C-Squat

C (See)-Squat is a squat house located at 155 Avenue C (between 9th and 10th Streets) in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.

The building was constructed in 1872 and thus is a pre-Old Law Tenement. Throughout its history, it functioned as a warehouse and residential tenement building, housing a pickle shop, cigar factory, cabinetmaker's workshop, saloon, bookbinder, numerous tailors, and a Republican meeting hall at various times prior to being abandoned, foreclosed, and then ravaged by a major fire that began in the basement and swept through the floors above, taking out the stairs and effectively gutting the bottom part of the structure. The City of New York assumed possession of the building in 1978, evicting any and all remaining occupants in 1984-85, and it sat empty and abandoned for half a decade prior to being occupied by squatters in 1989. It has been continuously occupied since that time.

Journalist and author Robert Neuwirth described the situation that gave birth to many of New York's squats, including C-Squat, in the late 1970s through 1980s, "In the 1970s, scores of landlords walked away from old tenement buildings. Many buildings slid into vacancy and rot. By the 1980s, squatters took over many of the structures in fringe areas such as Alphabet City (Avenues A to D) in the Lower East Side and in certain areas of the Bronx and Brooklyn. They had to fight to stay. The city dispossessed hundreds of squatters, sometimes mounting massive paramilitary attacks on their buildings. In the end, 12 squatter buildings survived, and they outlasted official resistance."

In 2002, following extensive negotiations begun under the Giuliani administration, the government of New York City granted provisional ownership of 11 squats on the Lower East Side, including C-Squat, to the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), a private not-for-profit organization tasked by the city with overseeing their renovation and legal conversion into resident-owned cooperative housing. The residents of the twelfth squat described above elected not to participate in the UHAB-managed legalization process and are now suing for ownership of their building under adverse possession.

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