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Police responded to a call from 202 E. Sixth St. near the Bowery at 11:56 a.m. Sat., May 9, and found a young woman in apartment No. 5 unconscious. She was declared dead by emergency medical technicians at 12:06 p.m. and the case was referred to the Medical Examiner’s Office. Police identified her as Lesia Pupshaw, 26.

According to police, “Five to six men had been throwing bottles at her earlier Friday night.”

Local photographer and blogger Bob Arihood on his Neither More Nor Less blog, gives a more detailed account of an ongoing feud between a group of local Hispanic youths and the Tompkins Square Park “crusties.” According to Arihood, there were at least three or four separate, increasingly violent run-ins between the two groups over the past week.

“One of those confrontations, the one on Friday night, resulted in the injury and hospitalization of a male crusty and a young woman being brutally battered on the head and face,” Arihood wrote. “The Friday night confrontation, which began with taunts and threats, evolved into serious physical violence. This ultimately violent confrontation was perhaps responsible for the death of a young woman, who with brutal head injuries, returned to an apartment on Sixth St. and sometime later Saturday morning died. … Another witness, not a crusty, whom the police did not believe, claimed that she had seen the young males responsible for the young woman’s injuries late Saturday afternoon in Tompkins Square Park near the Seventh St. and Avenue A entrance.”

According to Arihood, the suspects and crusties clashed again on Sunday night. Witnesses identified the suspects as “three light-skinned Hispanic males in their mid-to-late teens, one wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball cap.” The local males threw water balloons, hurled taunts and ran. The crusties chased them to Avenue D and Fourth St., where a box cutter, a pipe and bottles emerged. Outnumbered and on “hostile turf,” the crusties retreated to Tompkins Square, where Arihood said he held a flashlight as glass was picked out of one crusty’s bloody scalp.

aND NOW THE LYING ASS NEW YORK POST ARTICLE.

Last updated: 7:37 am
May 17, 2009
Posted: 2:04 am
May 17, 2009

Sometimes crime does pay.

Nearly 30 years after an eclectic group of poets, performers, anarchists and artists illegally occupied a burned-out East Village tenement, they’ve officially become a Manhattan co-op.

STERN: CHEAP DEALS UNFAIR REWARD FOR BAD ‘DEED’

Last Monday, the group signed off on the final paperwork allowing them to legally call their one-bedroom apartments home. They’re now owners of the Bullet Space building — named after the art gallery and community space on its ground floor.

The cleaned-up, five-story cooperative at 292 E. Third St. is a far cry from the rat-infested hellhole into which they first moved in the 1980s as squatters. Back then it was so derelict, its owners chose to walk away rather than pay taxes. Now the city says it’s worth $2.2 million, and real-estate experts estimate its market value between $4 million and $5 million.

To its shareholders, the building was always a coveted prize.

“What is it they say, possession is nine-tenths of the law? That was our motto,” said artist Rolando Politi, an original Bullet Space squatter.

Politi lived through the building’s intense rehab, when residents refused to vacate out of fear they’d lose their toeholds in the neighborhood.

“The city would tell us to leave and let them make the renovations, but who’s to say we would ever have gotten back in?” Politi said from his fourth-floor unit, where he’s fashioning street trash into a June 21 art exhibition.

The building’s reddish façade no longer bears the graffiti marks and cracked windows from its past, when the city battled squatters fiercely.

Hundreds of people forced their way into abandoned East Village buildings and claimed ownership, until firefighters and cops showed up to clear them out.

In 2002, the city made the controversial decision to sell Bullet Space and 10 other East Village “squats” — including one where actress Rosario Dawson grew up — for $1 each to a nonprofit housing group, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board.

The city told the group and residents they had to bring the building up to code before the residents could officially take ownership. As part of the city’s low-income program, residents get a 40-year real-estate tax exemption.

Bullet Space is the first one to make it through the conversion process begun in 2002. Another former squat, The Umbrella House, is expected to go co-op soon as well.

Some critics say the plan rewards illegal behavior.

“I’m outraged that property would go to squatters,” said former Port Authority Executive Director George Marlin, who ran for mayor in 1993 on the Conservative Party line.

“Look at all the hardworking people who are losing their homes right now. Is it fair for squatters who badgered the city into giving them a building to now be able to profit from it?”

Bullet Space residents paid for their building’s rehab, and carry a $668,759 mortgage taken to cover the cost of renovations.

Thirty years ago, when developers walked away from the dilapidated site, squatters moved in and contributed about $50 a month for basic costs. Now those fees are up to $614, said 67-year-old poet John Farris, who lives on the fourth floor.

Farris, who invested significant sweat equity and personal money into the building, remembers the days when the toilets were “bucket flush” and heat came from wood stoves fueled by flammable objects hauled in from the streets.

“We had water, but not much else,” said the poet, who will publish his first novel this fall. “The winters were rough.”

gotis@nypost.com

Thank Gosh there were intelligent people who commented and told the REAL story.

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ManyYearsInNYC wrote:
THIS ARTICLE IS INTENTIONALLY MISLEADING! Before anyone gets upset about this “unfair deal,” let’s rewind to the start. The original landlord walked away from the building because he couldn’t make any money, like thousands of other landlords during this period. The cause was a combination of rent control, the Arab oil embargo, economic depression and the fact that people with money refused to live in such areas. Landlords either torched the buildings for insurance $ or sucked out money until the City foreclose. The area became full of crime, drugs, etc. Theses artists were a rag-tag bunch who made homes in a few abandoned buildings and, unwittingly, began the process of gentrification that now puts yuppie $$$ in the City’s tax coffers. The deal with the City for the building simply transferred the building to it’s residents (this has been done with over 1,100 other buildings in NYC!) and created LIMITED-EQUITY co-ops…which means it is difficult for the residents to cash-out, since resale is restricted somewhat. They also can’t sell the building, so the $4 million mentioned is irrelevant. The 40-year tax-exemption is simply a reference to the City’s J-51 abatement program for repairs to apartment buildings that was created to encourage LANDLORDS to fix up buildings. Also, the building wasn’t worth much to a private developer, since any occupied building is worth MUCH LESS than a vacant lot, because you can build a yuppie building on a vacant lot and make $$$. Bottom line? These folks took a lemon and made lemonade. If they hadn’t, there would have been an ugly new building there with maybe 10% affordable units, a similar 40-year tax break, etc. Sometimes the little guy wins a small victory. Is that so bad?
5/17/2009 9:06 PM EDT
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SnuggleBunny wrote:
I heart Bergen Bob. All of you commenting on how valuable the property is are missing the underlying fact that these people stepped in and invested decades of sweat equity, personal finance, and care into these buildings and this community. You’re just mad you or your bratty friends can’t live there because the area is trendy now. Well, I grew up there, and some of my friends live in the former squats, and let me tell you that YOU are the lazy ones who expect to have a place handed to you by a broker or by some greedy landlord b/c you have the money to throw at it to be near your favorite brunch spot. Sod off. It’s not your community, never was, never will be…the only semblance of community left in that area exists amongst the artists, poets, and musicians that dared call it home when the City turned its back on the Lower East Side/East Village.

If you didn’t live here in the 80s…
if you’re not from the Lower East Side/East Village…
if you don’t understand what a terrible and yet wonderful place it was to live…
then you have no business commenting on this story. Go buy yourself a doorman condo in some glass and metal box and be happy with it. The whole City doesn’t–and shouldn’t–belong to you. They earned the right to these buildings.
5/17/2009 6:07 PM EDT
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me@here.com wrote:
I was here back in those days and let me tell anybody who doesn’t get it – that building wouldn’t even be there if they hadn’t moved in and worked their butts off to bring it back to a reasonable state. Most of the buildings didn’t have squatters either – they had drug dealers and addicts from everywhere lining up twenty four hours a day to buy drugs – yelling and screaming and throwing their dirty needles all over the streets and bleeding on the sidewalks. There were rats and garbage and it was dangerous too. Meanwhile the old timers who stuck through it all are now being forced out by greedy landlords who are charging two thousand dollars a month for fifth floor wallk up apartments that shouldn’t cost one third that price. Oh – you mean you thought these landlords actually renovated these places? Let me tell you what they did in my building. The apartment beneath me has all the same filthy floors, walls and ceilings – the landlord simply put new floors, walls and ceilings over the old ones. Meanwhile, the old ceiling is still ready to fall at any second when it will bring both ceilings down on the tenant and her poor cats. You have to walk up three steps to get in her apartment now because it’s shrinking lolol. Meanwhile, the services supplied are wretched – garbage sits for days till it’s leeching vile fluids after which the super drags it through the hallway, leaving a layer of slime behind (that he does NOT mop up). He also cleans the hallways with a mop so filthy, it smells for hours afterward. And guess what? These new tenants paying these high rents? They never complain about anything. Front door lock broken? It will stay that way for days because they say nothing. I’d much rather have tenants like the folks who squatted and fixed that place up and made it what it is today. Those are good neighbors and not criminals.
5/17/2009 4:16 PM EDT

People shouldn’t comment on things they know nothing about. The only reason why I gave up squatting to move to my apartment was because I couldn’t deal with doing work days, fixing my place and being responsible. It is easier to pay rent and fuck about all day. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit that but I’d rather tell the truth and deal with it. That is a virtue that the New York Post evidently doesn’t have.

I love you Bill!

Barbara

The following article was taken from The Villager.

Volume 78 – Number 49 / May 13 – 19 , 2009
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933

Obituaries

Villager photo by Lorcan Otway

“Barnacle Bill” liked to roll his own tobacco cigarettes, a habit he picked up at sea.

‘Barnacle Bill,’ the last sailor of Tompkins Square, dies at 44

By Lorcan Otway

William “Barnacle Bill” Scott died of an infection after suffering a stroke, last Saturday, May 2. He had been in a coma at Lincoln Hospital, in the Bronx, since March 8.

Born on July 8, 1965, “Barnacle” was well known in the East Village as a gentleman and a gentle man, in spite of his hardscrabble looks. Bill wore a nose ring, and had a large, upturned scar on the left side of his mouth, giving him the look of a pirate, but that was the farthest from the reality of this man.

He went from the Navy, where he was a petty officer, a bosun commanding small craft, to the Navy Reserve, and then honorably discharged became a merchant mariner, spending a good part of most years sailing American-flag vessels.

When not at sea, Bill spent a good deal of time in Tompkins Square Park, where he was as at home with the “crusties” as he was with the Village intelligentsia. His stories, whether of life at sea or East Village adventures, were punctuated with his trademark Homeric line, “It was not for nothing that…,” and on the story would wind.

Bill was not too proud to borrow money from a friend. To loan him any sum was to know that as soon as Bill returned from his next voyage, he would repay the loan, over dinner, paid for by Bill, and at the table would be a collection of others who would not otherwise have eaten as well that day.

One need not look far to find where Bill got his sense of responsibility or his kindness. His mother, Dorothy Scott, was a foster mother to other children.

“He was kind of like a Lower East Side legend,” said neighborhood activist John Penley, who recently relocated to Erie, Pa. “I knew him for like 15 years, and I never knew his name — just ‘Barnacle Bill.’ He would go out to sea on merchant ships for months at a time, and come back and stay for a while, spend all his money, and go back to sea. He was the last sailing man from the Lower East Side that I knew… . The last of a breed that is probably vanishing.”

His funeral was held last Friday at the Ortiz Funeral Home, 144 Willis Ave. and 141st St., in the Bronx.

Fly & The Drunkard’s Wife!
with Eugene Carrington – poet/bike messenger
Friday May 17 – 7pm
Bluestockings Books – 172 Allen St
http://bluestockings.com/events-calendar/

Fly, cartoonist & author (Peops, Zero Content) and Craig Flanagin, musician and cartoonist (God Is My Co-PIlot, Pants Avengers)
present new spoken/sung/yelped stories, playlets, songs, and frivolous dances.
With performance ensemble/electro-gypsy band The Drunkard’s Wife.
Expect accordions, brass, nice hats, and homemade electronics

HOW IN THE HELL DID THEY ALL ATTEND HIGH SCHOOLS FOR DECADES AND NEVER LOST THEIR MINDS BECAUSE OF SOME GIRL’S PERIOD? SERIOUSLY….I mean not everybody wears tampons and they had to have smelled sanitary napkins. How about some girl who didn’t realize Auntie Flo arrived and had stained knickers? By my estimation, those vampires should have wiped out the female populace of any high school they attended. And Edward was with Bella all the time, even staying in her bedroom while she slept. Come on now!!!

As a matter of fact, no vampire story addresses this shit. You can’t tell me that vampires don’t smell menstrual blood if they can smell anything else.

I cringe when I read this book. People say that I am honest, too honest but Barack Obama opens his soul to the highest point of honesty. Not once in a million years have I wrote aboiut my struggle with identity as a black woman.

I was brought up to respect myself as a black woman. I was exposed to Langston Hughes. I was always listening to soul music and being that I grew up at the height of the Civil Rights movement, I was blessed with a strong education in Black HIstory. Unlike Barack Obama, I always went to predominately black school but they were middle class schools, not the concrete jungle of the inner city ghettoes.

At school, I wasn’t mocked for having a crush on Danny Bonaduce of the Partridge Family. We all watched that stuff. We watched Soul Train on the television and followed it up with American Bandstand.

In my home, I was in denial. I thought my foster father was white. He was so pale and had such “good” hair. I overlooked the fact that some of his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, had kinky hair even if they had the pale skin. I don ‘t know where I got that from. One night, my foster mom was teasing me about the way I danced and said I danced like a white person. Daddy defended me and my mom joked that he was like the rest of his people and didn’t have any rhythm either. I was a kid, I understood it to mean that Daddy was white.

I was very protective of my dad. He was my heart and soul. I think it was because I thought he was white, I didn’t harbor any bigotry toward whites because that would be like hating my daddy.

Daddy’s girl, that is what I was and I started dating white guys when my hormones kicked in. Doesn’t every girl date men that remind her of her daddy?

However, the resemblance between my father and white men only was at complexion. My father and his family considered themselves black even though they were whiter than octoroons. My aunt became a black muslim, following the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. She scoffed at the white man’s history that I was learning in school and hipped me to the book, Before the Mayflower. That was all well and good but nobody was noticing my deepening exposure to white culture. I watched tv all the time. My celebrity crushes was Donny Osmond, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, Elton John, Robert Plant, the list goes on and on. My parents came in my bedroom one day when I was a teen ager and my mother exclaimed, “Freddy, she has no black people on her bedroom wall”. It was true. I bought all kinds of rock magazines and covered my bedroom walls with Alice Cooper, Mick Jagger, Edgar Winter, Robert Plant and my favorite, Conan the Barbarian. All the comic books I read was primarily about white people. All the books I read, mostly about white people. Okay, I did read books like Down these mean streets. and I did read stories about black people like Uncle Tom’s cabin and things I had to read in school like James Baldwin.

I don’t know when I lost my sense of identity. When I was a teen ager, I never ran to the beauty parlor to get my hair straightened, it was nasty and nappy and I didn’t care. My mother harassed me daily, asking me why I can’t be like the nicely groomed girls across the street. I sullenly said nothing as I stood before her, dressed in my uniform, flannel shirt, t-shirt and dirty jeans and sneakers. I worshipped the sun. I always got as dark as I could. A lot of kids that I knew stayed out of the sun so that they wouldn’t get dark. Yet all the kids who straightened their hair and stayed out of the sun considered themselves blacker than me.

I talked like a white girl. That is what everybody said. My mother didn’t put up with slang words. I got slapped in the face for replying yeah to her instead of yes. From as early as when I learned to talk, it was drummed into me to speak properly. My mother meant well, she wanted me to succeed in life. She wanted me to be as smart as any child, black or white.

Still, it set me apart from other kids, particularly the lower class kids that I ran with. I was a foster kid, a ward of the state. Despite the fact of my diction and the fact that I was well-read. I was not in the circles of the Black middle class elite in my town. I hung out with the rough kids. The kids who lived in the projects. The neighborhood kids who despite the fact that they lived in nice homes and had hard working parents, still ran the streets and learned to steal from stores and did things that no child of our ages are exposed to until they are adults. We were knowing little kids. We hung out and watched the fights on our streets of neighbors who got caught cheating on their wives and the black skillet pan flying after their heads and the police who came to try to calm things down. The girls who got pregnant at 13, 14 and so on. These kids liked me because I didn’t put on airs and i dressed like a bum but when I opened my mouth to speak, that set off the alarm that I really wasn’t one of them. So, I was tolerated but if somebody felt like getting in a fight and beating somebody up, I was usually the target.

Things came to a head when I got my first boyfriend, a white boy. Honestly, I don’t know what happened. Was I ostracized? Well, there were plenty of black kids who thought I lost my mind. I thought to myself that they were nuts, especially the girls. They spent all their time straightening their hair, staying out of the sun, never going swimming so their hair “won’t go back” but I was the “white girl”
Strange. So the inevitable happened, I did turn into a white girl. My white friends didn’t give a shit about how I talked (well, umm, the lower class ones did). We all shared the same love for rock and flannel shirts. I lost myself then and for a very long time I was in denial. A look in the mirror didn’t even help me. I disavowed myself of all things black and I didn’t care. All my friends were white. I never listened to black music anymore unless I happened to be at a black friend’s home and that was rare. When my mother kicked me out of her house, I moved into my white boyfriend’s house and moved into my white world and for a very long time I never looked back.

The hair thing. Well, I finally succumbed to looking like a white girl by first getting a gheri curl and then I found out about braids. I wore braids for years. It’s funny but what broke me out of my braids and my shame of my nappy hair was when I was squatting in the lower east side and I was with these white girls and we all shaved our hair off. NO SELF RESPECTING BLACK GIRL CUT THEIR HAIR!!! It was the most freeing thing that i have ever done. After that, I wasn’t diligent about getting my hair done so that nobody knew it wasn’t my hair. Even now, I wear a weave but that is only because I am too lazy to learn how to take care of my hair. I don’t shave my hair at the edges that you don’t see my naps. You can see my naps clearly and I don’t give a rat’s ass.

Still Barack Obama writing about confronting his identity got me thinking. Even though I thought I was getting back to my roots, I still have a very long way to go. I don’t have a core strong group of black women that I am friends with. I know there are a stong community of artistic, free thinking blacks but I still haven’t tapped into that. Nearly all of my friends are white. Only recently, I have started reaching out to the black women that I do know so that I do not let them slip away. I still have not had a suitable relationship with a black man. I still have white boy fever.

Damn, I’m nearly fifty years old and it took me this long to realize that I need to come into my own as a black woman, not an oreo. Obama’s book is a awakener for me. Tonight, I paused and thought about how I present myself as a intelligent black woman and I was full of anger. Because I really haven’t been doing that. I prance around like a damn fool, performing for people, not being myself because I want to have everybody like me. That is just bullshit. I really don’t care about fucking firemen. I don’t care about young boys. I really don’t. I say that shit because I think it amuses people but it makes me look like a fool. It’s time to grow up. It’s time to treat myself like the INTELLIGENT AND COMPASSIONATE BLACK WOMAN that I AM!

BLESSED BE.

Barbara R. Lee

—–
I choose:
The Who

1. Are you a male or female: Acid Queen

2. Describe yourself: I’m Free

3. How do you feel about yourself: Anyway, Anyhow Anywhere

4. Describe your ex : Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

5. Describe your current boy/girl situation: had enough

6. Describe your current location: Tommy’s holiday Camp

7. Describe where you want to be: Armenia City in the Sky

8. Your best friend is: Batman

9. Your favorite color is: Blue Red and Grey

10. You know that: a little is enough

11. What’s the weather like: heat wave

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called? Amazing Journey

13. What is life to you: much too much

14. What is the best advice you have to give: Cry if you want

15. If you could change your name what would you change it to: Athena

1. My ex…took me shopping for my Pesach/Passover food tonight

2. Maybe I should… go to bed.

3. I love… my cats and my humans

4. People would say that I… am slightly crazy

5. I don’t understand why people… are cruel

6. When I wake up in the morning..I say my prayers

7. I lost my… my mind years ago.

8. Life is full of… change and emotion

9. My past… is murky and wild

10. I get annoyed… with stupid people who think they’re slick.

11. Parties are… great if there’s lots of food and fun people.

12. I wish… my apartment was clean

13. Dogs… are adorable

14. Cats…sleep a lot

15. Tomorrow… I will do step work with my sponsor

16. Love… imakes me all glowy

17. If I had a fortune… I would buy homes for my brother, my sister and Ginny. The rest, I’d travel all over the world and then buy a farm in the Hudson Valley and let Anarchist kids come and farm.