let’s get awesome

In the winter of 1997 i was living on Avenue A and 5th Street. I was just finishing college and pretty clueless about…well…most things. But for the purposes of this post, let’s be more specific and say that I was pretty clueless about the squats and the anarchist scene on the Lower East Side. At that point, the only experience I had resembling an interaction with that scene was walking into Blackout Books and getting vibed…hard.

One morning, just after my 23rd birthday, I was walking down Avenue A and saw a whole bunch of police barricades set up on 5th Street between A and B. I asked someone on the street what was going on and they said that the city was about to demolish a building on the street. There had been a small fire in the squat in the middle of the block, and the city was using this opportunity to rid the neighborhood of the building and its residents.

I ran home and grabbed my super8 camera and walked down towards the barricades. I started shooting. I only had one cartridge– about 2.5 minutes. While I was standing on the street, I ran into an acquaintance who lived opposite 5th Street Squat. She let me come up into her apartment and shoot from the fire escape.

The city demolished 5th Street Squat that afternoon, in defiance of a court-issued injunction. The residents’ clothing, belongings, identifications, and even pets were inside. As was Brad Will. Story has it that it was a space heater in Brad’s room that may have caused the fire. Maybe this is had to do with why he would pull something as crazy as defending the building while a wrecking crane was smashing it to pieces. But I imagine, had he not been responsible for the fire, he would have defended the building in the same exact way.

Three weeks ago, while doing video journalism for Indymedia, Brad was shot and killed by plainclothes police (paramilitary) in Oaxaca and a community of people in and beyond New York City are filled with grief and rage. There is a lot of organizing being done in the wake of Brad’s death to show solidarity with the popular movement in Oaxaca. I think he would be proud of his friends.

Over the last ten years, as my own late-blooming activism began to take shape and direction our paths crossed more often and I got a chance to know Brad a little– though not well enough. This footage I shot of him back in 1997 was my first and clearest memory of him– and also a visual representation of one of the most politicizing moments of that part of my life. It’s sad to be digging it out under such shitty circumstances, but important to share.

For more on the situation in Oaxaca, check here.

For the Shadow’s article on 5th Street Squat check here.

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