Frank Morales

Lewis: [00:00:02] Good afternoon.

Morales: [00:00:03] Good afternoon.

Lewis: [00:00:05] I am Lynn Lewis, with the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project, with Father Frank Morales, here at All Souls Church, and it is February 20, 2020. Hi Frank.

Morales: [00:00:21] Good afternoon, Lynn. How are you?

Lewis: [00:00:23] I’m very happy to be here and to see you, thank you for your time.

Morales: [00:00:28] Yep, my pleasure.

Lewis: [00:00:31] We are interviewing Frank, as a not only former housing organizer at Picture the Homeless, but also as somebody who is a really important figure, person—not only in the New York City housing movement—but who’s had an impact internationally in terms of vacant property, and the right of the people to seize vacant property. And we’re going to get to know Frank a little better and hear his reflections about all of that.

Lewis: [00:01:05] So, Frank, could you tell us where you’re from?

Morales: [00:01:08] I was born and raised in the Jacob Riis Projects, on the Lower East Side—Twelfth Street and Avenue D. I was born in 1949. We were one of the first families in my building, at that time. And yeah, so I was born and raised in New York City, and grew up in public housing.

Lewis: [00:01:32] What were the Jacob Riis Projects like at that time?

Morales: Very diverse. My friends Louis Ching, Ernesto Morales, Ronald Gee, you know, it was a very diverse community of people, at that time. And it still is—to a large extent—diverse, but, you know, so… My—and the neighborhood at that time was very stable. My childhood—it wasn’t without its moments of violent trauma, but, you know, it was a very stable environment. It was long before the planned shrinkage, and the arson, and the drugs, and all the rest. I grew up in the ‘50s and in the ‘60s, in the East Village. It wasn’t the East Village then, that was later. It was just the Lower East Side. It was the West Village, which was Greenwich Village where hippies hang out. But—yeah, so it was a very diverse community, wonderful great neighborhood.

Lewis: [00:02:48] Your family, before you moved into the projects, where were you living?

Morales: [00:02:53] Oh no. I was born and raised there. My family—my dad came from Puerto Rico, Naranjito, Puerto Rico. My mom is Peruvian/Italian, and she was born and raised in New York City. Her parents—mother from Peru, of Inca descent, and her father from Trieste, Italy. And they met, he was a merchant marine, and they met. So, yes, I hail from Puerto Rican, Peruvian, and Italian descent.

Lewis: [00:03:34] You know, what we hear about the projects now is so negative, yet the stories of people whose families were amongst the first to move into the projects is often really different. Could you describe what your housing was like?

Morales: [00:03:51] Yeah. It was very community-oriented. I mean, you know… It’s people—you know each other, everyone on my floor had their doors open all the time and you were always, as kids, running around. I lived on the seventh floor. My neighbors, we were close. The community… You know, growing up a kid, there were lots of communal games that we played, you know. Skelzie and Manhunt, and Ringolevio, stickball, basketball, you know… There were seasons—peashooter season, paperclip season.

Morales: [00:04:46] On Halloween we’d put colored—big chunks of chalk in a sock, go around and, you know, colorize the neighborhood. Halloween, you know, you’d go—start from thirteenth floor and come down and knock on all the doors, and be chased around by… This one guy, one time he dressed up, he had an old radio on his head with the two knobs that look like eyes, and so on. It was really scary [laughs], with this green kind of smock. And he opened up the door, and AGHHHH! And he chased us down the stairs. This one old lady who lived on the third floor, she opened up the door one time and she had one of those bellows or whatever you call them, that you do the fireplace, you know? But she had it filled with talcum powder. [Laughs] So, she completely—was standing there…

Morales: [00:05:42] Yeah, so it was a fun neighborhood, and it was quirky. I mean, this was the ‘50s and ‘60s, so there was a certain element of Beat culture. And Szold Place, which was just right behind my school, PS 34, which is right across the street on Twelfth and D—behind the school was Szold Place, which is still there. And that was a bunch of… Kind of, you know, shops, but they were, I don’t know, I don’t know if it—I don’t want to say witchy, but they kind of were. They were just spooky shops where they sold fur and leather, and weird posters. I remember one poster behind the cashier, was this giant poster of a roach, blown up—dead—and obviously dead on its back, with its little legs up like that and superimposed in the back was the shadow of a cross, and it was like [laughs], I obviously still remember it!

Morales: [00:06:48] Yeah, so it was—I had, you know—it was very much, very fun growing up as a kid. I don’t remember too much real negative stuff. Occasional stuff, really things that were not—that were very sad. But generally—speaking, fun, very communal, lots of friends, and like I said, a very diverse group of friends. All kinds of people. And you know, it was—nobody was armed, nobody was carrying guns. But we had a certain amount of delinquent behavior. We robbed the seltzer truck… You know, the seltzer truck would stop, and steal the bottles, colored bottles of seltzer, you know—have seltzer waters. That’s that bubbly water, it comes in...

Morales: [00:07:53] Skelzie was a big one. Top… you know, you draw it on the ground, played with tops… I was very good at that. I was the fastest kid in my neighborhood—running. Yeah. We’d have these giant races in the summertime, and there’d be hundreds of kids. In the middle of the buildings, there was a big open area. It was all on concrete, and we’d have races. And me and Eddie O’Brien, obviously an Irish kid, were the two fastest, and we’d tie purposely. Marilyn Lee and I were the vice-president and president of our class for six years in elementary school.

Morales: [00:08:47] I was in a special pupil’s class.

Lewis: And what was special about it?

Morales: You know, I guess we were considered to be more intelligent than some of the others, and so, we got different kinds of classes. They called them SP classes when I was a kid. I attended St. Emeric’s Church, which was right next door to the school, again right on Avenue D. Everything was right there, Thirteenth and D. And yes, and Avenue C and Avenue D was the chicken market, you’d go in and—sawdust on the floor. We’d go to Orchard Street with my mom and—she would haggle with the store owners, because that’s what you did then, you know—bargained for clothes, and shoes, and all of that. It was a beautiful neighborhood!

Morales: [00:09:42] My doctor, Dr. Kramer, lived—who was a legend in the neighborhood… He lived on the ground floor apartment. You could go there, but he would also make house visits. That was in the days when doctors would come to your house. They’d come with their leather little bag, and… If you had a fever or whatever. Yep! It was great.

Morales: [00:10:11] My dad worked at the Jewish Home for Aged and Infirm People on 106th Street. He worked there for twenty-two years, was a member of 1199. He came from Puerto Rico when he was eighteen. Did a lot of stuff during that time, that would have been about 1930—thirties—he ran booze, he did all—he had all kinds of adventures. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, in Germany, at the end of the war.

Lewis: What was his name?

Morales: Frank.

Lewis: Your dad?

Morales: [00:10:49] Tilso [father’s nickname] … Yeah. He wasn’t really big on the war. He was a cook, and he didn’t have a whole lot—he didn’t talk about it a lot and the stories he told were more like comical stories. You know, the time he was taking a leak and dropped his dog tag, stuff like that. But he was an influence. He was very emotional when it came to talking about Albizu Campos, and the situation in Puerto Rico, later on—growing up—and certain aspects like that that had an impact on me. My mother played mahjong with the ladies in the building… Yeah, it was interesting.

Morales: [00:11:44] It was a great neighborhood, very loving really. And again, there wasn’t really too much in the way of violence, really. You know, you’d have occasional fights. I had a guy picked on me forever, and then we had the big fight. You know, you’re just wind milling, you know, there’s a bunch of people standing around cheering. I stood up for myself because—I wore glasses and all that—but I was really fast, so the big guys would pick me for games that they could pitch me the ball, and they would just—because I couldn’t be caught. I could get—if you were coming at me on a sidewalk, and I was wanting to get by you, I could get by you without being touched, you know. We call it dodging, you know. I was a great dodger. Yeah, fond memories.

Lewis: [00:12:46] Could you—I want to go back a little bit. You mentioned your dad having a big impact on you. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Morales: He was uncompromising in terms of being disrespected. So, he would react if my mom was disrespected in the supermarket, or anybody did anything, or somebody threatened my sister or myself in any way. He wasn’t passive—he was very active. And the other thing that, you know—it wasn’t like he was highly political in that way, but he was very cynical about the powers that be, and the establishment, which is what we called it back in those days, just in the way he was. Although he loved his co-workers where he worked, and he was very close to those people. But the other thing that I was influenced greatly by was his religious view. He was very—he never, he wasn’t about church. He saw church as really just a rip-off. His was Catholic—we were raised Catholic. The multiple collections, and the kind of—I don’t know, he just didn’t really take that to heart, the institutional church.

Morales: [00:14:21] But he prayed the rosaries constantly, and you know, had pictures of—those well-known pictures of Jesus sitting alongside the lake with the moon in the background, all this kind of stuff. And it was a very strong force for him. When things got bad, or someone was ill, or something like that, he was very connected to that as a mode of remediation for problems, and issues like that. I think that influenced me. It wasn’t like I was that church-y myself, I mean, I made my communion, confirmation, and all that, but confirmation, even to this day, is basically for young kids. I mean, that’s when they graduate from church, you know. They make their confirmation, they’re out the door, right? And that was the same with me. But I remember early on, having that kind of influence, which is really—I can’t really quite define it, except there was an authenticity about his connection to that. And I think I also liked it because he was like funny and biting when it came to the institutional [laughs] church, and all of that. So yeah, he was—and he was a loving dad. You know, he loved my mother. He was very, very committed to her, and devoted to her and a hard worker, you know, nine to five, every day.

Morales: [00:16:03] My sister and I would stand in the back window of our building, which faces towards like the Empire State Building, you know. We’re on Avenue D… At that time, the Empire State Building had two spotlights that would do 360, you know? They would just travel around. So, we would go up in the window and watch on Fridays. We’d watch when my dad would come in—because that was payday. So, we knew that was going to be—that [laughs] we’d have chicken or something, some more substantial food. Yeah… So, yeah he was very, very solid.

Lewis: [00:16:51] And what was your mom like?

Morales: Very warm, funny, loving—housewife, you know. Not very opinionated really. But very strict when it came to things like doing your homework after school before you go out. We’d come home at three o’clock and we had to sit at the kitchen table and do our homework, and that kind of thing—and had a great laugh. She was, as I said, I was blessed with a great family growing up, strong, loving, in a neighborhood, in a situation that others… For us it was great. You mentioned earlier, what were the projects like—and they were beautiful! It was great. It was, as I said, a great place for somebody to grow up in, you know. Particularly, you got the school there, and everything was close, and I did well in school, and I was a regular at the Boy’s Club on Tenth Street and Avenue A.

Morales: [00:18:13] So—and which eventually the Boy’s Club provided the resources for me to attend private school when I went to high school, which was later.

Lewis: Where was that?

Morales: [00:18:24] At Cushing, Cushing Academy, which was a private school. We were the first class—the Boy’s Club still offers in New York here, scholarships, or helps to facilitate scholarships, for neighborhood youth. I think they do—have girls now as well, to attend private boarding schools... Mostly in New England, but some in Connecticut, and so on. And my year, which would have been ’63 I guess, was the first class. I think there were like eight of us from the Boy’s Club. And I interviewed at Mt. Herman, and Deerfield, and some of these others, but those were all boys’ schools at the time. Cushing was one of the few co-ed schools. And it wasn’t like I was some kind of Don Juan or something, but it was—it just seemed strange to me coming from public school to go to an all-boys school. It didn’t—you know, it wasn’t my cup of tea. So yeah, so the Boy’s Club, so, I went there for four years.

Morales: [00:19:31] I ran away a couple times, the first couple months. It was a culture shock.

Lewis: It was a boarding school?

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: And you ran away.

Morales: [00:19:41] Yeah, it was the time, you know, this is still moving into the ‘60s, but by ‘63 it was still—sport coat, button down shirts, penny loafers, prep school, preppy dress. And you were up at 7:10, breakfast in dining room, and you know, the whole thing. And it was great! I mean, it was good, and I eventually stuck with it and kind of got into the groove—and did well. Because I was the only kid that had ever had the possibility of going to college in my family. So, there was a lot of pressure. But early on, the first two weeks, it was just too much of a culture shock. I mean they served coffee hour right after dinner—standing around drinking coffee and tea, and people in sport coats, and you know, it was like… And I was the only scholarship kid in the school. And it was the year that “Do-wa-ditty, the boy from New York City” had come out. So, that was playing on the—you’re probably too young to remember that—[sings] “Do-wa-do-wa, come on, talk about…’ So, that you know, it kind of provided entrée for me in the school. The seas parted, based on not anything that had to do with me, but just on the rep, you know? You come from, [imitates voices] “Oh, he’s the guy from New York, oh, oh, oh.” So, there was some of that. But it was a good experience.

Lewis: [00:21:08] Did your sister go to boarding school?

Morales: [00:21:10] My sister was a year younger than me. I have a younger sister than that, but she came along later, about ten, twelve years later. But Elizabeth and I grew up together in the projects, and all that. She’s a year younger and she went to Art and Design and is now one of the top scientific illustrators in the country. She’s got thirty textbooks to her credit. You know, she draws everything from amoebas to dinosaurs to plants, to—you know. I’d say, “What are you working on now, what are you drawing?” She transitioned from, I guess you know, drawing at home to drawing online, and all that. But she’s a very successful artist. She started off on the Venus Paradise coloring sets, which were these little coloring sets that you could get with colored pencils, and she would be sitting in the corner just doing that all day long.

Lewis: [00:22:18] And your other sister? What’s her name?

Morales: Caroline. She now lives in Ithaca. She is—basically she was strong in math, and she became—she’s an accountant of sorts. So, she does various kinds of accountant jobs and she’s always working because she’s very good at what she does. Both my sisters live in Ithaca now.

Lewis: [00:22:45] Your parents must have been really proud of their three children.

Morales: Yeah, they were.

Morales: [00:22:53] They… Split up when I was twelve. My father was significantly older than my mother, and you know… It came a time when they were not going to be together anymore. And it was kind of rough for my sister and I, but we dealt with it. My father moved to Brooklyn, they both moved to Brooklyn. But I continued to stay around Avenue D. I would come back, and I would stay with friends, and I lived—I spent some time at Digger House on Tenth Street and Avenue A. Because don’t forget—by that time, counterculture—and things were changing. So, I was spending a lot more time on the Lower East Side, and less time in Brooklyn. I spent some time in Brooklyn with my dad, but after that things changed. I was away at school, so when I’d come home, I’d spend time there. But I also had friends on Avenue D, but I was staying there.

Lewis: [00:24:09] So, you mentioned counterculture, and what was happening in the Lower East Side at that time, when you were a teenager? What were some of the larger forces and things going on around you?

Morales: [00:24:22] Well, I remember—vaguely the kind of anti-war movement. I remember it primarily through some friends that I had who were associated with the Catholic Worker. So, there was that. But I think the more prevalent kind of countercultural influences were the Beatnik—Beat people—Beatniks. Because I started to spend a lot of time over in the West Village. Again, it wasn’t the East Village at that time, it was the Lower East Side. But we would go over to that part of town, Washington Square Park… And I was starting to… And that’s kind of when I got into playing in bands. I played in bands all through high school, and all through college. In fact, I pretty much supported myself in college, playing in a band. So, I spent time in some of the places where folk people were, and poets, and stuff, you know, I got to see a lot of those people—Richie Havens, and Leroi Jones, AKA, Amiri Baraka, some of the folk people, particular Dave Van Ronk, and some of the earlier people. Even Reverend Kirk, who played with the Deacons for Defense in the South—Black folk guy.

A lot of that kind of radical politics came from there I think, as a young person. And then later, of course, just—Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, some of the early albums. Those were influences. Tompkins Square Park band shell, the Fugs, you know—Tuli Kupferberg—who I stayed in contact with over the years. Did some interviews with Tuli in his kitchen, which I’d never seen but he used to do these kind of interview format in his kitchen, in his house. And, you know, they were radical influences. And on the Puerto Rican side, the Nuyorican Café, in its early phases. Again, I was young, but you pick up on this stuff, you know. You just pick up on it—Young Lords, and the influences of people—particularly through culture, because that was the thing.

Morales: [00:27:18] It was only later when I was working in the South Bronx, much later, like in the late ‘70s, that I became really much more immersed in Puerto Rican radical culture then,  and kind of came back around to identifying in that way… You know, because—Puerto Rican, Italian, and Peruvian, and you look the way you do, you kind of jump around from how you identify. You settle on one thing—I’m not quite sure what I settled on. I settled on me, right? But by the time I got to the Bronx in the late seventies, after going to Seminary—graduated from college, going—being through the ‘60s, and played in the bands, and living through the Aquarian Age, and catching Hendrix at Woodstock on the final day.

Morales: [00:28:12] Yeah, then I went to Seminary, and became a priest. And the influences there were—King, of course, but less so, because the Civil Rights Movement was still—we were aware of it back during that time, but I can’t claim that it took precedence over the anti-war, anti-Vietnam situation.

Morales: [00:28:38] We were all draftable, at that time. I applied for conscientious objector status.

Lewis: And you got it?

Morales: They didn’t call my number though. See, I had to fill out the application and go through the whole thing. I was ready. There was no way I was going—you know, for me the thought of having a weapon, and taking orders from somebody, and going to some foreign place, and all of that whole war thing, was not even, you know, it was like a millisecond of reflection. I mean, you know, it was not going to happen, ever. So, it was just like what do you have to do? And one of the things you do, is you apply for conscientious objector. I didn’t have a well-defined moral position, at that point, other than what I think everyone is innately endowed with, which was the desire not to be hurt—one’s self—and not to hurt someone else, but I had to articulate that.

Morales: [00:29:45] But they had a drawing at that time. It was a lottery, and I remember sitting in college in a big room after dinner, or one afternoon after—I can’t remember. During some period, we’re all sitting there—this TV set—and this kind of matronly looking, suburban housewife kind of person was [laughs] twirling peoples’ fate in there, in this thing.

Lewis: It had little ping pong balls with the numbers on them.

Morales: [00:30:19] Yeah! Exactly, and reaching in there, [imitates voice] “One thirty-eight!” you know, and if your—you had a number from the selective service, and if you didn’t get the right number, you were 1A. And if you were classified 1A, that means you were draftable. You were like—Canada! Or you know, a lot of guys were just dosing with as much drugs as they could, before they went into their physical. Or like Arlo, in Arlo Guthrie’s movie where he goes, “I just want to kill”. You know, people were doing everything they could to avoid… Those who were in opposition to the war. So, I mean, the influences there were the anti-war movement—to a lesser extent the Civil Rights Movement.

Morales: [00:31:30] But a lot of the political education at that time, for folks that were in university, college—in those years, and I was in college from sixty-seven to seventy-one—which were very good years to be in college! We were on strike the four years that I was there, which everything was pass/fail—you take whatever you want. I took all philosophy and theology the four years I was there.

Lewis: What college was it?

Morales: This was at Hobart, but the third year we were able to take courses anywhere we want, so I took a few courses at Cornell. I think I even took one at Rochester, but I’m not sure about that. I don’t remember so much because we were moving around. You didn’t have to go to class. You would go to a demonstration and write it up and you’d have independent study, turn in the paper at the end of the time, you kept in touch with your philosophy professor, and your professors. It was wide open.

Morales: [00:31:59] The universities though were social centers in the respect—to the extent that people would be passing through—and speeches, and giving talks, and mobilizing people, you know. So, it was not unusual to have a double bill of you know, Huey Newton and Buckminster Fuller. They would come and you’d go and see the speeches; Herbert Marcuse and… There were always people coming through.

Morales: [00:32:28] And the books were coming out. We were reading stuff as it was coming out. The counterculture, things were… When the Doors put out a record, when this one put out a record, they were just out! You know, we were all listening to this stuff. It was an explosion that—it’s hard to describe—and you didn’t have anything to compare it to, you just—you were there. But I remember by seventy-one, seventy-two, thinking that was amazing, and I don’t know that it’s ever going to be like that again. Even as a young person, in sixty-nine I was twenty. So, you know—most influential folks though, in terms of where I went, after college, was—you know we were playing… I was playing in bands, and I had an opportunity to continue to play in bands, right? And just do that. But I didn’t really want to do that.

Morales: [00:33:28] I was influenced by the Berrigans. Dan Berrigan, in particular, was a friend of my religion professor, who was a friend to William Stringfellow, and Dave Dellinger, and all that. And they would have—they would be meeting there. There was like a relationship between—because Hobart’s in Geneva, which is a little north of Ithaca, it’s about forty-five minutes and Berrigan was based at Ithaca at that time. And this whole community of Catholic left that’s still based in that part of the world, the Grady family, and others up there. And when Dan was underground—at one point, because he was being accused of wanting to kidnap Kissinger. We had—we were all wearing “Kidnap Kissinger” question mark—buttons. I was a member of the Catonsville Defense Committee—because they went and did this action, pouring the blood, and destroying draft files. So, we were all supporting that, and I was impressed by that. I was impressed by the over-the-top direct action. You know, later on, the plowshares smashing nose cones and all of that. Over the top—coupled with a religious sensibility—coupled with taking the arrest, you know, which is like try to convince the jury of your peers that what you did was correct, and morally—you know, it’s demanded morally. Not so much morally proper, but it’s a demand to do that.

Morales: [00:35:10] And so, he was underground at one point, the FBI was looking for him, and my religion professor has us over for dinner at his home—myself and a few of the other students. In walked Berrigan—and he’s underground at the time! He’s sitting across the table. So, then years later, right before he passed, I was visiting him at Fordham—because he was at the Jesuit retirement home there at Fordham University, right on Fordham Road. So, I got to spend a little more time with him then. And actually, it was more personal than back then, because then I was just in awe as a student of what they were doing, and so on. So, those are the influences that kind of moved me towards—because I was interested at that time, like a lot of us, in social justice concerns. Whether it be peace, racism, and all these various issues of the moment—at that time—but coupled with religious sensibility. I was a philosophy student, and I had an offer to… It was not so much an offer, but a good chance of going to the University of Chicago to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. I’m still interested in philosophy. I mean, I still read what’s current, and have my own thinking about this kind of stuff.

Morales: [00:36:46] But, I decided I was kind of not wanting to do an academic stuff anymore, that I wanted to just get onto the street. And all of that, getting back to the neighborhood, and my roots, maybe all that was coming up. I wasn’t so conscious of it. But, you know, pursuing an intellectual, professorial direction at that time, you know, I started it, I took some courses, and started doing it—but then eventually—and the only place that I could go to, that would allow within the setup that we’re… We deal with what we’re given, right? You’re born into a certain place, you didn’t choose that, you’re there. Where do I go? Well, seminary provided the opportunity—not only for me to pursue a degree in divinity, and all of this kind of thing, but really on a more basic level, provided the opportunity for me to continue to do the work that I wanted to do within some kind of institutional framework that allowed for somebody like me to function.

Lewis: [00:38:02] What kind of work was that? What were you thinking in terms of your work, your daily life, your job, what would it be?

Morales: At that time, I think that I was primarily oriented towards following in the footsteps of Jesus—which would have been immersing myself among the poor, and dealing with, as best I could, the issues of the poor. And my thinking at that time, and I’m just now reflecting, because eventually, that’s why I wound up in the South Bronx. I graduate from seminary, went to seminary, graduated from seminary in ‘76, in the Episcopal church. And political work that I was doing at that time, because this is a seminary in New York, was to work with various groups in Manhattan, particularly around the emergence of liberation theology. I was a member of Christians for Socialism, a chapter in New York. We had chapters around the country—which was very—what’s the word—exciting at that moment because the stuff was coming up from Latin America, and even from Africa. Orbis Press was translating a lot of this stuff. This was the early days of Orbis Press. Now they have 150 titles, but at that time it was just getting going—Gustavo Gutierrez, Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation, these are texts—Communism in the Bible—books like that. Copernican shift in theological thinking and that was impacting the seminary, to some degree, but we were on the outside.

Morales: [00:39:55] Christians for Socialism—we were meeting at St. Mark’s Church. David Garcia was the rector there. The group was composed of members of the communist party, nuns, seminary students, workers, you know, it was a hodge podge group and our slogan was, “Neither Church nor Party” right? It was a meeting space for people to come and reflect and most importantly to digest all of this material that was coming. It grew out of, if you’re familiar with the process, I mean the Vatican II, which was… International Conference of Catholic Bishops and so forth, issued their final report, which talked about an option for the poor. You know, well Jesus loved everybody and so on… Yeah, but he had an option for the poor, see—and that opened up the gates to where the New Testament, and the reading of the New Testament, began to be seen as a supporter of the needs and desires and struggles of poor people. And particularly in Latin America, but to some extent Africa as well, later on with Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement, which began as the Christian Movement. And so, it was not really that hard to comprehend. It was basically taking a lot of the sentiments, and the message, and the directives that came from this little book called Quotations from Chairman Jesus—that came out of there and applying it to social justice struggles at that time.

Morales: [00:41:49] So, that’s what I was involved in, and so eventually wound up in the South Bronx in the late ‘70s. I think it was ‘77 or ‘78, I started working at St. Ann’s Church on 140th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue. I was the assistant priest there and was there until ‘84, so it was about four or five years. And they were very exciting years in the South Bronx, at that time.

Lewis: [00:42:17] Yeah. Could you share what it was like then?

Morales: Well, we… The young folks… The girls were doing Double Dutch, you know, “The girls go to college to get more knowledge, the boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider”, and that kind of thing. The boys then started to pick up that rhyming thing, from the girls—who would sit on the stoop, and they would just go off on these kinds of things. Then later on, the boys primarily were coming out on the street with turntables, and they would hook up to a light pole, or somewhere they could get juice, because a lot of it was outside, and there’d be wires all kinds of places, and so on, and they would just play records. They would have like Beethoven on one thing, and Frank Sinatra here, and then some hip-hop—there was no hip-hop. You know, soul music and they were just mixing stuff.

Morales: [00:43:26] And I would… We occupied… After I had three years’ worth at the church—which you know, we did what we could in terms of meeting needs of people. We had meal programs, and clothing, and all that. We buried a number of people who died as a result of overdoses, and drugs, and experienced the arson throughout the neighborhood that was happening. I’d stand up on the roof later—we occupied a few buildings, before I started squatting up there, we occupied two buildings, 281 and 283 St. Ann’s Avenue. And I’d go on the roof at night, and you could see the sky was red in different places. The place was burning, all over. It was constant smell of burning—smoke—all the time.

Morales: [00:44:15] But then, even within that, there was this resilience that was happening. And that’s what people need to realize—that hip-hop, and graffiti, and all of that stuff was happening within this context. It was a response to that. It was like a sign of resilience. Yeah, and it was a beautiful thing. We did benefits at the gym, at the church, with Afrika Bambaataa, who was up the block on Cypress, and some other of the—Orange Crush I think was another one. There were a few different groups there. And, you know, we’d have a couple hundred kids would come into the gym, I had a box in front of the door… Put your weapons there, you know, leave your knives and guns and what have you, so we don’t have any stupid stuff. And people were generally respectful. And they would have great shows! You know, people breaking—and the breaking was people running off a bench, you know, elevate, and run off, and then just hit the ground… And when you hit the ground, you would break [laughs] like you were a cup or glass, right? And it was like—stuff was coming right off the street. It was like, amazing.

Morales: [00:45:36] I remember going downtown, to Manhattan, because, you know, I’m from the Lower East Side, so I had friends there. So, I was back and forth, and say, “You don’t know what’s going on uptown.” Because nobody was aware of it yet! You know, it was only a few years’ later… It was pretty quick, after that. I mean, Fashion Moda on 149th Street was a gallery space that first housed a lot of graffiti art, and all that. You know, we were working with artists up there at the time—various artists who were involved locally in New York, and internationally became well-known. People like Tom Otterness, and Kiki Smith, and others who were impacting in their own way, with some of the stuff we were doing in the South Bronx. The Ahearn Brothers, they did Wild Style, this movie—and Charley… They still work in East Harlem, I think, you know, they do sculptures on the side of buildings, of some neighborhood people—have them suspended up there, you know. So, there was a lot of activity there.

Morales: [00:46:48] We made a silkscreen shop in the basement of one of the buildings that we occupied. Which was—we were printing bandanas for the FMLN. And people were coming up—because some of the folks that were living with us there, had come up from Latin America and Central America and they were… It was like a pipeline and one of the things we were doing was doing silkscreen printing.

Lewis: [00:47:18] Was this connected to the Sanctuary Movement in the early eighties with people coming from Central America?

Morales: Yeah. It was some of—yeah… But that was more happening with some of the people that were associated with the Catholic Church, which I was relating to. There was a guy named Dick Shaull who was an author in liberation theology, North American guy, and a couple of religious women—Mary and Sharon—and they ran a center that was dealing with the Sanctuary stuff. Yeah, there was a network of people at that time in the South Bronx that were involved in this, and this was the same time in terms of the housing question.

Morales: [00:48:12] I had—before I worked at South Bronx, right out of seminary, I took a job up in Poughkeepsie for about a year—maybe two years I was there. This was before I came to the South Bronx. And it was more like—it was probably—I’m out of seminary, and it was an offer, and I went.

Morales: But working in the South Bronx was really conscious, a more conscious kind of decision. But any case, while I was up in Poughkeepsie, I was working as a chaplain at Vassar, which is right outside of Poughkeepsie and they were involved in the divestment movement there at that time, and I was part of that. Eventually, I was shut out of the campus by the deans, they wouldn’t let me come, but some of the women, they would allow—you know, make it so that I could come in and you know, we had a pretty good campaign around divestment.

Lewis: South Africa?

Morales: [00:49:13] Yeah, that was the issue at the time. I was working part-time in the Southern African Magazine along with Bishop Tutu’s daughter, who was part of that collective. Mike, I can’t remember Mike’s name… Some others, Jim Cason, Mike, and some others who were part of South Africa Magazine. It was a really great magazine at the time—promoted a lot of issues around anti-Apartheid issues, and so on. I worked at different publications, the Guardian newspaper, which is a left newspaper on Seventeenth Street for a while...Yeah. So, I mean, it was… We were very active.

Morales: [00:49:59] In terms of the housing stuff, we had a campaign—I’m thinking now with South Bronx stuff, you got me thinking South Bronx, we had a great campaign against Antonio Silva, at Lincoln Hospital—worked with a lot of Young Lords, Young Lords who were still in the neighborhood at that time, Frenchie, Stevie Montalvo, and Cajon, and others who were there. Antonio Silva was a sterilizer from Puerto Rico. He was responsible for sterilizing or facilitating the sterilization of one-third of the child age bearing women in Puerto Rico at the time. He was then moved—he moved—took the position at Lincoln Hospital. So, we got him out! We had a campaign around that, around Silva—we got him out.

Morales: [00:50:50] At that time, too—Dr. Smith occupied a place with Mutulu Shakur, and they opened up an acupuncture center where we’d bring people over… And I witnessed it! I saw people go in there—and they were, you know, having bad reactions to trying to detox cold turkey, and they were helping them there through their approach. The Feds eventually went after them. You know, anything that had to do with supporting the—sustaining the people who were there in the war against the, you know, machinery, they were targeted. People were targeted. That was the case with that center. Dr. Smith was eventually murdered at that center, if I recall.

Morales: [00:51:46] In terms of the housing stuff, I was fortunate, when I was at Vassar, as a chaplain, I met a woman there—Black woman—who then… By that time, I was working in the South Bronx—we stayed in touch, and she got me in touch with some other women, who were in DC. It was through Karen that I met Yolanda Ward’s people. I don’t think I ever met Yulanda Ward, but it was a group of women, so I’m not sure she was part of that or not, I don’t remember. But it was Karen from Vassar, who connected me to these folks in D.C., it was a Black Grassroots Unity conference, they were called, and Yulanda Ward was a member of the Black United Front, DC, and also the Rape Crisis Center, I think, it’s another women’s organization. She was a very active, twenty-two-year-old woman.

Morales: [00:52:47] She transmitted to us, this document, which was just a paper, I think it was a text of a speech she had given, or something like that, which had to do with this project known as Spatial Deconcentration—which was a phrase that we later learned was lifted from Pentagon manuals, which had to do with the conscious effort to depopulate the urban centers of poor people, particularly people of color, and that’s what this paper dealt with. They had gotten a hold of some documents from HUD related to this project, this program, this initiative on the part of the Feds, through kind of direct action, liberation, expropriation of documents from two or three HUD offices around the country. And that was the information that I had gotten. And so I was, you know, it was very… It influenced me greatly.

Morales: [00:53:52] Because at that time I’m living in the South Bronx, and I can see what’s happening… We’re involved constantly in anti-arson work, essentially—trying to keep people, you know—trying to do what we could to deal with the situation there. But this provided a wider, kind of political context and understanding as to what was happening in cities across the country. Harlem lost a third of its population from 1970 to 1980, one-third of the population was decimated. And it became very clear that the motive for this was less to do with economics—the left in this country traditionally has seen the emergence of bombed out cities across the country and then the consequent result of mass homelessness, as a result of purely economic motives… That, you know, capitalism doesn’t want to provide housing for poor people, and etcetera, etcetera. And/or the, you know, implicit but unspoken thing about the people are self-abusing, and that’s why they’re homeless, all the rest, right? Rationalization. Never seeing the destruction of the urban centers as part of a strategy of social control—and a conscious effort to undermine the ability of people in these neighborhoods.

Morales: [00:55:13] Again, coming out of the late sixties with the Brown Berets, and the Black Panthers, and the Young Lords, and other mass-mobilization in the urban centers, revolutionary organizations in the urban centers—that this attack on the housing was part of a counter-insurgency effort—to undermine the ability of people to resist, through attacking the base, attacking the housing! And that’s what it was. And that’s—those documents that Yolanda Ward provided, and then subsequent research that I had done, taken up myself at that time—and published on that—point towards this program of spatial deconcentration. Later Roger Starr in New York referred to it as planned shrinkage, I mean, this whole idea. But basically, seeing the urban centers and the demographics, the shifting demographics of the urban centers, which are moving more and more towards predominantly people of color, as a threat! So that is a threat and they’re very explicit about it.

Morales: [00:56:22] I mean, Anthony Downs, who authored the report, in the Kerner Commission Report, which basically, there was… In 1967, there were riots—so-called riots, right? Which is usually a result of white on black violence and then people responding, police stop, or whatever. In any case, in 1967, 109 cities experienced this. People in fact, don’t realize what this was like, okay. So, there were 109 cities like that. By sixty-eight, Martin Luther King is assassinated, which is—that was a state sponsored execution. ‘68, the government released the Kerner Commission Report which is a study that was conducted on these riots, ordered by President Johnson through executive order, in which he delineates in the executive order, to uncover the roots of the riots—you know, okay. But more importantly how to prevent riots in the future. Alright, if you think about that, how do prevent civil disorder in the future, how to prevent resistance. So, it’s a counter-insurgency—a charge to this Commission to come up with ways in which to execute a counter-insurgency strategy in the cities—destruction of the housing. That was the way they were going to do it.

Morales: [00:57:54] Then one of the… Along with the synergy of other evils—cut the boxes in the neighborhood, so the fire department was reacting slowly. Roderick Wallace has delineated these—the synergy of the evil effects in the book called Plague our Your House or Plague on Your Cities, Roderick Wallace. He delineates running the drugs, you know, the fire departments’ responding more slowly, sanitation’s not picking up as often—they basically destroyed these neighborhoods.

Lewis: Closed fire departments.

Morales: [00:58:29] So, I mean, these—this was the context within which it seemed to me that what needed to happen was that people needed to seize the vacant housing in order to create communities of resistance. We had to resist this process that was going on at the time. The shelters, which were then originating—right—around ‘79, 1980, through the consolidation of FEMA in Washington DC, which oversaw, and still does, oversaw the shelters nationally. This was Oliver North’s FEMA—as a manmade catastrophe, according to the language of FEMA. But also, at the same time, when the National Coalition for the Homeless was formed—in Washington D.C.—at the time, which promoted legislation here in New York and other places, which legalized barracks-style warehousing of people. Because warrant of habitability laws in New York City didn’t allow you to put people in these places. You have to provide a home. There were certain laws that applied, you know, constitutional laws within New York State Constitution for housing—as opposed to shelter. But people lost the thread there and equated shelter with housing!

Morales: [00:59:55] So, in any case, when the shelter industry got going, and the incidence of AIDS and TB, and folks at that time—talking 1980, eighty-one, were saying it was twice the rate of infection in those places, as it was out on the street! So, the idea of occupying vacant houses, in which there were numbers—there were vast lots. You could stand on the four corners in the middle of the South Bronx and see nothing but bricks and broken glass, you know. The place was destroyed, they destroyed the housing, and this was happening all around the country.

Morales: [01:00:36] Seize the buildings! For me, the idea of squatting—which is the term of choice internationally, Europeans talk about squatting, and so on… But for me it was about self-defense, defending against the genocidal attacks that were taking place against people of color regarding the destruction of the housing, the decimation of the community, the running of drugs, and coupled with the increasing so-called quality of life crimes, and all that stuff. In other words, let’s jail as many young people as we can. It was a full-on counterinsurgency against the resistance that had freaked them out from ‘67, on. This was the response, a was kind of counter-revolution, if you will, in the form of the destruction of housing.

Morales: [01:01:31] So, I’ve always maintained that homelessness, you know, people talk about the origin… If you dial up the origin of homelessness in the web, right, and you don’t—it’s facile, right? Again, it would be overwhelmingly economistic, but nobody’s talking about this—the idea of social control and destruction of the housing. Homelessness is a consequence of state repression. It’s clearly an attack on peoples’ ability to fight back—you take the home! And then secondarily, you place them in those low intensity detention centers, known as shelters, and you know, that was… That’s where… That’s what we’re looking at. So, I was very active at that time in visiting shelters, Fox Street, and some other places where we’d have workshops, in the shelters, to organize people to scout out vacant buildings that they could take, and they could still take showers in the shelters and so on, and keep… And work on...

Morales: [01:02:39] I remember one meeting I had at that time, it was probably about 1980, eighty-one, because I was up in the South Bronx till about eighty-four, and then I came back down to the Lower East Side. There was about thirty or forty guys in a room, in a shelter. That’s when you could provide access… After a while they got hip and started to make it so that you couldn’t go in there and put video cameras. But when you could go in and, “We’d like a room to have a meeting, please.” And you could actually go into these places and have a room, close the door, and say, “Look guys, this is what we’re about, boom…” And just lay it out.

Morales: [01:03:17] The rationale—I mean, everyone knew what was happening, you know—people know when they’re under attack. I mean, you know. And… This is what we’ve got to do, we scout out some buildings, and so forth. We’ll need to come up with a couple hundred bucks to… We’ve got to put a door on this building, and like that. And I remember from one week to the next, I came back, and the next time I was there, boom, they put the $200 down on the table, and there was a lot of interest in this, right? So, you know…

Morales: [01:03:51] That was kind of the beginning for me, in terms of my adherence to the politics of squatting, and understanding it as a means of self-defense, particularly for people who were under this kind of attack. But there were also other reasons for it as well, that over the years that I’ve come to appreciate. You know, the collective work, just the spirit of creating something that’s all about use value, rather than exchange value, right? Just the sheer joy of making a house together, for somebody that didn’t have one, you know—and working with people to do that. I’m looking forward to more experiences in that area. But the ones that I’ve had were just spectacular! All kinds of great stories. I mean, we were working up one time in a building up in the Bronx… Bad experiences too with evictions and cops, and you know, and all that. Particularly under, you know—we started with Koch, and then Dinkins, and Giuliani, and they were all criminal’s, vis a vie the peoples’ right to a house.

Morales: [01:05:07] But the good stuff—we were working on a building one day and we were taking a break, this is a vacant building, and everybody’s full of dust and debris, and somebody’s making soup, and we’re sitting on the sidewalk in—it’s in the South Bronx. And at that time—you know—one of the upsides of abandonment is that you could do stuff, and nobody really cares. You know what I mean? It was like we were just there, and working on this building, we’re outside. And a teacher walks down the street, who was a teacher at Samuel Gompers High School, and he’s asking us what we’re doing. And we said, “Well, we’re working on this building to try to fix it up, so people can have housing. And he goes, “Oh well, I’m a professor at Samuel Gompers High School. I’ll bring my class! He brought his class, twelve kids from the high school, we bought all the electrical cables, and all the switches, and boxes… They wired our entire building, and he graded them on it, right? And some of these kids were from the neighborhood. So, this is the kind of thing, so it just struck me at that time.

Morales: [01:06:13] We had talked to some unions about this, and so on. But, you know, people haven’t gotten to the place yet where they’re really wanting to take matters into their own hands. The unions, particularly the construction unions and so forth, if we got the right kind of thing going, we could create a situation where they—they being the elite who run these cities in this country, and so on—would be forced to negotiate, you see, because we would be taking land, we’d be putting people in housing. They’d be raising Cain about it, but we haven’t gotten to that point yet. But this was just a small indication of what could be done! This guy, he brought his class in there, and we got this building going and those two buildings are still there, you know, they’re functioning. So, in any case, maybe I’ll just stop right there for now. That was the South Bronx and then…

Morales: [01:07:12] Eventually I came back down to the—by ‘84, ‘85, down to the Lower East Side.

Lewis: So, in… We just missed each other in the Lower East Side, because I left in ‘85.

Morales: Uh-huh.

Lewis: And at that time still, there were—I lived on East Fourth Street between Second and Third, Second and Bowery, so there were still people, you know, with fires in old barrels—

Morales: Yeah, yeah.

Lewis: keeping themselves warm and people dying—freezing to death on the street.

Morales: Uh-huh.

Lewis: I remember someone froze to death on Second Avenue and Fourth Street in front of the bank.

Morales: Uh-huh.

Lewis: There was a guy Lincoln Swados who was street homeless—

Morales: Yeah. Right, I remember that.

Lewis: [01:08:03] —in front of a vacant building and they—some developer kind of people were going to fix the building up, and he refused to leave, so they put this like, construction stuff around him, and blocked him in there, and he died.

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: It was like a war.

Morales: Yeah, I remember.

Lewis: [01:08:23] When you came back down, when you came back home, to the Lower East Side… This would be in ‘84, ‘85, what was the neighborhood like then? Because I think it’s very hard for people that didn’t live through that to picture that.

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: So, what was it like?

Morales: Well, it wasn’t, you know, wasn’t as bad as in the South Bronx, but it was similar. I mean, it was people… It’s hard to imagine, you know, east of A, of Avenue A for instance, from Fourteenth Street to Delancey, was decimated. I mean, there were just hundreds and hundreds of vacant buildings, and stretches of vacant lots, and so forth. So, a similar process had taken place. Proliferation of drugs, I mean, it was drug central. It was Brook Avenue when I was in the South Bronx, at that time was the big spot—particularly when crack emerged. But, you know, it was a major drug market and, yeah…

Morales: [01:09:29] And I remember it when I came down, and people said, “Why did you start squatting on the Lower East Side?” Well, primarily because I didn’t—I couldn’t afford to live… I didn’t have any real income at that point. I was doing what is called supply work, it’s like a substitute teacher, you know. You work on Sunday, you get a call from a church, “We need somebody for two Sundays.” And you come and do a Sunday, right? But I wasn’t—I didn’t have any kind of full-time job. So, I—and I was kind of oriented, and in the mood, in the spirit, you know. It’s kind of, it was—fun. We started scouting buildings and just went around.

Morales: [01:10:17] And it was in the zeitgeist at that point too, the squatting mode, because all throughout Europe this was happening, at that time, a similar time, right. The mid-eighties and right during that period. And we had some European folk who were coming through, but we were looking—you know, squatting in buildings all through the neighborhood. Again, it was a diverse group of people, local Puerto Ricans, people from the shelters, punk rock runaway kids who, you know, left home and didn’t—old Polish ladies, you know, elderly black men classy... I’m just thinking of people, who I—who were… And they’re still in some of these buildings. It was, again, a very diverse group. Obviously, the ones who had, physically, more ability to go into the buildings, when they were really in rough shape...

Morales: [01:11:20] So, we started that wider process of squatting—because uptown it was those two buildings, right next to the church, that’s where I started there—and then worked with a couple of different groups, Casa Del Sol, which was a little further away, but that building was really never fully vacant. There was a woman there who was refusing to be moved out, but when HPD was consolidating buildings, they were emptying them out. She refused to leave, and she came to us, and so we started moving people in, including people I was working with in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Suzanne, and some other people. I don’t know if Espy [Esperanza Martell] was part of that, but there were various people that went into that building from that—those movements.

Morales: [01:12:09] But on the Lower East Side, it was a much wider thing. We were working in—eventually by ‘87, ‘88, ‘89, we were in about thirty buildings. We worked collectively, and there was a network, people talked to each other. We’d have eviction watch meetings with people from various buildings who’d come together, because even though the squatting of the buildings—they were autonomous, in other words, you and your ten, twelve friends who went into a building—nobody’s going to dictate to you how you ran it, and all of that. But we all made a commitment to one another that if you were attacked everybody would come out. So, we’d have these eviction watch meetings and that was our primary, centralizing element, or motive, was to defend one another. Otherwise, the buildings were autonomous.

Morales: [01:13:06] And at that point, I’d say, you know—later on in the early ‘90s, mid-‘90s, I remember doing a survey at that point because a lot of the attack that we were getting from some of the developer elements, and the New York Post, and some of these people, [imitates voice] “Euro-trash, you know, it’s all white people…” And all of this kind of thing.

Morales: [01:13:31] It’s always been fifty percent people of color, in these buildings, right. And you could go around, and I remember saying to people, “I’m going to go door to door.” And that’s what I did. I went around, just to see what was going on. And it wasn’t like it was conscious, although some of us did make an effort to point things out along the way, you know. “Let’s make room for families, let’s make room for people in shelters, let’s, you know, let’s...” And we would do outreach, as I mentioned, we continued to do, particularly at Bellevue Shelter, we’d go to Bellevue Shelter—we’d get calls from them! They needed… We put pickets outside of Bellevue to protest either the food that they were getting, and so on. We’d encourage people to come and get involved in the squatting, and all of that.

Morales: [01:14:25] You know, and we had some run-ins with the official urban homesteading approach. And I’d been involved in urban homesteading stuff—because eventually two buildings in the South Bronx, which we squatted, were brought into the urban homesteading program. So, I was familiar with that. And for the most part, some of the leadership hated us because we were taking some of the stock that was available to them, right? So, you could understand that. But on the ground, on the bottom—the ones that were working on weekends—and then having to leave it alone and come on week [days] ends… And we’d say, “Beware, you might be doing this two or three years.” It was like a form of workfare. They were gutting out these buildings, and they had no real guarantee they were going to get them at the end of the time—and that happened in some cases.

Morales: [01:15:17] But Carol Watson, and some other people from Joint Planning Council, they were calling, “Could you watch our buildings for us.” And in the course of the week, or we’d lend them tools. There was a lot of sharing that was going on at the base. Unfortunately, some of the political elements in the neighborhood at the time were just demonizing us and calling us those kinds of names. I had—God bless her—Margarita Lopez and some of the others, were going around, [imitating voice] “He didn’t grow up in the projects!” They were… And I was saying, “Why is she saying these things about me?” I never had any conversation with some of these people! But they were just defaming me for, [laughs] you know… And I’m saying, “Look, these buildings are here. They’re falling down!” You know what I mean? “You got people who need housing—let’s take the housing, let’s work together, we’ll take them all, right? We’ll take them all.” In any case, we continued to do this, to do the work that we started doing in the South Bronx.

Lewis: [01:16:21] The Tompkins Square Park Tent City was going on, in the mid-‘80s—

Morales: Yeah. Yeah.

Lewis:  shut down with tanks by Mayor [David Norman] Dinkins. I know you mentioned there was intentional outreach around Bellevue, and in the neighborhood like in Tompkins Square Park—how was it integrating homeless folks into the squatter’s movement?

Morales: Well, I mean… it was… It’s hard to say really, because it wasn’t a success or a failure. It was, in some cases, there were individuals who moved into some of the buildings—who, that was what they—that was their choice. They would come to me, or they’d come to others, and say, “Are there any spots open” and so on. Each of the buildings would have regular meeting times, and that was the point of entry, so you’d send folks over. So, you had individuals. There were homeless groups, I remember Terry T, and some other folks, who… They took a building down on Houston Street, and they were concerned to have the building just be representative of people that they knew from the shelters. So, that was what that was about… I don’t know, I mean, I think there were—it was difficult for some of the guys who were coming from the shelters, or who were used to living in a certain way, who weren’t really accustomed to, you know, the kind of culture of squatting. So, they preferred to live the way that they were living. Although some of us were trying to encourage folks to get more involved in this approach. But it wasn’t as successful as it might have been, but it’s hard to know why, you know, you can…

Morales: [01:18:23] I’ve thought about it a lot, in different contexts, in different ways. For instance, Alfredo Gonzalez, who was a member of the Young Lords, and then later got involved with us on Lower East Side… I met him up on Fox Street, then he came down to Lower East Side and he was in one of the buildings, living in one of the buildings. I remember, he had an apartment, and we collectively we all worked together, and got it fixed up as best we could, and he had his bed, and all that. And I was running around in other buildings, and so on. I’d come back to see him—oh, maybe two, three months later, to see how he’s doing… And he was still in the bed, and he still had his clothes rolled up underneath the bed, and he was just sleeping in the cot, living in his bed. And I’m going, “Alfredo, put a freaking picture up on the wall, you know what I mean? Like, move in!” So, there was a certain kind of resistance in some ways, that I think maybe it’s a result of the kind of oppressive situation that people were forced to live through? It takes a while.

Morales: [01:19:37] You know, so… It requires more—more thought-out process. This was also true for families, you know, some of the early challenges that we had in the situation on the Lower East Side, and since then, the number of families in there now. Because if we can’t make the buildings—I remember some of the women who—that I was familiar with at that time, in our scene in the mid-eighties, “If we can’t make the buildings suitable for families then we shouldn’t be doing this.” You know, like that, so it was...

Morales: [01:20:18] There were various challenges to confront, because you’re also dealing with situations unlike, you know… I’m part of the SqEK Network, which is the European squatter network, right—and we had these annual meetings in different European cities. So, you talk to  squatters in Paris, or in London, or in Germany—at different places… Nobody’s confronting the kinds of conditions that we are confronting here. I like to say that squatters in US, particularly in New York City, are the toughest squatters anywhere, right? They don’t have the winters! They don’t have the roof being in the front door, and half a roof sitting empty to the elements for five or ten years. Imagine rain and snow coming into a place for five or ten years. They were wrecks! Completely destroyed! We’re not talking—you got to Brixton, you walk into a place, or these different places, in Paris if you squat at a house, a vacant house, and you’re there on the first day of winter, you’re good until the first day of spring. [Laughs] You know what I mean? Just eminently civilized, but… You know, and they don’t have billionaire mayors, and all these other, or a high premium on land—or—it’s all kinds of different factors that come into play.

Morales: [01:21:44] But, yeah, the issue of Tent City was that, when homeless people started to occupy Tompkins Square Park, and they were getting harassed by the police and so forth, community people, people living in the squats—and others—came out in their defense. And there were instances were numbers of people came out, and literally ran out the police. And I’m talking literally—with hundreds of bottles flying, and police literally running down the street, you know—and/or the racist, skinhead people. You know, word would go out, “So and so was attacked by this group” and so on, and we’d have a concert and from the stage people would call out these—they’d be sitting there thumbing their nose, neo-Nazi types, and so on. Hundreds of people would run them out, they’d be running down St. Mark’s Place as fast they could to get back to Jersey, or wherever they came from. So, it was a highly politicized community in defense of people who were living in the park at that time.

Morales: [01:22:54] Then there was the campaign to help build tents. And people started to, [imitates voice] “Let’s squat this land, see, particularly in the warm months. So, a lot of the proliferation of the tents and all that was facilitated by this kind of ethos of, “Let’s take the land back.” This was also following the so-called Tompkins Square Park riot, when they tried to impose a curfew on the park. Well, the consequence of that immediately following when it was determined that the police had, you know, were wilding on the community and so forth, was for a brief period of time, to take the park over. That the community would self-manage the park. Now, mind you, this was way beyond the pale of the liberal establishment, and others, right? But for a short period of time, we had that going. So, the bathrooms were open twenty-four/seven, people who needed to take showers could go in there and wash up, and so forth. It was this whole communal… People in the neighborhood were bringing food. For a short while there was a very beautiful situation there. It was kind of a cross between, you know, a Hooverville and Woodstock. It was—everyone was working together, you know. Yeah.

Morales: [01:24:16] And it was… And we had at that point too, there were a limited number of vacant buildings left, because they had destroyed them all, and gentrification was coming, and they were grabbing these buildings. You know, HPD and the urban homesteading crews were still claiming their buildings, and we had this kind of peace arrangement that we wouldn’t go into this one or that one. This kind of thing. So, there were a limited amount of spaces to go in.

Morales: [01:24:42] The police were sending homeless people from various parks around the city to Tompkins Square Park. We think… People would come in and they would tell us, they’d say, “Yeah, we had an encampment at a park down by so and so, or this way, so… And they said, you can’t be here, but you can go to Tompkins Square Park.”

Morales: [01:25:02] So, they were creating—and this is what happened to Zuccotti [Park] during Occupy… They’re very insidious—let’s create an untenable situation, let’s send all the drugs dealers, and all, you know—some—like those bad elements—but also people who were camping out here, and saying, “No, you’re not good here, but we’ll leave you alone over there.” It becomes untenable just in terms of sheer numbers, right? Just hard to manage it. And that’s eventually what happened in Tompkins Square Park, to some degree. Although I think in the main, the police and the elite development establishment in that neighborhood, particularly headed up by Antonio Pagan, and some of the other more right-wing elements—succeeded in getting the police to come in. And it was really kind of tragic at that point.

Morales: [01:25:59] And you know, we tried to do the best we can to take people in and so forth... Terry T, and some other homeless people, occupied a house on Houston, and took a building there. I know some others went out… I remember having some scouting crews out in East New York at that time, and maybe… I don’t know if they were successful or not. We started to spread out because we didn’t have anymore—we had very few buildings left to take.

Lewis: [01:26:36] Well, those were amazing times, and I interviewed Willie Baptist about the National Union of the Homeless, and the founding of the New York chapter—

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: and you were there.

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: Could you talk about how you got there? This was in ninety-two maybe—

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: early nineties. How did you get there, what was that like?

Morales: Yeah, well… It was not as pleasant as it might, you know—it—you know—again… We participated in the Union of the Homeless gathering. The founding of the New York chapter of the Union of the Homeless. I don’t remember where it was. Was it Riverside? It was some

Lewis: Riverside church.

Morales: big place, right? And there were a thousand people there! I remember it was large. Maybe I’m over exaggerating, but it was large.

Lewis: He said 1,200, and it was the largest in the country.

Morales: [01:27:32] It was large. We had various workshops and breakdowns, and so forth, of the platform that was going to be put together, and so on. I’m not using the right terminology, but you know, it’s like the mission statement, and so on. And squatting was on the agenda, right? Because that’s what we were pushing—myself personally. In other words, there’s a lot of vacant houses in this city, the shelters are—forget about it… Don’t hold your breath for the establishment to create affordable housing for you, any day soon. The only way we’re going to get this is to create some heat and pressure, to create negotiating space for these people to even let you go to the—be in a meeting. So, we have to take land, we have to take the houses, and defend them, right? That was our agenda. And it was accepted by a lot of the people who were there!

Morales: [01:28:29] So, we were expecting that that would be part of the platform. One of our candidates, I think it was up for—I don’t know, I might have been up for one of the offices. I can’t remember at this point, but Alfredo was up for vice president, I think—in the election—
and James, I can’t remember his last name, was up for president. And both James at that time was staying with us in one of the buildings, and Alfredo was down there. So, you know, we were—I mean it’s not… None of us had any real experience with kind of a Machiavellian—left, sectarian left—CP democratic centralism approach, alright? Which is like, “We have to keep a certain amount of secrecy, and we have to sort of, force our opinion because we know better than they do…” And all this kind of thing, right. None of us are coming from there. We were just pushing openly what we believed to be the correct strategy for homeless people in this city, which was to embark on a campaign of direct action for the housing, create some negotiating space for bigger policy changes, and so forth and so on. That was our agenda.

Morales: [01:29:57] Something happened—and we were told that the people who were running on that kind of—with that kind of politics, were asked not to run. So, there was some maneuvering that went on there. And I don’t know if others who were involved could shed some light on this, but basically, they were moved out. One of the people who was involved in this—
disappeared. He was just gone. So, you know—and that squatting agenda was less of a priority by the close of the conference. And from my point of view, there was something that went on there that involved some of these elements in these party groups, that remained behind the scenes, but attempt to pull strings and so forth, and so on. And you know, I grew up in New York, I’d been familiar with sectarian politics, and I know what time it is, so I mean, there was some of that that went on there.

Morales: [01:31:05] And I don’t know all the particulars, and so forth, but it was just not… The outcome was not what I would have hoped for. Because we had an opportunity at that point to really create a mass movement that was about direct action for housing. There were a lot of vacant houses, there still are, three times more vacant houses now in New York than there are homeless people still! The, you know, the people that we were talking to in the—maybe some will say, “No, that was a minority position, and people really didn’t support it.” Everybody supported it. I mean, I remember the experience I had at PTH, you know. We’d have our housing meetings and so forth, saying, “Yeah! Let’s do it!” [Laughs] You know what I mean? Arvernetta [Henry] talking to me, saying, “I passed by the house that I grew up in.” And all that! And I remember she would talk like that. And your heart goes out to people and say, “Come on, let’s just go take that house back!” Well, that was the sentiment of a lot of the people at that conference. But, at the end of the day, when the leadership was chosen and so forth, it went another way. I’m not so sure exactly who all the players were. I had my suspicions, but you know, I’m not about pointing fingers at people. It’s just… It was unfortunate.

Morales: [01:32:29] The same level of, you know, kind of unfortunate that happened on the Lower East Side with the squatter movement there, vis a vie some of the, you know, particularly Miriam Friedlander, and some of the—who I think were legitimate left people. They were people who were progressive people! But at the end of the day, they went for this, “the cross-subsidy plan”… “We can only get this amount, Frank, you have to—we have to let them have the market rate housing over here…” If we all had banded together, we could have taken it all, [smiles] you see... We’d have a lot more affordable… We’d have a lot less gentrification going on in the neighborhood, and so forth. You know, just didn’t have the willingness at that point to take that final step! She never demonized us, Miriam—and others. You know, and for the most part I still see some of these folks, and you know, alright—this is where we are now, so let’s go from here. What do we have to do. But we had opportunities to make a much more powerful coalition.

Morales: [01:33:39] When I was in Paris, yeah, it was in Paris—I remember going to a conference—not a conference, a meeting there. There was about forty, fifty people in this room, and a table up front, people sitting, and they were talking about—I think it was a daycare center that had been occupied and was under threat. Something like that. It was an occupied space, it was a squatted space, social center. Don’t forget, like in Rome, and Paris, there are hundreds of social centers. You know, we’re not used to this here. These are places that were occupied—unpermitted, occupied centers—that generally don’t house homeless people—because the homeless crisis is not to the extent there that it is here. So, it’s more about daycare centers, and gymnasiums, and info-shops, and movie theaters, and different kinds of community needs, and political centers. Which is a lot where the incubators of the left in these places are in these social centers.

Morales: [01:34:44] But in any case—this meeting in Paris—I remember sitting there, and there was a squatter representative, a person who’s involved in squatting the social center, there was a member of the coalition for the homeless group, there was a member of the council—social work council on daycare centers, and so, it was a diverse group of people all sitting together, you see—and they had the ability to… And that’s what we’d always say.

Morales: [01:35:14] We’d talk to the Met people—people at Met Council, or to the various other groups around… We’d provide—it’s like good cop/bad cop, you know. You—deal with us, we need policy changes and so forth, otherwise we’re going to support breaking locks and going into these houses, civil disobedience! You see, if you don’t have that… You know, you’ve got to have that kind of threat!

Lewis: The left pole.

Morales: [01:35:44] We had these opportunities.

Lewis: Uh-huh.

Morales: And in the case of the Union of the Homeless, and the case of the Lower East Side squatters versus—you know, whatever—and I don’t use liberal in a negative way… I mean, but kind of more liberal establishment people who wanted to work with HPD and urban homesteading and say, “Well, there’s three vacant buildings, and you can take one, and we’ll take two for market rate…” Or you know—the cross subsidy—we called it double cross subsidy. You know, because we’d say, “Why allow for market rate housing?” It’s like—we don’t—that’s what we don’t want. We’ve already lost enough poor and working-class people in the neighborhood. Why are you doing this? You see, so… That’s unfortunate.

Lewis: [01:36:32] So, we’re in the ‘90s, and Picture the Homeless was founded by two homeless men—who, at the time of the founding, were staying in Bellevue Men’s Shelter. And they were—Lewis Haggins, and Anthony Williams—and Lewis was going to AA meetings at CHARAS, just off Tompkins Square Park… Between B and C, right? The same decimated neighborhood where people had committed—created a community center that really was kind of a political hub, a big cross section. And so, within that space, there’s room for homeless people who were organizing. You were back in the neighborhood then, of course, and so, do you remember when you first heard about Picture the Homeless, or came across Picture the Homeless? What’s that story?
 
Morales: [01:37:38] I’m wondering how it is that I first heard about Picture the Homeless… Hmmm… This is one of those things that—yeah, it’s going to come to me—

Lewis: It’s okay.

Morales: when I’m in the shower later or something. [Laughter] I’m trying to think! Let me think... It might have… I’m mean, I’m guessing it was because you guys were doing actions, and you were out there, so I’m sure I just picked up somewhere along the line, that there was an action happening, and I remember being struck by the fact that there were—you know—that this was a homeless organization that was beyond service… You know, the offering meals and offering shelter. That it was an activist social justice-oriented group—and that was unique. Because I think Picture the Homeless was a unique organization among, you know—even Coalition of the Homeless type groups, and others who were, you know… And I don’t put them down, I mean, these were folks who were benevolent people, they’re attempting to do what they think is the right thing—providing shelter, and all of that. But in any case, you know, going at the deeper issues, and organizing for themselves—rather than some kind of top-down thing, or social welfare program, or something like that. It was impressive. So, I’m sure it probably was picking up on some action that was happening—going, “Who are these people?” And just, you know—because I was very interested in those issues and so, I just followed up.

Morales: [01:39:30] Eventually made my way up to the Fordham Road house there.

Lewis: We moved up to the office on Morris, just off of Fordham, in 2007 and we needed to hire a housing organizer,

Morales: Uh-huh.

Lewis: And we put out an ad and talked to people that we knew. We had already started the organizer trainee program, because we’d had a hard time hiring organizers who had themselves been homeless. We—it was very important to Picture the Homeless members that, when we had money to hire somebody—because they were volunteering and working really hard—that we hire from within. It was also very important to have the skills that were necessary to be able to do those jobs, because it’s a lot of work. And so, being a hard worker doesn’t qualify you to do just any work, right? And so, we had a training program. We had—Nikita had graduated from that and was on staff. Rob Robinson had graduated from it and was a full-time volunteer. And so, we were embarking on this…

Lewis: [01:41:02] We’d already done a vacant property count in Manhattan.

Morales: Uh-huh.

Lewis:[01:41:07] So we were… Picture the Homeless members were committed to—kind of exposing the issue of vacant property as a strategy to organize homeless folks to say, “Hey, there’s all this property, let’s fight for it, let’s take it! And to try to move the housing movement to say, you know, “Okay, well, it’s not owned by the city anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to keep it vacant.”

Morales: Right.

Lewis: And so, we put out a call to hire a housing organizer who could really help move us on this issue of vacant property. What is to be done? So, there you came along, right? [Smiles] And applied, and that was very exciting for us.

Lewis: [01:42:01] And so, could you describe what was the office like when you first came up, what was your interview like, for example, if you remember that?

Morales: [01:42:11] Let’s see, what was the office like? I don’t know—I found it very enlightening… Because I had never been in a place that was quite like that. In other words, the office, the organization, and as it manifested itself in the office, was a place of a, you know—homeless movement, a movement of people who were committed to dealing with this issue, right? And the only experience that I had had in terms of housing issues, was either in organizations where I was doing like, kind of tenant organizing, and all that… You know, and it’s a bunch of well-meaning bureaucrats, and others, and so on. So, this was unique. For me it was enlightening. It was a new experience really. And a very welcome experience. I was very impressed by everything… The mood of the people—which was on one hand kind of militant, and concerned—and on the other hand, fun and kind of loving with one another. The space was multifunctional, you know—it had the meeting thing, but it also had comfort and so forth and I remember one of the things that I was interested in doing was the Thursday night meal, you know. So, I loved making use of the kitchen and all that.

Morales: Yeah, so it had a kind of busy, busy thing going on, with people involved in various kinds of things. It was a good staff of people… But I think the thing that I think was most impressive to me, and I cared mostly about, was that people just seemed to care for one another. There was a camaraderie there, and you know, the system can be so brutal and cruel to people, and it creates a kind of distrust, and a kind of competitiveness for the few crumbs that are out there, and all of that. Well, you know, there was a palpable kind of solidarity among the people there, you know—and I kind of liked that.

Morales: [01:45:01] I mean it was… For me, without sounding overly priest-like… I mean, it was like a church! It was like what a church—you know, what the body should feel like. It’s a body of people who come together. You know, the early church took in the orphans, and took in the widows, and had communal meals, and worked together on stuff. That’s the kind of feeling that I had there, you know. And then there was the intellectual side, people like Jean, with the library, and the wisdom that was in the room. And it’s not only in terms of intellectual stuff, but just the street smarts of people, you know—you just... I just learned a lot just being around people, and hearing the way they articulate their experiences, and all of that. You know, we all come from different places, but when you’re involved in that kind of collective work—where the individual skills, and experiences, and hopes, and visions that people have—come together on a certain project, “Alright, this is what we’re going to do together…” That’s great! I mean, it’s so… I found it a very valuable experience.

Morales: [01:46:21] I don’t recall the interview process. I’m sure I was probably coming from… Because I’ve always been somewhat of a zealot around this, you know… There’s no other way, take the vacant buildings, that’s it. And if, you know, it’s like for me—the litmus test. If people are not down with squatting, I don’t want to know ‘em. That’s kind of where I came out of. So, you know, I’m thinking to myself, this is a homeless organization, they’re about action. They’re about taking action. So, I’m coming in there with that kind of a view. Well, this is the action that I’m talking about, right?

Morales: [01:47:03] So, but then to see, and to be educated to the kind of work that people were doing, and some of the other issues that I was not familiar with… I’d never had those experiences, you know? Going to the intake center, and what that’s about, and people getting jerked around with their—you know, the promises their being made that they’ll get some kind of supplementary income, or maybe they’ll get a house here, and all of that— Kafka-like insanity that people are put through—who are already suffering. I had never had any experience with any of that! See, for me, in some blissful state—hey, you break a lock, you go in, you schlep out debris, and you defend it. It’s not that complicated.

Morales: [01:47:59] But to get more involved in what peoples’ lives who were in that place… I remember in the early times we’d go to the “former tenants”… We weren’t going to use the term homeless…

Lewis: Uh-huh.
Morales: Because it was clear they were creating another class of people, even another class of human being, you know—this is another kind of… We weren’t wanting to go for that. So yeah, and that’s also true too—humanizing. Now you know, it’s not like I hadn’t had experiences with people on the street, and so forth, and from where I come from. But still—you know, when you don’t really live in that day to day, it’s an education to meet people who do live that, day to day.

Morales: [01:48:56] I can’t remember that guy who lived on the subways, he was twenty-four/seven on the subways. And he would… He always looked great; he’d come in… He would—and he liked the way he lived. I mean, he was very comfortable with it. I can’t remember his name.

Lewis: Well, there were many people that really impressed me with how well they were able to keep up

Morales: Yeah!

Lewis: with their

Morales: I mean, there’s a certain…

Lewis: appearances. And I used to think, I don’t sleep well one night, I have giant bags under

Morales: Right

Lewis: my eyes and—forget it.

Morales: It’s hard to sleep like—it’s hard to live that kind of way.

Morales: [01:49:35] But in any case—I mean… The diversity of the group, I’m just thinking of the people when I was there.

Lewis: Do you want to name some of them? Some of the people that you remember?

Morales: Marcus [Moore], and Arvernetta, and of course, Rob—who were some of the others? Jean, of course. Then the staff, aside from the staff, Tej [Nagaraja], and Sam [Miller], you, and who else was there? DeBoRah [Dickerson]… They’ll come to me.

Lewis: Uh-huh.

Morales: [01:50:05] Yeah! No, it was really a valuable experience for me, you know. I don’t know that I was as successful in terms of the campaigns as I would have liked to have been. I mean, we did the best we could—or at least, you know, I functioned the best that I could. I had a difficult time, as you recall, doing the necessary… What do you call that—you know, transcribing the experiences, and writing things up, and all of that sort of thing. But I understand the need for that—in terms of trying to keep the organization afloat, and doing what you were doing, which was raising the money, and all the rest. But yeah— it was very important to me at that time, and instrumental in my own growth, to have that kind of direct experience with homeless people that were… Doing the kind of organizing that they were doing—day to day, and with a commitment.

Morales: [01:51:14] I think that was also the case too… The organization of Picture the Homeless in terms of the classes, and the organizer school, and all the rest… The administrative aspect I guess of it, was ingenious really—and again, unique—the way it was—the way it functioned… But I think what was really most impressive to me was just the stick-to-itiveness that people had, you know—just like staying with it and mounting campaigns, and so forth.

Morales: [01:51:54] My favorites… I mean, I remember some of the actions that we made. The Long March to Jamie Dimon’s house.

Lewis: You want to talk about that?

Morales: Yeah, that was… We had a march to Jamie Dimon, who, you know—the CEO or whatever of Chase Bank. It was on Park Avenue, I think, and 90th something street. And we marched from, we started at 125th, if I recall, and we marched down… We marched from 125th and… I don’t know where it was, Lex maybe—and down to Park Avenue and 90th Street. And it was, you know—it was a bit of a march, it was a bit of a walk, because some of the members were, you know—I think we had a few disabled folk who were with us, or other abled, you know.

Lewis: Tammy, who had been in the Panthers—

Morales: Right.

Lewis: was using a walker.

Morales: [01:52:51] Yes! Right—So, we were—it was a slow march, but it was very—it was a really powerful march. And of course, we had great banners, you know—that was the thing. Seth [Tobocman] and others made—would help us with the banners, and we had good banners. And I remember that as we were crossing—we were starting to feel a little fatigued. The weather was okay that day, I remember. But we were, I don’t know, we were heading for Ninetieth and Park, and maybe we were on, you know—106 and Lex and we’re still making our way there. We were about halfway there, and I was going, “Okay…” And then there were a couple of hills that we had to traverse, and all that, so it was a bit difficult.

Morales: [01:53:35] But then, we were met by the band, what was the name of that, The—

Lewis: The Rude Mechanical.

Morales: The Rude Mechanical Orchestra, [smiles] right. And we were coming around the corner, and they started playing… It was so great, I mean, it was such a spirit lifter. And then they joined us, and we made our way to Jamie Dimon’s house. And it was—it was impressive. I mean, it was… It made its way in. I mean, we got in a bit—but people reacted. In other words, it was a strong witness—to you know—these people who are sitting on so much wealth, and hoarding it, and you know—facilitating the violence that’s done against people. So, that was a good action.

Morales: [01:54:30] And the other action I remember was the occupation of the vacant lot. I think it was at 115, off of First Avenue? I can’t remember.

Lewis: Park and Madison.

Morales: Okay, yeah. It was a vacant lot, that we had scouted out as a lot was owned by Chase Bank and we were advocating that there should housing created there for people who needed homes, you know—poor folk—you know, affordable and decent housing that people could actually afford to live in. And we collaborated—we occupied the land, the vacant lot, and took civil disobedience, right? We took an arrest, claiming that we were going to stay here.

Morales: [01:55:23] And it was funny because for a while there the police were at a quandary as to whether they could arrest us or not, because they needed to get the okay from the owner. And Rob, I remember, was our liaison with the police and he was very good at that, and they were not able to contact the appropriate person [laughs] at Chase Bank, so they couldn’t get the okay to evict us. So, that was pretty good.

Morales: [01:55:51] But our point really was to perform this act of civil obedience to take the arrest and make the point—that the breaking this law was to highlight the fact that the bigger crime was to keep lots vacant, and keep buildings vacant, while people were without homes, particularly women and children that were leading the demographic of the homeless population at the time.

Morales: [01:56:27] The good thing that—additional to that action, which I think was a successful action and we got some press on it, and it was… You know, you’re raising consciousness. Civil—that kind of action really is meant to appeal to the heart of those who see it being done and hopefully get them to take action, you know, to support your cause. And I think in that respect, I think we got our message out, and we made it clear to people that we were willing to take these kinds of actions. And that’s what I believe. I believe that squatting these vacant buildings—is an act of civil disobedience.

Morales: [01:57:12] I mean you know… We had an action later on, I don’t think it was when I was working with PTH, but we were defending a woman in Brooklyn who was getting evicted from a home she’d been in for forty years.

Lewis: Miss Ward.

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: Yeah. That was during the housing… So, all of this was happening right after the housing kind of market crashed

Morales: Right.

Lewis:  in 2008.

Morales: Exactly.

Lewis: And so, there were a bunch of—mainly people of color, who had gotten these predatory loans—

Morales: Right.

Lewis: and so, they were being foreclosed upon.

Morales: Right.

Lewis: So, it was Miss Ward in Brooklyn…

Morales: Right.

Lewis: We were targeting Chase…

Lewis: [01:57:58] And during that whole mix, we also did banner drops—

Morales: Right.

Lewis: at three buildings at the same time, and then had the action in Brook Park

Morales: Right.

Lewis: and marched on Chase Bank in the South Bronx.

Morales: Yes! I remember that, yeah.

Lewis: You were instrumental in making that connection with Brook Park.

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: So, all of this was happening within the same timeframe, the same couple of years that you were there.

Morales: [01:58:29] Yeah, that’s—those were, you know—for me… It was very—it’s the kind of witness… The kind of—the kinds of actions that I enjoy—that are meaningful to me. You know, and I—these are the kinds of things… I dream about these sorts of things.

Morales: [01:58:54] I can’t tell you how many times—I have this conversation with Rob all the time. Find me six continuous Chase-owned houses in Jamaica, Queens—right? Organize some people, get the press, get your messaging together, and go in! Right? Go into them! I guarantee you they’re going to—they’ll fold in a minute! They’re not going to… You know what I mean? It’s like get your negotiators ready to go. [Laughs] ] But you know, it’s like… People are… They’re—you know, they’re self-censoring. They’re just, “We can’t do that!”

Morales: [01:59:32] Or, you know—I don’t understand the reasons why not, but you know—this is the kind of thing that we need to have more of. We need to, you know—the kinds of stuff that PTH has done and continues to do. And also, the criminal justice stuff—you know, going in at Penn Station, and roll up and making sure that people are not abused, within those contexts. And the vacant buildings count, to get a read on what—where the vacant buildings are and so forth… My orientation, of course, was yeah, the ones we can identify—then we can go in. But just to raise the issue, because people are not aware! They’re just not aware. We need that ten times over. We need PTHs all over the country, you know—that kind of approach.

Lewis: [02:00:31] So, Frank, one of the things that you’re raising—and also, you know, I also dream about these things, and I sometimes was frustrated, or sad, or at a loss—why housing campaign members didn’t… Because as an organization we weren’t saying to people, “Don’t do that.” We were saying to people, “Go ahead!” I remember, you were supporting Genghis [Khalid Muhammad] and Marcus, who were interested in doing that, and there was this kind of tension between—among members saying, “Well, I’ll do it—but it will be my thing, not the organization’s thing.”

Lewis: [02:01:25] And then, we would allow the office to be a base, because people had to do these things at night!

Morales: Right.

Lewis: You break a lock at night, and go in. I remember we were scouting a building—you, and Sylver [Pandolfino], and Joe [Jordan], and I were scouting a building like at one in the morning, [laughter] and then we went in the bar to talk, and Joe had a skirt on, and people were like, “Who the fuck are you guys!?” So, we were doing those things—

Morales: Yeah.

Lewis: as staff, with some leaders.

Morales: Right.

Lewis: [02:02:05] But we never had—there wasn’t a critical mass of members—

Morales: Right.

Lewis: who… I won’t say didn’t want—but who just didn’t.

Morales: Yeah!

Lewis: What is your—looking back on that, what is your take on that?

Morales: Well, I’ve seen that… You know, I’ve experienced that in other instances as well. There’s fear. People are afraid—that particularly if you have any kind of past run-ins with law enforcement, and all that—so there’s that. Which—you know, okay, that’s understandable. There’s also I think a lack of—belief—you know that they can do it. That it’s possible to do this. Because it requires a certain—you know… It’s kind of an imagination… You have to imagine, use your imagination—that this can really happen. That it’s possible. I think there’s some of that. Or maybe it’s—there’s a hope that eventually the powers that be will see fit to provide for you. You know, there’s a kind of hope—you know, it’s kind of a… Yeah, it’s a hope that eventually… If we—we’ll put on pressure, we’ll protest, and we’ll do what we need to do, we’ll melt the heart of the pharaoh, you know, and they’ll see fit to do this, so it’s a combination of things I think.

Morales: [02:04:04] I remember one time there was a building that was occupied by People on the Move, which was a squatter organization of sorts in the South Bronx, again around—you know—in the mid-80s. Some people from the Lower East Side actually had gone up to the South Bronx and organized this really great organization, right? And they took a dozen buildings up there! And there was one building on Home Street—I can’t remember, maybe it was Home Street, or maybe it was Crotona Park, I can’t remember. It was one of the buildings they had taken—it was forty families, a number of whom were formerly homeless. It was like forty apartments, right—some of whom were like MTA workers, worked in the subways. So, it was a strong building. They had renovated… I’d been there—I went up there, they were facing eviction, during the Dinkins’ administration, and they had the building hooked up, beautiful. It had been abandoned. And they had an aesthetic, that was not the aesthetic that I was used to in the East Village, right—they had smooth walls, and you know—they had really got this building together, it was functioning great.

Morales: [02:05:26] And they did not believe that Mr. Dinkins would come and evict them. They just didn’t believe it. This is what I mean, they had this misplaced trust. And Seth and I were up there that morning with a few others from downtown, and we had gotten wind that this was going to happen. They had heard it too, but they didn’t believe it. And they were also supported by the Catholic Church, in the neighborhood. So, they didn’t believe it, and so we kept saying, “They’re going to come. They’re going to come. You don’t understand it.” You know, this is— we’d experienced a number of what the police referred to euphemistically as, “self-help evictions.” That’s what the cops call it when they come and through you out of your house.

Lewis: It’s like “self-deporting”.

Morales: Yeah, and we said, “No look, you don’t understand, they’re coming.”

Morales: [02:06:19] They had… There was a woman who had a big pot of soup, she was sitting in the front steps of this big house, big building, for when they would come—to greet them.  That they were just coming from the city to see how—what they were doing, and they would negotiate, and then we have the Catholic Church on our side… What do you guys know? This kind of thing. So, we were there, and long story short, they came marching… The police came marching over the hill, one by one! Marching with rifles, [stomps feet to imitate sound of marching] like that! And they’re watching them come, and the first thing they did was to kick over the soup... And you know, long story short, this was a Friday—by Monday morning, it was a vacant lot. They didn’t even let people get their things out. It was the most brutal eviction by demolition, because we had a few of those downtown, down in the East Village, that I had ever seen. I had never seen anything this brutal, and as cruel, as this eviction was. This was under Dinkins. “Mr. Dinkins would never do that.” That’s what they kept saying.

Morales: [02:07:30] And you know, when they were out of the building, and the cops had surrounded the building entirely, Seth and I had gone in, and were just going through the hallways and so forth—and just... I remember it was like ghost— it was eerie, all peoples’ possessions, and kids’ toys laying around everywhere, and so forth, and so on.

Morales: [02:07:51] They had… So, you know, that’s a lot— I think that’s a lot of it too. Generally speaking, this is a panic culture… People think… I’m always telling people, “Look, you break a lock, you go into a building, you take—you know—you defend it!” You know, and I’ve had people say, “Well, what if they come for me?” I say, “Yeah, but I can also come back later, and you gonna still be here.” I’ve had people come to me and say, “You know, I remember ten years ago you told me that maybe I would be here, and I’m still in there. You don’t know unless you go for it. You’re not going to be renditioned to Romania, you know what I mean? It's like, I’m talking to these housing organizers, and other people, and so forth, [imitates voice] “Well, what if this, or what if that?” You know what I mean? There’s no serious downside to this. Thank goodness we haven’t— we’re not hit with a felony charge here— yet, in New York. They may go there, but that’s not the case now, you know?

Morales: [02:08:53] Take the housing—take it! Put a picket in front of the local bank that’s holding it, put the pressure on. You know—so, there’s fear… Homeless people— a lot of it is fear. People who have had this experience with the police, and so forth—that’s the first worry. But I think a lot of it too is this trust—that eventually—I’m part of an organization, we’re taking action, we’re doing stuff, we don’t need to go there. You know, we… Eventually things will change—a new mayor. This is what some of the left was criticizing, you know, and I won’t go into particular people, or names, or organizations, or whatever, but some of them… You taking—squatting—you’re taking the pressure off the state to provide the housing.

Lewis: Yeah.

Morales: [02:09:42] Right, it’s the benevolent state idea, you see. Eventually we get enough good people in there, then things will change! Right? We have to elect them, pressure, get people in there, make those changes, pressure them, protest, and so forth… Eventually you’ll get those changes. Well, no! why don’t— we’ll take these buildings—right—create some heat, then you can go in and talk to these people, and point to us, and say, “See, that’s going to be what’s going to happen, unless you guys deal with us.”

Lewis: [02:10:10] That’s A Letter from a Birmingham Jail strategy.

Morales: [02:10:16] Yeah! You know what I mean? So, you know, hopefully, we get there some day.

Morales: [02:10:21] But I can understand the reluctance of people, particularly people who have been abused, and, you know, have suffered in this way. A person who sleeps on the train, I mean,  maybe they’ve been booted a few times by the cops… This is their life! So, you tell them, “Hey, we’re going to go break a lock, and we’re going in, and so on…” I realize it’s a high bar, see?  But if we can get some of the activists, and organizers, and, you know, that whole thing about white skinned privilege, and all this kind of thing—to get down with this, start moving on this kind of thing, and bring people along, and create confidence…

Morales: [02:11:04] Because once you do it… And this is like Marcus.

Lewis: Yeah, he’s still doing it.

Morales: Yeah! You talk to Marcus. And you know… You talk to somebody like that who says, “Yeah, this is what I’ve done…” And take them… You go to their houses! This is in terms of our experience with squatting,.. You know, we’re there for a year or two, and after a while you start think, “Boy, I’m here… I’m good. I’m here for the long term, I’m not thinking they’re going to come in next week and throw me out.” We had some of those kinds of experiences, but after a while, I think it’s an innate kind of thing that takes place—in your home. It’s like a bird with a nest or something. You start to believe that it’s your home. You don’t fear anymore.

Morales: [02:11:48] Then actually it turns into, “Try to push me out of here.” You see? It flips, you know, because you start to defend it, particularly if you’re with a collective of people, and so on. And you have a neighborhood that’s coming out to support you, because they understand—and that’s part of it too, in terms of the strategy of squatting. When we were starting to squat, we would set up tables at Tompkins Square Park— not saying we’re going to be evicted tomorrow, or whatever, or an action, but to just sign our eviction watch list. “We’re occupying buildings in the neighborhood to create housing… If they ever come for us, would you be willing to come out?

Morales: [02:12:27] So, you just—you organize the community before the emergency. You get everybody on the same page, it makes it a lot more difficult for them to come in. We’re in eleven buildings now, we’re still there—and you know, we’ve been transitioned, and so forth. But, you know, again—going back to the European context, they’d say… I remember these people in one of these meetings, said to me, “How did you guys stay in there?” Because they’re used to making deals with the city. In Paris, for instance, they’ll come—the Socialist mayor in that neighborhood, they have the grandisimos [grandissimont] or whatever they call them—these separate little things… And they all have their own little mayor. This one guy says, “Oh yeah, he’s a socialist.” He came out on a motorcycle! [Laughs] This mayor, of this little area. [Imitates voice] “You have art here, you have a gallery, you make a show… A gallery space available to the community…” And so on, “Very good… Five-year lease, here you are.” You see—but they agreed to leave after a certain period. You see, and I remember talking to some of the ones that were facing that, and saying, “Organize! Get the people, and you know, let’s defend this!” “No, we made the deal. We made an arrangement.” So, it’s a different mindset.

Morales: [02:13:40] But here, you organize among the… Horizontally— our strength is at the base. We don’t have any sway at the top of the pyramid, you see. We can sway them, but only if we’re strong at the base. And I believe this is true around police brutality… In South Bronx there was a cop that was harassing and beating up people, in the late seventies and early eighties. And he was known, he was a real thug, right? We took a picture of him, and put it on a poster, we made a silkscreen poster—and said, “Beware of this thug cop. He’s acting in a criminal way.” Right—and we put the posters all over the place, particularly in areas where he would see them. And we began to create campaigns on the street, to embolden people—not necessarily to do violence, but just to stand up! And to create a psychological condition among these perpetrators of these types of crimes, to like—wise up. The communities… We have to defend ourselves. By taking the housing, by taking the storefronts and creating businesses for people, and so forth… That’s the way.

Morales: [02:15:05] See, you say, “Well, is that a solution Frank?” I’m not saying it’s a solution, you can talk of short-term solutions, or what they—what’s—a lot of the activists now talk about [imitates voice] “transformative, and transactional” you know, and all this kind of stuff, right? Now, you do that, then the policy people can go make an appointment with the undersecretary of so and so, or the mayor’s deputy so and so, or whatever, and say, “Look, we need to re—in New York City here for instance, people say, “Well, what’s the solution to the homeless crisis here in New York City.” Right? “We know that you’re interested in squatting, and so forth, but that’s only going to impact a certain amount of people, even though we know your dream is for hundreds of thousands of homeless people across the country, and their supporters, to occupy the vacant housing.”

Morales: [02:15:53] Okay, aside from that—right—what could we do here in New York City? Well, what we could do here in New York City is pressure the mayor to reinstate urban homesteading programs, create a legal, permitted means for people to access these vacant properties, of which there are lots of them, right? Reinstate urban homesteading—take the billion dollars a year—take a portion of the billion dollars a year that you’re putting into the homeless industrial complex, here in New York City, into an urban homesteading program with training programs and rehabilitative health healing programs—because people are damaged. The violence of homelessness is real. People are suffering—that’s got to be built in. But you take some of that money out of the hands of these speculators around homeless peoples’ lives—peoples’ lives—and create an urban homesteading program… Through eminent domain, target a whole bunch of buildings around New York City that could be a part of this program… That’s the solution. That would move us towards some kind of solution to homelessness here. Reinstate urban homesteading—take all your activists, and take all your housing stuff, and put some pressure on [Bill] De Blasio. We had this! You ended it in the early nineties. It’s not something they’re not— unfamiliar with. They could do it. He could mandate that. They could use eminent domain and take all these vacant properties. That could be done. Right?

Lewis: [02:17:23] It’s not that complicated.

Morales: [02:17:23] You don’t have to break locks, and so on, if you don’t want to go there, that’s okay. Right? Or you could break the locks, and then as a result of the, you know, the hullaballoo that you created around that, [imitates voice] “Well, what do you want?!” “This is what we want.” You see—but you’re not going to get their attention unless you occupy the houses. One way or the other. But these things could be done. It’s a matter of political will, etcetera, etcetera… But in terms of the activists and the organizers, getting beyond what we’re talking about. Either the cynicism, they’re wed to their grants, they’re not for profit, or whatever they’re doing, they’re hoping the state’s going to come in at the last minute and save them, or messiah, or somebody… Whatever—whatever it is—fear, you know… They’re going to be snatched up and put in some dark hole somewhere. You know, whatever it is that’s keeping them from doing it—it could be done. This is doable. And it would really alleviate some of the pressure.

Morales: [02:18:25] Just even reinstate—the last year that the urban homesteading program was—they were accepting requests for proposals—RFPs, right? In the early nineties, whenever it was shut down—they got 12,000… Because I know—I talked to the guy who was the head of the urban homesteading program, down at Maiden Lane, at the time, and he told me they got 12,000 separate applications. That’s 12,000 applications for 12,000 separate vacant buildings. Right? And each application, you have to be a group of a dozen of you, and you have to have a certain amount of skills, but you don’t have to be highly skilled… And you apply for an address—to take this building, a three, four, five-year program, where you do the grunt work, and all that… The city puts in a boiler… You know, and it’s a program—sweat equity, right? You don’t have the money, but you have the sweat, and you have a commitment to it, and so forth. They got 12,000 applications—they took two! And then they shut the program down. So, there’s a large base of people, let alone homeless populations, that would… You know this is the way to go. This could be enacted by the mayor, and it doesn’t require people breaking the laws or anything like that. This is something organizations could all band together, and this could be a unified demand—reinstate urban homesteading.

Morales: [02:19:53] For the Poor People’s Campaign, Reverend Barber’s group, and others, this is a national move! Urban homesteading—these programs were happening all over the country! Municipalities had these urban homesteading programs. They’re basically legal, permittable ways for people to access vacant property, to create what are called, [imitates voice] “Low-income co-ops, right?... Home ownership…” You’re owning shares, or what have you, and all that baloney. But, you know, a way to create housing for people… The—you know—the bureaucracies, the state, the capitalists, and so forth—they haven’t seen fit to organize ways...

Morales: [02:20:36] You know, I’m tired… Every week the New York Times has another article, [imitates voice] “The housing crisis…” You know, it’s just.. You know… “The solutions are elusive…” You know, all this bullshit. It’s like, no one wants to build low-income housing. You don’t even hear in the so-called presidential debates of late, anyone even talk about housing for poor people. Or homeless… you know, the homeless… All you hear is demonizing homeless people, and the racist Trump demonizing people who are trying to survive in tents, or in shacks, and so forth, around the country—and going after them, you know—criminalizing homeless people, that’s their agenda. But the left, the broader movements, and so forth, need to be raising up these issues, let alone these presidential candidates.

Morales: [02:21:31] You know, I remember back in the sixties—not that it was all great then—but even the bourgeois politicians were talking about, “War on Poverty”, and “What is the budget for low-income housing?” Before it became affordable housing. It used to be called low-income housing. Nobody’s— it’s obliterated. It’s not even a subject anymore. People don’t even talk about it. And that’s a problem. I fault the movements in general, for taking—casting a blind eye towards the needs of the poor. You know, that’s why, for me, you know—that’s central. If we’re not dealing with that, then we’re missing something. Those are the folks who are suffering. It’s not only in this country, it’s throughout the world. I mean, the U.N. just put out a report in the last few days, about [imitates voice] “Growing wealth disparity all around the planet.” I mean this is, you know… And the squatting… In terms of the squatting people and direct action that people are taking—everybody needs a home. They’re going to create one one way or the other. Like I said, the birds have their nests, and so forth. You know, people do it, they do what they do. Nairobi, Lima, Manila, you know, throughout Latin America—no major—no cities are creating housing for poor people.

Lewis: [02:23:04] Except Venezuela.

Morales: [02:23:06] Well, yeah, yeah, exactly. Correct me—you’re exactly correct. In some enlightened environments, right? But generally speaking, you have these rings of squatter encampments. Mike Davis has written about that—right. And others have written about that. Shadow Cities is another good book on that. People are creating—three-quarters of the world’s poor live in houses they made themselves. Capitalism does not meet the needs of the majority of the people of the world, particularly around housing. It’s a source of violence—we know all this already, and militarism, and all the rest.

Morales: [02:23:53] So, I mean, people in this city, and around—in other municipalities, in terms of the reality of homelessness, and the violence that’s attached to that, need to reorient their priorities at this time. And begin once again to take heed of the fact that there are people who are dying and suffering on the streets—feel some kind of something, you know—feel! Period—and begin to organize accordingly. Like organizations like Picture the Homeless, you know, have done. And there are some groups around the country, but I just don’t hear much going on there.

Lewis: [02:24:40] No, we don’t. This is why this oral history project, I think, is so important.

Morales: Uh-huh.

Lewis: Because we don’t hear about the efforts of homeless people organizing, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s not happening.

Morales: Right.

Lewis: Of course, it’s happening! But we don’t hear about it.

Morales: Exactly.

Lewis: [02:25:02] And if it’s a poor people’s organization, they’re not going to have money to have conferences, and everybody can go stay in hotels and have plenaries and all that. It’s very rare that that would happen. So, how can we get the word out about the work that we’ve done… How can we listen to the work to other people, to the stories of other people? And so, we’re hoping that not only through this project can we tell the story of Picture the Homeless, but that we can also create a model so that other homeless folks and other poor people can start to tell— not just their personal stories, but share their analysis, and share the story of their collective work together, their collective stories. I guess we’ll end here. But I want to ask you if you have any final thoughts about Picture the Homeless?

Morales: [02:26:00] Well, yeah—I mean, I hear of late that PTH is going through some changes. I would hope that through the collaboration of those who are devoted and committed to the organization, like the phoenix rising from the ashes, just to replenish, and to come, to create— what—PTH.2, right? Because it’s needed now more than ever! I mean this is… Look at the times we’re in now, with this… You’ve got the Ku Klux Klan in the White House… It’s appropriately named—the White House, you know. And the crisis of people living on the streets and suffering and so forth—it’s not going to go away. We need to organize. So, my hope would be that—and I would be—whatever I could do to help out… Is to resurrect, and reinforce, and empower Picture the Homeless anew, so that we can push forward the struggle for human rights for people who are without a home.

Lewis: Well, thank you, Frank. And I feel there are more stories, so if we want to do a second interview, you just let me know.

Morales: Any time!

Lewis: All right, thank you.

Morales: Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]