RENT
Date and Time
Dec 12, 2021 5:00 pm
Location
Shirlington
4251 S. Campbell Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22206
Dec 12, 2021 5:00 pm
Shirlington
Attend in-person or via livestream. Livestream the event on Busboys & Poets’ Facebook or Instagram page.
Jonathan Larson’s iconic rock musical RENT tells the story of a group of bohemians facing homelessness, addiction, and illness in early 90s-NYC. Learn more about the research that went into the production, specifically around the squatter’s movement.
Panelists:
Amy Starecheski – Author of Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City
David Merino – Actor, Angel Dumott Schunard in RENT
Matthew Gardiner – Signature’s Artistic Director and Director of RENT
Please RSVP if you are interested in purchasing a signed book with shipping (limited to those tuning in via livestream)
Doors open to the Robeson Room at Busboys and Poets Shirlington at 5 PM on December 12th. The program itself will begin at 5 PM with an introduction from Busboys and Poets Books Events Supervisor, Sesanye Sealey, before we dive right into it with our guests. There will be time for Q&A with the audience before the end of the program, as well as the opportunity to purchase a copy of OURS TO LOSE for Amy to sign the night of!
OURS TO LOSE: WHEN SQUATTERS BECOME HOMEOWNERS IN NEW YORK CITY - Though New York's Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict-an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and '80s Manhattan.
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.
Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on the use of oral history in social movements and the politics of history, value and property in cities. She is the Director of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. She consults and lectures widely on oral history education and methods, and is co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide. She was a lead interviewer on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and people who lost work. Her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press. She is the founder of the Mott Haven Oral History Project, which collaboratively documents, activates, and amplifies the stories of her longtime neighborhood, as told by the people who live there.
