Squatter Wars

At the time of Hine’s survey, the city and landlords were waging an assault on those whose tenancy was most precarious, seeking to dislodge them in the name of sanitation, redevelopment, and rising land values.

Hine documented a range of groups struggling against eviction: tradespeople who sublet premises of uncertain title; “truck gardeners” raising chickens, goats, and crops on unbuilt lots; and “shanty-dwellers” improvising shacks from discarded building materials.  In the face of “summary dispossess” proceedings and dawn police raids, these residents developed a repertoire of resistance. They stalled cases before magistrates, formed mutual-aid networks, and when all else failed, staged last-ditch resistance.

Hine was particularly drawn — judging by his inclusion of three newspaper clippings — to William M. Molenaor’s defiance of the millionaire landowners of Fort Washington. Living alone in a “canvas topped shack, half hut, half tent” near Broadway and Nagle Avenue, this seventy-five-year-old not only resisted the Building Department’s efforts to “oust” him but also spent five decades trying to prove himself the rightful heir to ninety acres of upper Manhattan.

Through these photographs and news clippings, Hine reminds us that the city’s northern periphery was not a tabula rasa but a zone dense with prior occupants, property relations, and land uses.