C-Squat

You are standing before one hundred fifty-five Avenue C, a building known to many as C-Squat. This five-story brick tenement was originally constructed in eighteen seventy-two to house working-class families and small businesses, including a pickle shop and a cigar factory. Following a devastating fire, the city took possession of the structure in nineteen seventy-eight, leaving it to sit in a state of rot and abandonment for years. It was in nineteen eighty-nine that a group of artists, musicians, and activists broke the locks to move in, beginning the process of turning a condemned ruin into a self-sustaining home.