Bill Weinberg leads walking tour of Lower East Side alternative culture
World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg will be leading a weekly walking tour highlighting struggles for urban space on New York's Lower East side over the past generation—including the squats, community centers, community gardens and Tompkins Square Park. In addition to Tompkins Square, a focal point of popular resistance in the neighborhood since the 1850s, the tour takes in La Plaza Cultural and other community gardens, site of the evicted Charas/El Bohio community center, the former Christadora Settlement House, the historic Saint Brigid's Church (recently saved from destruction by a community acitivst campaign), the Lower East Side Ecology Center, and the former site of the Esperanza Garden, destroyed by city bulldozers in 2000. The one-hour tour leaves from the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) in C-Squat, 155 Ave. C between 9th and 10th Streets, every Sunday at 3 PM.
There is a requested donation of $20 to help the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space survive.
Memories of St. Brigid's, 1991
I remember the day in June 1991, shortly after the police closure of Tompkins Square Partk, when the NYPD actually invaded St. Brigid's Church and threatened to arrest Father George Kuhn, who was then a very public supporter of the homeless protest encampment that had been established in the park. This happened in the midst of a protest to demand re-opening of the park, and people immediately surged to the church when word spread of what was happening there. With too many witnesses on hand, the police backed down. Some journalism on the incident by Sarah Ferguson of the Village Voice is preserved in the Blackwell City Reader. Father Kuhn (I wonder where he is today) was a true living exponent of Liberation Theology for New York City.
While I find it disturbing how this is simply forgotten history for many (probably most) neigborhood residents today, I'm greatly heartened that St. Brigid's will survive. The high point of my walking tours so far was on Jan. 27, when my group happened to be arriving at St. Brigid's just as did the procession of parishioners for the church's historic re-opening, written up in the New York Times. The account also notes (as we were told that night) that the newly reopened St. Brigid's is now merged with St. Emeric's Church, which was at Ave. D and 12th St.
St. Brigid of Kildare was of course Irish, as the church has traditionally been. Her feast day is Feb. 1 (appropriately just after the re-opening celebration), and is clearly a survival of the pre-Christian Celtic feast Imbolc, also related to the North American tradition of Groundhog Day and Candelaria (or Candlemas) in Latin America, the Festival of Iemanya or Yemanja in Brazil, and (on some level) to the Jewish holiday Tu B'Shevat, Chinese New Year, and the Japanese Setsubun.
This global tradition of a halfway-thru-winter holiday speaks to a universal human culture from the pre-industrial age, when the rhythms of the Earth made much more difference in our lives....
St. Emeric was Hungarian (the country's first Christian king), and possibly the parishioners were mostly Hungarian when the church first opened, in 1949 according to Wikipedia. But for the past two generations at least, they have mostly been Puerto Rican and, more recently, Dominican. With the merging of the two parishes, what was St. Brigid's Church is now officially the Church of St. Brigid-St. Emeric.