In the waning hours of the 1970s, flyers announcing a “Real Estate Show” at 123 Delancey Street began appearing on the Lower East Side. This wasn’t a luxury condo viewing, but rather an “art show celebrating insurrectionary urban development.” The leaflet featured a drawing, by local artist Becky Howland, of an octopus clutching a tenement house in each of its tentacles. Above the creature appeared the text: “A building is not a precious gem to be locked—boarded—hoarded.”
The Real Estate Show was internationalist (“It is important for artists to express solidarity with Third World and oppressed people”); allied with struggles against racialized police violence (“The action is dedicated to Elizabeth Mangum, a middle-aged Black American killed by police and marshals as she resisted eviction in Flatbush last year”); and vigilant about art’s uses and abuses by speculators and rentiers (“artists, living and working in depressed communities, are compradors in the revaluation of property and the ‘whitening’ of neighborhoods”). It was also, as the organizers freely admitted …