micheal shenker,

East Village Squatters Lose a Leader
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
DESCRIPTIONPhotograph by Fly Michael Shenker in 1995, taking a break from doing some work in his squat on East Seventh Street.

Throughout much of the 1980s and ’90s, a certain segment of the East Village appeared to be in nearly perpetual rebellion. There were the squatters who took over abandoned city-owned buildings. There were the gardeners who reclaimed trash-strewn lots. And there were the anarchists and artists who declared rhetorical war on developers while holding roving protests and sometimes skirmishing with the police.

One of the people who seemed always to be at the center of such events was a wiry, bespectacled man named Michael Shenker, who arrived in the neighborhood as a teenager in the early 1970s and died on Saturday of liver failure at the age of 54. As word spread through the neighborhood that Mr. Shenker did not have long to live, a parade of visitors went to his apartment in a former squat on East Seventh Street. After he died, dozens of his comrades gathered there to fondly remember his many roles.

“Michael was like the hub of a lot of different circles,” Eric Rossi, a longtime friend said on Sunday night. “He was part of many groups and tied them all together.”

Mr. Shenker was an electrician, plumber and opera aficionado whom some described as the godfather of the East Village squatting movement. He was a regular at “soap box speakouts,” during which participants stood atop a milk crate on Avenue A and, in an East Village version of Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park in London, declaimed in loud voices on a variety of topics. He was querulous and opinionated and good-natured. Many police commanders and city officials considered him to be a disruptive rabble-rouser — he was arrested several times, at least — and his appetite for argument could try the patience of even his closest friends.
John R. Penley Mr. Shenker holding a sign at a protest against the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Mr. Shenker was perhaps best known in the neighborhood as a tactician who thought up ways to protect appropriated buildings and community gardens that were subject to eviction or bulldozing. Some of the projects he started ended up with narratives as dramatic any of the operas he loved.

He was one of the main organizers, for instance, of the occupation of a dilapidated former schoolhouse on East Fourth Street that a group of people decided to take over in the late 1980s and convert into housing for the homeless of Tompkins Square Park. The occupiers were eventually forced from the building, but they barricaded themselves inside for several weeks, helped by allies who crossed police lines at night and placed food and water in buckets surreptitiously lowered from windows.

He was also involved in buildings that the squatters hung onto, including one called Umbrella House on Avenue C, and 209 East Seventh Street, which was opened in 1985 and which Mr. Shenker moved into two years later. Soon afterward, he helped repair the building after a fire reduced nearly half of the structure to a framework of charred joists.

“For so many years, he single-mindedly pursued the goal of preserving those buildings,” said Seth Tobocman, an artist who described many of the battles surrounding the squats in a graphic novel titled “War in the Neighborhood” and included a character modeled after Mr. Shenker called the Maestro. “That was his focus.”

That persistence paid off in 2002, when the city agreed to legalize 11 surviving squatter buildings in the East Village, among them Mr. Shenker’s.

“We have weathered and survived the onslaught of gentrification,” he said then in an interview with The New York Times, “and due to our tenacity and adaptability, we’re still here.”

A few years earlier, Mr. Shenker had helped plan the defense of the Esperanza community garden on East Seventh Street, where more than 100 people locked themselves inside in an attempt to stop the Giuliani administration from destroying the garden and selling the lot to a developer.

Mr. Shenker, who had chained himself to a block of cement buried in the ground, promised to haunt the mayor “like the Furies from Greek mythology.”

Although that garden was not spared, the controversy over its razing helped lead to a settlement that removed hundreds of others from the auction block.

For years, Mr. Shenker limited his advocacy to neighborhood issues, but after the squats were preserved he widened his scope. In 2003 he organized demonstrations outside the United Nations against the impending war in Iraq. The following year, just before the Republican National Convention, the ABC news program “Nightline” broadcast Mr. Shenker’s photograph while reporting a story about people described as potentially dangerous. Friends said that he was angered by what he called an irresponsible assertion.

Eric Laursen, a writer and activist who worked with him during that time, said he was struck by the degree to which Mr. Shenker’s views were shaped by deeply felt sentiments.

“It wasn’t just about being right or doing the right thing — it was about throwing yourself into it and letting your emotions being part of what pushed you,” Mr. Laursen said. “He wanted to be one of the people who was infusing his passion into everyone else, chanting and waving his arm and being infectious.”