Chapter 4
Recorded on January 22, 2068, in Tribeca, Manhattan.
Eman Abdelhadi: This is a recording of an interview conducted by Eman Abdelhadi. It is January 22, 2068. We are in the Tribeca Commune in Manhattan, in the home of Belquees’ family. Hi Belquees!
Belquees Chowdhury: Hi Eman!
Abdelhadi: Oh hello! And what’s your name? [Long pause.]
Chowdhury: That’s Hala! They’re being shy right now.
Abdelhadi: Aww, hi, Hala! How old are you?
Chowdhury: Come on! You know the answer to that! [Long pause.]
Chowdhury: They’re about three.
Abdelhadi: Adorable! Are you and Hala the only ones living in this apartment?
Chowdhury: No, I have another nibling, they’re six, my father, and my two sisters. My father comes and goes. Ever since Amma died, he likes to stay on the move.
Abdelhadi: I’ve heard you do a lot of hosting here in the Tribeca Commune.
Chowdhury: Yes. TC includes forty-one buildings in this neighborhood, organized around a large canteen and meeting hall two blocks west of here. We go there for our meals. This building that we’re in is mostly used to host travelers who come through the region. It has eleven flexible housing apartments. Our apartment is one of three in this building with permanent residents.
Abdelhadi: Forty-one buildings is huge! It’s gotta be the biggest commune in the city!
Chowdhury: One of them, yeah! We have thirty-five hundred residents. But our footprint is even bigger, because we have a lot of flexible space. All the communes can welcome travelers, refugees, kids on sojourn, visitors, and all that. But we kind of specialize in hosting. When city or borough assemblies aren’t virtual, we like to host people here. That’s why we spent a lot of time building meeting spaces. We have like twenty large halls, a canteen that can easily feed three times our resident population, and lots of flexible space.
Abdelhadi: How does the flexible space work?
Chowdhury: Every building has a few permanent residents, and they serve as hosts and caretakers who facilitate visitors’ use of the rest of the building. The apartments around us are full of Mi’kmaq who have a lot to say about Asiatic bittersweet. I’m not involved, to be clear. I am sure they would love to tell you all about it.
Abdelhadi: Full of what talking about what? I didn’t follow that last bit at all.
Chowdhury: Sorry. Mi’kmaq are a First Nation up in the North. Asiatic bittersweet is an invasive vine they farm. Or are trying to destroy. I’m actually not really clear on which. Right now, there is an assembly happening over how to deal with invasive vines in North America. They tried to figure it out on the forums but there was way too much conflict. Someone finally called an IRL. But this building is filled with visitng Mi'lmak botonists who have very strong feelings about this particular plant.
Abdelhadi: You light up when you talk about the commune. Have you been here for a while?
Chowdhury: Yeah! I helped set this all up! It’s been my heart and soul for the better part of the last decade.
Abdelhadi: Are you from this area?
Chowdhury: No, I’m from Queens. I grew up in Woodside. I first came to this area twelve or thirteen years ago to study at a school that was here—BMCC. It stood for the Borough of Manhattan Community College. You ate lunch at the canteen, right? That was that building, that’s where the school was.
Abdelhadi: Oh yeah! Hard to believe that was a school building.
Chowdhury: Yeah, it’s gone through a lot of renovation and repurposing. I was part of the student occupation here, and then when we liberated the detention center, I helped set up the Tribeca Commune. It’s a long story.
Abdelhadi: I’d love to get into it, but let’s start with Woodside first. I want to know more about where you grew up. What year were you born by the way?
Chowdhury: End of 2030 or beginning of 2031. I’m not totally sure. My parents are from Bangladesh, they moved here together in the mid-twenties. Abba drove taxis and my mom worked as a nursing assistant. We loved each other, but there wasn’t really time for anything but surviving. That was when prices were crazy, and we just kept working more and more to get less and less. I started working when I was twelve. Abba would take the taxi to a discount store upstate and fill it with canned and bottled drinks—those were still a thing back then. And I would put them in coolers of ice and sell them on street corners and the park in the summer. Sometimes I would babysit, other times I’d pick up shifts in some of the restaurants on our block. Anything I could find. Eventually, when I was seventeen, I started cleaning at Elmhurst Hospital where my mom worked.
Abdelhadi: Seventeen? Uh oh, so you started working at a hospital when LARS-47 hit?
Chowdhury: [Laughs.] Yup! What can I say? I’m drawn to crisis! No, but for real, I learned a lot there about organizing and about collective action. I’m grateful for that time. My mom had already been teaching me about organizing, because she was involved in worker and patient strikes that happened throughout the forties as they were closing public hospitals. Before Elmhurst, she worked at Queens Hospital. I grew up with all these meetings happening in our apartment, dozens of people crammed in, talking about their next action.
Abdelhadi: Tell me more about that!
Chowdhury: So, the workers kept going on strike over pay and patient care. The hospital was turning away patients who couldn’t pay or provide insurance. That was pretty much everyone at this point, because the depression was so bad. People could hardly afford food, let alone these insane fucking hospital bills! And we never had huge public investment in hospitals—the system relied on the idea that people or their employers could pay. And when gradually everyone was pretty much out of work, the system had nothing to sustain itself. So yeah, it was definitely an incubator for struggle.
One of my favorite direct actions was when workers started sabotaging the billing. [Laughs.] Bills would mysteriously disappear from people’s accounts. But of course, that didn’t last long. The workers weren’t being paid consistently and supplies were running low. The first couple of strikes helped a bit, but then they started closing hospitals. When they went on strike in ’45, the hospital just shut down. It was fucked up. They started just shutting down the hospitals, because nobody was funding any of it and the government couldn’t keep up with running anything at that point. My mom and a lot of her coworkers ended up moving over to Elmhurst Hospital. But the City was in the middle of abandoning that hospital too. They wanted to close it and were reducing resources to it every day. The writing was on the wall—this hospital would close too. Until LARS-47 hit.
Abdelhadi: What happened then?
Chowdhury: LARS was nuts, because it made people hallucinate. And people were already stretched so thin, taking care of their loved ones and neighbors while they were in full-blown psychosis was really impossible. So, everyone rallied around the hospital once the pandemic started—workers, patients, everyone in the neighborhood. The City and the feds were useless, of course. What do you do with mass support but a city government that doesn’t care? At that point, “city government” was basically just the police and skeletons of previous infrastructure that had been gutted by budget crisis. Everyone was demanding more, and finally, in early ’48 I think, the City announced they were officially closing the hospital. The response was huge. The nurses started a full occupation of the building. About five hundred people from the area joined in. They had these huge assemblies every day, and they made the decision to keep the hospital open. The [US] Army was everywhere at this point, they had tanks and gunboats lined up at LaGuardia. The political situation in Queens was a mess. Extremely fragmented, very chaotic. Every neighborhood had a totally different thing going on, and it was all rumors and confusion.
Abdelhadi: How did they keep the hospital running in the middle of all that?
Chowdhury: The nurses, well, the Assembly they ran, but the nurses were the heart of it, decided they would keep Elmhurst open, and not charge any money for anything. It was still a totally wild idea. I gather people were trying something like this in other uprisings years before, but we didn’t know anything about that. It felt like we were just making it up as we went along. Hundreds of people would turn out to the Hospital Assembly every night to try to figure out how to keep the hospital running. Maybe a million people came to Elmhurst during the occupation for care. The Jackson Heights Commune had just started, and they initially kept everyone fed. Then the problem was how to get drugs. There was this big drug plant in the liberated zone in the Mississippi Delta, just outside the Jackson Fallout Zone—this was Jackson, Mississippi, not Jackson Heights. It was modeled after liberated pharmaceutical operations in Lima. They were shipping up drugs and medical supplies—so we had connections all over. I lived at the hospital for two months. I was coordinating teen volunteers. There were maybe a hundred kids who would come every day and help out with whatever needed doing. I think a lot of them became nurses and doctors later. Elmhurst was one of the first places in the US, to my knowledge, where a workers’ occupation just started providing free services permanently.
Abdelhadi: Amazing!
Chowdhury: It really was. I think Elmhurst was really a turning point for the whole movement in North America. It became a really important model of communization struggles all over the city. The riots, the communes, the worker occupations—they were all patchwork before that. And Elmhurst was one of the moments where they could come together into a full break from the money economy. It was like: “Oh. We can meet our own needs.” The elders in movement circles would always say, “We keep us safe.” And at that point, it was like right, we keep us safe. We also keep us fed. We keep us healthy. We keep us alive.
It was honestly so exhilarating for me to be a part of. I formed all of these really strong relationships there, like it felt like I was falling in love with everybody. I feel like I kind of discovered the kind of person I could be through being in struggle with other people. Like, mostly I am thinking of the teen volunteers I coordinated, but I also formed all these really strong friendships with doctors and the cleaning staff I had been working with and long-term patients.
Abdelhadi: That’s beautiful. The hospital … it’s not still there right? It was … it was destroyed?
Chowdhury: [Pause.] Yes. Queens … we were militant, you know. This neighborhood did not take kindly to military occupation, and they punished us for it. They had instituted these checkpoints and a curfew in ’49 or ’50. And people weren’t having it. After the military shot up a bunch of people after curfew, a squad from this area blew up a checkpoint. The military bombed the hospital the next day. Leveled it. There were over six hundred patients, maybe half that many workers. My mother was one of them.
Abdelhadi: Were you in the building?
Chowdhury: No, I had left a few months before that. I had started at BMCC at that point. My dad called that day. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew something was wrong. He sounded, I don’t know, hollow? I said, “What’s wrong Abba?” And he said, “Your Amma, we have to go find her.” And I said, “What do you mean? What happened? Where is she?” And he was like, “They killed her. They killed everyone. We have to find her. We have to bury her.” We went, but it was … it was impossible. It was impossible. It was just wreckage. Very few bodies intact. Sometimes you’d see things you recognized. Someone’s scarf. An ID card. But never anything close to a whole body.
Abdelhadi: Would you like some tissues?
Chowdhury: No. Listen. Muslims, we bury our dead, you know? My mom, she was a nurse and a caretaker. She did this for so many people in our neighborhood. The ghusl—the ritual wash. We’re not afraid of the dead, you know. We wash the body, and it’s an act of care, of love. A dignified goodbye, a sendoff to God. We clean them, wrap them in clean, white cotton, return them to the earth. My mom, she did that for so many people, and we never got to do that for her. Abba says she hasn’t forgiven him for that. She comes to him in his dreams and asks when her janazah will be. He’s never really recovered from that.
Abdelhadi: Have you?
Chowdhury: I don’t know. I’m not sure recovery is the goal. The grief is a part of me, I grieve out of habit. Especially since I didn’t face it all right away. I kept busy. I wanted to take care of my dad. And I wanted to blow everything up. And I wanted to cry a few years away. But there wasn’t time to dwell on any one thing, because history was still moving all around us.
Abdelhadi: What was happening at BMCC?
Chowdhury: Well, it was falling apart like every public institution. It was mostly still running because professors continued to teach, even though barely any money was coming in. But I got involved in CUNY Against the War, which had started a few years earlier with protests against the invasion of Iran. I had lost so many people at Elmhurst, and these became my friends and family. We were a “cadre group,” as we called it then. Our friend Anand had been researching CUNY’s history—he kept telling us how much radicalism had happened here over the past century. We were really disciplined about the work and about knowing each other really well. Like, we would do these formal tellings of our life stories in the evenings, we were really deliberate about how we worked with conflict, a lot of stuff like that. That’s the space where I was forced to face my grief. I familied several people from there. It’s where I met my sisters, the ones I live with now. A lot of my closest relationships to this day came from CUNY Against the War. I am still in touch with at least a dozen people from that group.
Abdelhadi: Is that the group that started the occupation?
Chowdhury: Yes. So, one thing people forget about in this commune era is that there were also fash in the city. We always talk about fighting the police and the Army, but the lines between them and the white power militias had become really thin. There were these death squads forming—I think they had evolved from these white supremacist gangs from the early tens and twenties. They were concentrated in places where police and military people lived—like Staten Island—and these really securitized parts of the city, like Tribeca, and actually, Lower Manhattan in general. Anyway, one of these squads assassinated a professor, Dr. Joaquin Alves. He was a Puerto Rican activist who had been an organizer and militant in the Bronx for decades. He was a mentor to a lot of us. It happened right in front of the main entrance, in front of hundreds of people, like they rode up with scooters and gunned him down. Students took over the building that night, called the occupation “Tribeca Red,” and I think for a bunch of people it was the beginning of the Tribeca Commune.
Abdelhadi: What was the atmosphere of the occupation like?
Chowdhury: Organized, militant, and fun as hell. CUNY Against the War were the main organizers, and like I said, we all knew each other super well. We had very, very intense relationships and had already done a lot of work together. So, it was easy to get really organized really fast. Because the logistics—like food and housing were relatively easy to set up, there was also room for … for something else—catharsis? I guess.
We literally took the biggest room and made it a permanent rave room. We cut out the lights and had people DJ and it was just this giant party all the time that you could go to whenever you wanted to dance your heart out. There were drugs of course, [laughs], so you could do that or you could get high on the music. Whatever. It was a place to unwind. Someone else started a meditation room, for more mellow vibes. Stuff like that.
Abdelhadi: What were the occupation’s demands?
Chowdhury: A complete withdrawal of the pigs from the area. Public funding for workers and to run the school’s operations. At least that’s how it started. But honestly, I think we just wanted to shut everything down at that point, acknowledge we had reached a point of no return. Build something different with our new reality.
Abdelhadi: Did the occupation move beyond BMCC?
Chowdhury: Oh, hell yeah. That neighborhood was full of cop fec. Honestly, they probably wouldn’t have given a fuck that we were occupying a public institution they were already divesting from. But the fact that we were in Tribeca, that made it dangerous for them. They started patrolling the building and the death squads would show up just to sit across the street and intimidate us. They would line up their scooters and motorcycles in really neat formations, and they would all wear sunglasses and these horrible, fucking baseball caps. They all dressed the same too, pastel-colored polos and cargo shorts. Arms crossed across their chests, trying to look all serious and tough. Just watching us for hours. It was scary at first, but then militant folks from Chelsea showed up to back us up, and then eventually folks from Harlem and the Bronx too. The Zetkinistas were doing patrols for a while, and they also brought us food and supplies. Pads and tampons. [Laughs.] That’s what we ran out of first. People getting periods were desperate for those, but then the word spread and everyone brought us so many. We ended up with like more pads than toilet paper, hah.
Anyway, eventually the pigs and the fash backed off bit by bit. The police were overextended and couldn’t keep up patrols. The fash were getting a bit terrified when Chelsea, the Bronx, and Harlem showed up. We started marching through the neighborhood once we had enough of a force and going after some of the main cop hangouts. We brought bats, hammers, whatever we could find and tore those places out. On the twelfth day, we burned down the First Precinct. We sent people to the big hoopla up in Crotona Park that happened that year.
Abdelhadi: How would you compare the occupation of Elmhurst to the occupation of BMCC? Were they similar?
Chowdhury: I think keeping the hospital functioning, and the experience of the workforce, really helped give clarity and some measure of unity to the assemblies at Elmhurst. Like people fought over all sorts of stuff, but when it came right down to it people were really invested in just moving ahead with what could work. Workers knew something about how to get along, be organized, be interdependent, and that helped out a lot. For students, it was a bit more dicey because the objective wasn’t clear yet. Feeding everyone, keeping everyone clean, getting places to sleep, and so on—that was the easy part, especially since so many of us were organizers to begin with. But what next, you know?
Abdelhadi: What happened next?
Chowdhury: It turned into a lot of political factions fighting it out constantly. Some people wanted to merge into the transit worker assemblies that were happening on the docks at Battery Park. Others wanted to go join the fighting in the Republic of New Afrika or up in the Bronx. CUNY Against the War pushed for what we ended up doing: turning the campus into a neighborhood commune of sorts to organize and struggle in the area. Lower Manhattan was basically a deadzone in the movements around the city. All this eco co-op stuff was happening in Brooklyn, the fiefdoms in Queens, the shooting war in the Bronx. But Lower Manhattan was like the bunkers of the remains of corporate America. When the Army pulled out, a lot of them did too, but they still had these fortified headquarters buildings increasingly cut off from everything around them, behind their own little private floodgates. At first, the police were doing a lot to protect them but then the police got stretched with everything going on. They hired private security, but there wasn’t enough of a threat in the area since it was all so dead. The streets were empty, all the little restaurants and things had shut down in the forties, and a lot of the neighborhood was abandoned. We felt like there was a lot of stuff there that we could reappropriate and make use of. We saw potential in that neighborhood at the end of the day.
Abdelhadi: Were storms a big problem at BMCC? Battery Park City had already been flooded and emptied out, right?
Chowdhury: A lot of the neighborhood was underwater during the worst storms, definitely. BMCC got flooded regularly. You see the tidal canals we’re building outside? We are finding ways of dealing with it. We are embracing the water. The corps weren’t able to get along with each other well enough to build flood walls, and the City and the feds definitely couldn’t take it on. The storms and the damage they were doing to Lower Manhattan played a role in the initial divestment from the area, for cert. Now that I think about it, they also played a role in us being able to pull off what we did.
Abdelhadi: You were working hard.
Chowdhury: I worked extremely hard. All the time. I worked my ass off. I thought there was some way if I kept working I could keep from crying. It wasn’t until years later I started sorting through how much what had happened at Elmhurst messed me up. Initially I went to BMCC thinking I would become a social worker, some sort of professional. It was a brief attempt to run away from politics. But as things heated up on campus, I got sucked back in.
Abdelhadi: You mentioned a detention center earlier in the interview. Could you elaborate on that?
Chowdhury: Cert. This was in the third year of the occupation, in 2053 or 2054. The Army was gone, and we decided to make a big move. The private security forces around the corporate buildings were still formidable, and we were not an army, so we stayed away from that. Since the cops and Army had backed off, we weren’t getting as much support from Chelsea and uptown anymore. But at the Crotona Assembly we found a connect for weapons. People started learning how to shoot and all that.
Eventually, when we got strong enough, we decided to liberate the Manhattan Detention Complex [MDC], the Tombs. The place held maybe nine hundred prisoners at the time. Most of them were from the fighting in the Bronx. It was a major step for us because it was still a major stronghold for the police. A combat unit from the Bronx came down to help. They started the raid by shelling One Police Plaza. There was this big public housing complex, Alfred Smith. That was liberated ground and right next to One Police Plaza. So, this combat unit set up there and just as the sun came up, they unleashed all this artillery fire on the police building. They drew all the police’s attention there, and an hour later the prisoner committees coordinated a riot inside the Tombs. Less than an hour after that, we attacked. We had maybe a thousand people, a mix of people who had family members inside, students from the occupation, some locals, we all attacked the MDC from outside. It could have gone horribly wrong, like one well-placed machine gun nest could have killed a lot of people, but it ended up going really well. The prisoners all escaped that day, and we shelled the MDC to its foundations. The NYPD held on to One Police Plaza for another few months, but they were terrified to step foot outside.
Abdelhadi: What happened to the former prisoners?
Chowdhury: That turned out to be the most interesting part for me. About three hundred of them stayed in the neighborhood. Over the next year, the corporations started pulling out of the area altogether, and took their little private armies with them. The neighborhood was totally ours at that point. We set up housing with them in the apartment block next to BMCC, I think it was called Independence Plaza, and it really was a bit like the Tribeca Commune is today. We built out this huge kitchen at BMCC and started serving everyone in the neighborhood food. A lot of the liberated prisoners needed a lot of help to sort stuff out. Things had gotten really bad in the Tombs in the last couple of years. We had a lot of volunteers, some of them with skills, move to the area to work through trauma. That’s when I started thinking more deeply about what had happened to mom. My dad moved in around then, to an apartment with me in the same building with all the ex-imprisoned.
Abdelhadi: What helped you sort out your own trauma?
Chowdhury: Mostly friends. Like, I got a lot of therapy of different sorts. But really it was my friendships. All the people I knew, besides my dad, I met through the struggle. That’s where I formed my deepest friendships. I think there is something about heightened struggle that gives you a chance to really trust people. For really being able to fully love. Or maybe I’m just too controlling of myself the rest of the time to really open my heart to anybody. It’s hard to say. My friends became a really major part of my healing process. One thing I realized was how my mom was with me all the time. How she had taught me how to build community, how to hold space, how to organize, how to create homes with other people out of whatever circumstances we found ourselves in.
Anyway, a lot of us slowed down in the late fifties once the commune had taken more shape. We had all been through fec, lost people. And we really tried to figure our shit out together. I spent some time on retreat at this trauma center in Queens and came back to Tribeca ready to do some healing. We had support groups every night and were in this long process of trying to heal together. It took a lot to reconnect to my body, to remember my mom and the days around the hospital bombing again, to be able to do anything that involved being present with myself. I’m just very, very grateful for my friends who got me through all that. My sisters Jess and María are the most important to me, that’s why we became sisters, but there was a whole community of other people who were in that with us. Many of them still live in the Tribeca Commune after all these years, though those that don’t live here come around often.
Abdelhadi: Beautiful. Thank you for this interview. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Chowdhury: Eat kudzu sauerkraut.
Abdelhadi: Excuse me?
Chowdhury: The invasive vines assembly we are hosting. The big thing they are really into is kudzu sauerkraut. They say if there is any hope for the future of Chattanooga, we all have to eat a lot of kudzu sauerkraut. Reps from the Hamilton Commune in Chattanooga are volunteering in our kitchen, and every meal has kudzu in it. They are trying to convince us to accept two hundred kilos of semi-processed kudzu. I think it’s a bad idea, but I promised them I would tell everyone to eat kudzu sauerkraut. So, I’m telling you.
Abdelhadi: Well, thank you. I will work on that.