As New York City was transformed by real estate and finance interests in the 1990s, a group of squatters on the Lower East Side waged battle for affordable housing

In October 2013, I visited Fly in her apartment in a squat on E. 7th Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When she first moved into her building in 1992, she was granted a space in a section of the squat that had been gutted by fire. It had no floor or windows; no heat, no electricity, no running water. With the help of fellow squatters, she rebuilt the apartment over a period of several years.

During my visit, she brought out a thick photo album, one of many she has to document the history of the building. There, in the photo album, was the room where we sat, but twenty years earlier, sunlight streaming through gaping holes where there are now windows; where there is now a floor, there were just beams and the ceiling of the apartment below.