it's a fair way to do it.

But on the other side of that, you can say because people can come from anywhere. Even the challenge for local residents to get preference… that's been challenged as a violation of fair housing. And so I think that if you have people in a community and something is coming from the community and it's a community effort, and there are people who are at risk or doubled up or homeless from that community.

Yeah, I could totally make the argument that Picture the Homeless members should get that housing. Without Picture the Homeless, there would not be an East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust. The New Economy Project was also very instrumental in the formation of NYCCLI. They had done a planning studio with Peter in this parallel universe kind of way. Different people or different organizations can have the same great idea at the same time. So, they were already also looking at that. And so, to give them tons of credit because they've done tons of work and they've carried a lot of the water for everyone, and they had the capacity to do it, but that doesn't mean they had to do it. Right? So they just deserve tons of credit.

But in the beginning, you know, we really wanted housing for Picture The Homeless. We wanted that to create housing for people who are not only homeless, but extremely low income, below 30% of AMI. And when you say that, you can't say below 30% because then people will do 29% of AMI. You have to say, we will need “these many units at 5 percent, these many units at 10%” to force the developers - and to force the financing to go to the developers to make that happen, and we don't have that.

So, it was in many ways, I think it was heartbreaking, but Picture The Homeless members weren't only doing that work to get an apartment for themselves. They were doing it because they care about the city, and they care about their neighborhoods that they come from.

And so to me, that is one of the most beautiful things, not just about Picture the Homeless, but about organizing. When we're organizing, we're not just trying to get something for ourselves. We're trying to get something for our community, or for our city. And that really to me is like the basis of democracy. And it's very, very beautiful.

We don't necessarily think of people that are in such tremendous daily need, but in many ways, I think those are the people that are gonna make it happen. Because if you look at places where there's been a revolution like Nicaragua… Nicaragua still, I think, to this day is the 2nd poorest country after Haiti, in the Western Hemisphere. You know, there was a Haitian revolution. So, it's not like: “Oh, they're so poor they can't organize”. Maybe they're gonna organize because they are experiencing those conditions, and they're fed up.

And so it was tremendous, tremendous leadership from Picture the Homeless members.

Gabriela: That is really beautiful. And, yeah, as you are saying this, I know that many of those folks continue organizing, no? And just like one of my last questions for you, besides being a tenant at Cooper Square and contributing in all these different meetings as an organizer… were you part of the board at a certain point?

Lynn: Yeah. I was. But I can't take any credit for any kind of organizing when I was a tenant. I feel like I was so green, and I'm just grateful that folks invited me at all. I mean, I guess as organizers, that's what they would do. Yeah. But I just don’t feel like I can't claim much of a contribution. But I was on the Cooper Square CLT board

and a member of the MHA board as a CLT representative. When Picture The Homeless was in the Bronx, it was probably 2010… 2011… 2014. I can't remember when I got off the board, but it was for several years. And our office was way up in the Bronx, and so it took a long time to get downtown. But I really would do pretty much anything that Cooper Square asked.

I feel very indebted and grateful for everything that I got out of being a part of Cooper Square, and that I still continue to benefit from. So, I would go to the meetings. I knew a bunch of the people. I didn't know everybody.

And it was during this time that there was a lot of tension between some MHA members and the CLT. One of the reasons I think - and we talked about this then, was about the need to educate the residents of Cooper Square about this history of struggle so that people hopefully will understand that the CLT, as stewards of the land that the buildings are on, is there to protect everybody's interest, but it's not there to allow people to financially benefit by selling their apartments.

I'm not saying that everybody that had issues with the CLT wanted to just sell their apartment. I'm not saying that. People can have all kinds of reasons to disagree with something.

But there also was that. And Valerio was the director of the MHA. And he was doing all the CLT work, which is really like a whole separate other job. And I think that they hadn't acquired, you know, any new land or anything like that for a long time. I mean, of course, that's not a critique.

I mean, just getting the CLT up and running and the MHA and it was just a huge amount of work. But there were some of us on the CLT board that thought we needed to expand. There was the fight with the Church of the Nativity, that the Diocese was gonna sell for luxury housing and that was Dorothy Day's church and so there was organizing around that. Not everyone on the CLT was of the same opinion.

And the two buildings. There were 2 buildings. HPD called Valerio and was like: “we have these troubled HDFCs. Could you all take them and help them?”. So, the relationships that he built over time with HPD, I think, are just really invaluable. But there was tension, like: “do we take on these buildings?” And meanwhile, there was a lot of drama with MHA residents and the CLT and some MHA residents saying: “We should get rid of the CLT” And you know there was infighting, which, you know, it's like a little town.

Cooper Square is like a little town. I mean, I was on the MHA board, and there were people that had been there since I lived there in the early ‘80s, you know, and where I have gray hair now, and we were almost girls then.

And then there were a bunch of new people that got it through the lottery. They didn't know about it and some of them didn't seem to really value the CLT and the role and just felt like it somehow limited them. I think that the CLT board… I think Valerio was working… I can't even imagine how many hours a week, for how many years, and then you get a more engaged board.

And so then it's like: “what about this and what about that and what about this?” And that was challenging. [Valerio] would give very exhaustive detailed reports. We worked on a project to get funding from HPD from Enterprise Foundation, and we had to do it with HPD.

Part of that included training and hiring Cooper Square residents to be ambassadors because there's a lot of failing HDFCs in the Lower East Side to go and say: “Hey. Well, you could incorporate and consolidate.” There were CLT board members that felt like we had our hands full dealing with tension with current residents, so we shouldn't expand. But those failing HDFCs, those opportunities, they don't last forever. So some of us, I was one of those people that felt like, you know: “We shouldn't focus all our energy on expanding. But if there are opportunities, we should seize them”.

And so that was some of the disagreement that I remember on the board that was very difficult. I think that's why some of the work that This Land is Ours is doing

is picking up the work that some of us as board members on the Cooper Square CLT felt like we should have been doing, like the vacant lots, the parking lot on Sixth Street. We don't need parking lots on Sixth Street. You know? We need housing. So, I think that that was a fundamental difference. And there were no paid staff. The CLT had no paid staff. Valerio wasn't paid to staff the CLT. And then he resigned, and Ryan Hickey was hired, who was the housing organizer at Picture the Homeless.

So, he was hired as staff for the Cooper Square CLT for some time. And you know, those are also questions about funding.

Gabriela: Yeah.

Lynn: You know? If you're gonna have staff

or if you're not gonna have staff, then is the board gonna be able to do all these things? Not because people don't have those skills, although that is a thing, but also time. It's a lot. It is a whole lot.

Gabriela: I heard through other interviews that those two buildings are up and running, and they are going to be transferred to the CLT. So yeah.

Lynn: That's great.

Gabriela: It is expanding.

Lynn: There were a lot of questions about that when I was on the board. But, you know, there should be questions also. Everybody is not gonna agree on everything, and it is important that if you have a position to be able to back it up and to hash it out and then you come to a resolution. Those things are important, and sometimes they turn into personal fights when really they're not.

They're more like policy questions that we have to be able to grapple with. So, I'm glad [about] those 2 buildings. The other thing is, I think about the Cooper Square CLT and the other CLTs that we have as really embodying a lot of collective knowledge, and collective memory.

And we need to grow this movement. We have to grow it. And we have to make sure that people can work together and that they want to see the value in that even when it's hard and even when it's a pain in the ass because I think of how many units are there totally in New York City on CLT land? It's just a couple hundred, and we need a whole lot more than that. And so, the people that have been doing the CLT work are the ones that are going to grow the movement.

So, this project is really valuable for that as well so that people can hear these stories, like: “how did that happen?” Because I don't see a lot of the CLTs… and maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a lot of actions. I don't see a lot of actions and in my opinion, we're not gonna get concessions from the city without action. And the city has the power to give CLTs [property that the city owns]. I mean, I'm really happy there's a Community Land Trust Act, but they should do that anyway.

They should be doing that anyway. They should turn over the property that they own, at least land bank it to see if there's a Community Land Trust in that area that wants to take it on—and that's not happening. It's great we have that Act, and that people are organizing for it, but I feel like we need a lot more militant action beyond press conferences.

And one thing I learned with East Harlem, I was doing consulting, training—organizing trainings with members. The tenants that were there, they were already in the buildings. They had a really kind of different interpretation of their own self-interest, than people that needed the housing. And by that, I mean, they've been jerked around so much by the city. They would come to meetings with a letter from, like 1983 saying: “They promised me my apartment decades ago.” And so people wanted to be secure in their homes and [they were] fighting for a much lower AMI.

For example, fighting for when we got money from the state, $500,000 for the East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust—the city wanted to take money away from us because we got that money. They didn't even want it to go to organizing. They wanted it all to go to rehab. And Harry really backed us up and was like: “this isn't gonna happen without the organizing.” And Picture the Homeless is doing the organizing, but they need resources. So, I'm really glad that this project is happening, and I hope that people pay attention to not just what's wonderful about Cooper Square, but all of the struggles that got us to the point where there is a wonderful Cooper Square, and training tenants on organizing. People are secure there [East Harlem/El Barrio CLT tenants], so when we're secure, we're not always gonna put ourselves on the front lines.

Gabriela: Seeing like all these efforts now, we are talking about decades of work and organizing. What would you say to the new generations that are living in Cooper Square, for instance? Because there is like this desire for organizers or transferring the knowledge to the new generations. But that can be challenging, no?

Lynn: Yeah. I'm so glad you asked that because when I was on the Cooper Square CLT board and I was on the MHA as a CLT rep… Because of the lottery, you have people that are getting apartments at Cooper Square or that will in East Harlem or wherever, that have no idea about the struggle for you to be able to have this beautifully renovated apartment in this beautiful neighborhood that you can afford. And so, we have to share these stories.

There's no litmus test. So you could, you know, vote for Trump and get an apartment at Cooper Square. There's no political litmus test. But you can appreciate the effort that went into it, and you could learn. That’s one of the things that's so powerful about the story of Cooper Square - are all the actions that were done. That's what gets people to the negotiating table with you, because they know if they don't talk to you, you're gonna go disrupt some shit and they don't wanna deal with that, so then they're gonna talk to you. That's the lesson from every social movement! So, I think that that history of struggle - it wasn't just meetings that made the CLT and the MHA happen. It was this visionary planning combined with direct action and organizing.

And those lessons, we learned those at Picture the Homeless. Those surveys that we did, the counts, Walter, you know, they did that at Cooper Square in the early sixties. And we learned those lessons, not just from them, but certainly they were among our teachers. And so I think what I would say to people at Cooper Square now is:

“I'm glad you have your home. I'm glad that it's deeply affordable, and I hope you're really happy. But what are the other things that we need to change so that we can apply the lessons from Cooper Square to those things? It doesn't just have to be about housing. It could be about education. It could be about health care.”

But what I would also say is: “Just like you have this really nice apartment now, other people need housing. And so how are you going to repay?” Right? Not because it's transactional, but you received this because other people struggled.

So, I feel a responsibility. And I wish other people felt this, and many people do, I'm not saying they don't, but I wish everybody felt like: “I have what I have because somebody sacrificed. And so, how am I gonna convert that to action today? How am I gonna take action so that somebody else is comfortable in the future?” And so not everybody's gonna do that, but some people will.

Some people just don't even know that we can change things. And so I think, you know, the Rabble Rousers [Documentary] film is amazing, it's an amazing portrait of Francis [Goldin] and that struggle. But this Oral History Project is really important too because there's still people at Cooper Square that were part of making this happen.

And so having people reflect on our actions and activities in the past is really crucial, and so I'm really happy you're doing this.

Gabriela: Thank you so much, Lynn. Anything else that you would like to share?

Lynn: I don't know. I feel like I talked my head off, and I don't know how relevant it all is. So, I don't know if it’s so valuable. No.

Gabriela: Thank you so much.

Lynn: Thank you so much.