Once Upon a Radical Time on the Lower East Side

New York Times Blog: By Sewell Chan

Clayton Patterson — ex-teacher, artist, photojournalist, documentarian, as he describes himself — is a man obsessed. His first anthology, “Captured: A Lower East Side Film/Video History,” published in 2005, took up 586 pages. His latest anthology, “Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side,” weighs in at 624 pages. ...

Radicalism on the Lower East Side has a long history — settlement house reformers, garment worker organizers, Italian socialists, native-born Trotskyites and Yiddish-speaking intellectuals among others — but the radicalism that Mr. Patterson focuses on is more recent: the tenant, artistic, leftist, antiwar, civil-rights, gay-rights activism that dominated the area’s politics in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. ...

The Lower East Side’s reputation as a refuge for struggling newcomers, down-and-out artists and nonconformist agitators appears to be fading, perhaps for good. “What we knew here before will never be here again,” Mr. Patterson said wistfully. Others were not so pessimistic. Mr. Rosen described local efforts to promote zoning restrictions that would prevent high-rise development in the area.

“Changing the zoning is not just a matter of how high a building goes, but it’s also a matter of remembering our history, being able to see our history, and beyond that, being able to protect our communities,” he said.