Bill Weinberg: On Monday, 25 parcels of public land throughout New York City were sold to developers at an auction down at One Police Plaza, including four community gardens here on the Lower East Side and the Charas/El Bohio Community Center which apparently went for over $3 million. Is that correct?

Armando Perez: Yes. Three million, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I was very outraged at this article that I read where the city bragged about how successful this auction was, that they were able to make over $19 million in this auction. The city budget is supposedly two billion dollars in the surplus, and they're bragging about $19 million. I think there's more behind that than meets the eye. $19 million is nothing. And if we look at what they're selling off, that's peanuts. At Charas, for example, we ve been in that building over nineteen years, we estimate we have spent over two million dollars in sweat equity. We have another million dollars we have put in from fund-raisers we have done. And if we look at the programming that we have done throughout the years, we have saved this city a tremendous amount of money. When we deal with our youth and we keep them out of jail you figure out what that costs, to have one of our youth in jail for just one day, let alone years. And we have been able to do this.

We have a political art space, for theater, for music, for dance. This is the only place around here that has the amount of space that we have available for artists. We have people that are coming from Brooklyn, from The Bronx, from Queens, to rehearse here in the Lower East Side, and its not because they love the Lower East Side, it's because this is the place where they can get the space affordably.

So the implication is that this is not really motivated by budgetary necessities, that there's some kind of other agenda here.

Absolutely. If you look at the fact that we have been forced out of the Lower East Side in the last few years, especially after [ex-City Councilman Antonio] Pagán got into power...

When you say we, who exactly do you mean?

The working class people, poor people, people of color have been forced out of this neighborhood. The last census that was taken shows that there s still a lot of Latinos down here, but we have to look at reality, and the reality is that most poor people are living doubled and tripled up in the Lower East Side. The rents, of course, everyone knows have gone sky-high. And those that are paying those high rents are also doubled and tripled up, because they can't afford to pay that kind of rent. So this is the way people are living in the Lower East Side. And its immoral that people live this way. When I got my first apartment I was 18 years old, many years ago. I was able to pay my rent with no problems. I paid $35 a month for an apartment right there on East Ninth Street.

Woo-hoo! Sounds like science fiction today!

And there's one thing that I got out of that, that most people will not ever experience the way we're going, is to be able to know what it is to have your own space. Its an experience that everyone should have. And unfortunately that's been taken away from us. Youth who leave their parents in order to start their own families wind up having to move out of the Lower East Side, and some of them even out of the city because they cannot afford the rents. And what is that doing? Its displacing families.

The whole agenda ever since Koch has been If you can't afford to live in New York City move!

That's it. Now, look at the reality now, look at the fact that this administration has moved so quickly to get rid of all the city-owned land. When the city, state and federal government figure out that there is a housing crisis they're gonna all of a sudden come up with the money and say, We have the money to build the housing but we can't build it in the Lower East Side because there's no land, we don't have land in the Lower East Side. But we have land in Staten Island, in Far Rockaway and we can build it over there...

Are the white middle-class folks in Staten Island going to want a bunch of folks from the Lower East Side moving into their turf?

If we look at Manhattan and what they're after they don't care about the people that live over there. They're looking at what's happening over here. They're looking to move everybody and anybody out of Manhattan even those that think that they're safe. They're paying their twelve hundred dollars a month, and I ran into them a year and a half ago in Tompkins Square Park when I was out there trying to get them to sign petitions to stop the state from doing away with the rent regulations, and they says Hey, I don't have to worry about that, I pay my twelve hundred a month. And I said, Don't you understand? Don't you see? You gotta look at the big picture here. And the big picture is that you're next! Because once they get rid of the working class people and the poor people of this neighborhood, they're coming after you! And you know what they're coming after them right now. Because those same people are knocking on my door wanting to know how I can help them, because their landlord is harassing the hell out of them...

Hoping to get morethan twelve hundred a month?

Absolutely. The landlord now knows that he or she can get two thousand, three thousand, and these folks cannot afford it, so they want them out. And they're doing it illegally, but yet they're doing it.

I'll give you a perfect example. I had this one woman that lives on St. Marks, and she has been harassed by her landlord to the point where her landlord even got the cops to bang on her door. This woman came to me for help, and I have been trying to help her ever since. This is a battle which has been going on for over a year now. When the cops called her, they left a message on her machine saying they had a summons they had to give her and if she didn't come in they would break her door down. She then called me up, and I called the Ninth Precinct and I spoke to the officer there and he assured me that she would not get arrested. He told me All I want to do is give her a summons and that's it. I says, Look, I'll bring her in, but please do not arrest this woman, she's very very nervous right now. Again, he assured me, and I said, fine. We go over there, and as soon as we get there he asks me, am I an attorney? And I said No, I told you who I was over the phone. And he says, Well, you have to leave. And I says, What do you mean I have to leave? And he says, Well, I m arresting her. And I says, You know, this an outrage. This woman is scared as all hell, you can look at her right now, she's shivering, and you're going to arrest her? On what charges? He says, Well, she destroyed some property in the building and its worth over twenty-five hundred dollars, and anything worth over twenty-five hundred dollars I can arrest her. So I says, Well why didn't you tell me that over the phone? You lied to me. And he says, I have the right to lie to you or to anybody in order to get an arrest. And I said, Well, this is outrageous and I don't think you really know who you are dealing with here. Here's my card, I want you to find out who I am first, and if you continue these actions I m gonna have a lawyer here soon. And they released her. But this woman had no business being arrested in the first place.

We all know its a dirty struggle. When I moved into my building, we were on rent strike and the landlord was sending goons around to intimidate us, and opening the empty apartments to crackheads and prostitutes. We're all aware of this. Why don't we talk about Charas?

OK. First I want to thank the people of the Lower East Side who showed up on Monday at One Police Plaza. I estimate at least three hundred to three hundred and fifty people came, and I want to thank each and every one of them. I also want to thank the people that wrote letters, people that called Giuliani and asked him not to do this. And I also want to thank the Bread & Puppet theater company that came all the way from Vermont when they heard about this those are the folks who were out there playing the music and stuff in front of One Police Plaza.

And I also want to ask the people in Loisaida that when they see me walking down the streets please, stop looking at me so sad. I have had women come over and cry because someone bought the building. I want you to know that this battle is not over. And all it has done is gotten me angry, so angry that I m gonna fight this man all the ways. But more than that, I want everybody to know that it's got the people of this city angry. Because I have received calls from all over the city wanting to know what we can do. In reality, what Giuliani did here was he woke people up! I believe that a lot of folks didn't think that this was going to really happen. I think that they saw the victory that we had last year and they said, these guys they're OK, they know how to do it. But we have to realize that they had a whole year and a half to prepare for what has taken place now.

Why don't you start at the beginning and tell us what the whole struggle over Charas has been?

We ve been in that building for nineteen years now. We actually tried to get the building twenty-one years ago. When we went to the city and told them what we wanted to do with the building, they kept stalling us. And meanwhile the building was used as a shooting gallery, prostitution, and finally they started stripping the building for anything worth anything. The roof had copper in it, so the roof was torn off the building. But when we saw that the front doors were gone, that's when we decided enough is enough. We went in and we squatted the building. It was about a year later that we finally got a month-to-month lease. This kind of lease actually kept us from getting capital improvement funds, so all the repairs that were done in that building were done by us, through the sweat equity that we put in, the fundraising that we ve done.

I found out about two and half years ago that our building was gonna be put on the auction block. And I found out, believe it or not, through the Giuliani administration. I have friends all over, and someone over there told me and I can say this now because he's no longer working for him that Giuliani was coming after us and he was coming after us bigtime. One of the people who was behind this was our ex-Councilperson Antonio Pagán. When we were put on the auction block the first time, in October of 96, I think Giuliani believed whatever rhetoric was coming out of Antonio Pagán's mouth about us, and we were underestimated. I believe that the mayor thought that the only support that we would receive as an organization would be from the Lower East Side which is not his constituency so he really didn't give a damn. But he got a rude awakening when the support came from Europe, it came from South America, it came from Mexico, it came from all over the United States, and it came from every borough in this city. It came from institutions, community-based organizations, art organizations and individuals.

So then they decided that they would take us off the auction block, admitting that we are a needed, viable organization in the Lower East Side, and said they would work with us to get us on better financial standing. That was a lie.

The agreement that we made with the Giuliani administration at that time was that we would come up with a package to present to them in one month. One month they gave us to show how we could obtain the building and how we could renovate it. But because I had learned of this a year before that, we had prepared ourselves for this struggle that was coming. So we already had two solid proposals, which we mailed them a week before the first meeting between our board and the Giuliani administration. We went in and sat down and the first thing they asked us was, OK, what do you want us to sell you the building for? What are you willing to pay for it? We said, Well, we'd like you to sell it to us for one dollar. And they laughed at us. And I says, What's so funny? This is something which has been done throughout the years, and most recently Giuliani did this just four month ago for an Italian organization in Brooklyn whose executive director is one of his allies and was one of his biggest supporters in his campaign. This information is in our lawsuit. An article came out about it in the Daily News, which we have copies of.

But they said that was absolutely out of the question. The second thing was asked for was to be taken out from under the Department of Administrative Services and be put under the Department of Cultural Affairs. Again, they said absolutely not. And again we asked, why? This has been done before. And they said, the city wants to get out of the landlord business.

They had to admit to us that they hadn't even read our proposals. This is how arrogant this administration is, and that mayor of ours is. So I just said, let's just go on, ask us any question you like and we'll answer them. The first proposal was for full community use of the building, we just asked for eighteen months to put the package together. They refused, and we asked for a year. They refused and we asked for six months. They still refused, so we moved on to our second proposal, which was mixed use. Half the building would have been for community use, the other half would have been for market-rate housing.

Under the administration's current 80-20 plan, eighty percent of the building is market rate, and twenty percent is low-income. What they don't say is that then in twenty years, that twenty percent low-income becomes market-rate also. So we're selling the future down the drain. We're selling our next generation's opportunities to get that type of housing down the drain. Under our plan, in twenty years the market-rate section would be gone and we would then have the whole building for full community use. And they looked at this proposal and they said, this is great, this is do-able. They said they would set up another meeting to further discuss this.

We said, Great, when is the next meeting? This was on a Friday. They says, Monday we'll call you and let you know. Came Monday: no calls. Came Tuesday, we call; they don't call us back. Then we start keeping a log of all the calls that we made. We also sent certified letters. Everything went dead. There was no communication from that point on. They put us back on the auction block for March of 97. We went to the state Supreme Court and put in for an injunction.

On what grounds?

On the grounds that they did not deal with us in good faith, as they said they would. On the day before the auction, the state Supreme Court ruled in our favor and we went out of there pretty happy not knowing that the city turned around and went to the appellate court and had the decision overturned, and we were put right back on the auction block. So that morning we had to scramble down to the appellate court with our lawyers. We weren't able to get the appellate to take us off the auction block, but what we did get was that the city had to say that this was under litigation when it came up on the auction block, and that anyone who bidded on this property would have to know that their monies would be held in escrow. And that's why no-one bidded on the building last year.

Now, this year it was a different story. I should say that from that point on there was no communication whatsoever to our organization from the mayor's administration. We have tried everything possible to get some kind of communication going. We have a lot more going for us this year than last year. We have a new City Councilwoman, Margarita Lopez, who is behind us one hundred and ten percent. She tried to communicate with the mayor's people on our situation to no avail. They put us back on the auction block without notifying us again. And when we found out that we were back on, we organized to get them to take us off the block and negotiate with us. Remember that first proposal that we said we needed time to put together? [claps hands] That's together! And when we were at the state Supreme Court, the judge asked them, what would you sell them the building for? They told the judge they would sell us the building for thirty to forty percent of the upset price, the starting bid, which at that time was $1.2 million. We have that in place, OK?

If you have that in place, why weren't you able to make a bid at the auction on Monday?

There was no communication whatsoever. We tried everything. We sent the [city legal department] Corporate Counsel the proposal. They said they would submit it to the Mayor. No communication. We went down to City Hall with our lawyers they would not meet with us.

Then, when the Borough President's office found out that the other community center, the Soto Velez center on Suffolk Street and Rivington, was taken off the auction block, [Manhattan Borough President] C. Virginia Fields called to find out why they were taken off and we weren t. The Giuliani administration blatantly lied to the Borough President, telling her that the reason they did not take us off the block was because we did not submit a proposal. And she knows that that's a lie because she received our proposal over three months ago. We sat down with her and went through it, and she loved the plan. She told the city, Wait a minute, that can't be true, because I have the proposal, I ve read the proposal, what are you talking about? They then told her, We'll call you back. When they called her back, they said, Look, the Mayor made up his mind and he is not going to take it off, and that's that, and they hung up on her. And this again, is the arrogance that the Mayor and his people have. They have no respect for anyone. This is the Borough President of Manhattan, and this is the way they treat her. That's an outrage to me.

Now we're gonna be having a press conference at City Hall next week, and given that [the AIDS advocacy organization] Housing Works just won that ruling...

...overturning the Mayor's regulation that barred press conferences of over twenty people from the steps of City Hall... Right, the courts found it unconstitutional. So we would like to get as many people there as possible.

So, who is the purchaser?

The city doesn't want to reveal who it is.

It was an open bidding process down at Police Plaza, wasn't it?

Yep, but they say they don't have to disclose who it is until the money is in place. They don't want to reveal it for whatever reasons, and we know what those reasons are because they know that we will put heavy pressure on whoever bought it. We will denounce whatever organization bought this property. We will name them in any lawsuits that we have coming up.

Well, I note the coverage in yesterday's New York Times of the auction mentions the notorious cricket incident, in which ten thousand live crickets were released at police headquarters when the auction was taking place, in protest of the sale not only of Charas, but of four community gardens on the Lower East Side hence the cricket significance, I suppose! It mentions that the sale took place, but it doesn't say who they buyer is anywhere in the article.

Well, we asked the reporters there if they could find out, but they wouldn t tell them neither. The reporter from El Diario called me up and she said, Armando, I tried. They would not tell us who it is. So, they re keeping this really hush-hush. But eventually, we will find out. And we ll expose this organization for being part of the plot of the Giuliani administration to destroy an organization that is doing so much for this community, and has done for the past thirty-three years, in that building for the past nineteen years.

Is there some kind of a legal stipulation that the building has to remain at least partly for non-profit use?

Yeah, because of the ULURP [unified land use review process] that was put in place, stating that it has to be for community use. That was something that we fought for, say, fifteen years ago. We were happy to get that in, because who would want to buy a building at that time and remember it was a whole different time, now for community use? So we felt pretty safe.

Now there were rumors that NYU was interested, and they started getting faxes. I actually got a call from them saying, please, can you stop this? We're not interested, please stop the faxes! And I said, I didn't put that in place. So whatever organization or institution is the buyer, they re going to get protests from different parts of the city, different parts of the country, different parts of the world. We're going to find out who their funding sources are, and we will go after them. Whoever bought this building, don't think that you're just going to come into this community, be a part of destroying this community and that you're going to be accepted. That is not going to happen.

What has taken place here is a political attack on Charas/El Bohio. Giuliani is using his powers as the mayor of this city to destroy this organization, and that's not what he is supposed to do as mayor of New York City. He is abusing his powers, and it is wrong and it's immoral.

Why? Why has he got a particular ax to grind against Charas?

A lot of what we do are things that he's against. When we put a show, a production or an art exhibit together, many times it's with a message about social injustice. We did a play called We Don't Want No Cheese, We Want Apartments Please, back when the United States was giving out cheese all over the place. We were putting out the message that cheese is not the answer, that the answer is a roof over peoples heads. We tackle issues like domestic violence; we did a play Amor Que Mata, A Love That Kills. We ve addressed closet cases like incest most galleries don't want to show that type of art, and we showed it, through the eyes of victims that went through this.

The inflated prices that some of these community properties have been going for has suggested to some that there's some kind of master plan for redevelopment of the neighborhood here.

Absolutely. I have no doubt about that. About two weeks ago we had a meeting at Charas of about sixty people from the community to strategize on what we would do if the auction did go forward. And I said that we can take Charas off the auction block, but that is not the answer here. The answer is to stop this auction from going forward. Because we can save Charas, but if Charas is here and you're not, then what good is it? I mean, I don't want to be an organizastion for a bunch of rich people. I want my people and when I say my people, I mean the people of the Lower East Side, not just Puerto Ricans, all the people of the Lower East Side. This is our constituency, and this is our home, and we cannot allow this to continue. If they continue to sell all this land, we're all going to be gone, and we have to stop it now. Because when they sell these gardens, they are not going to be building affordable housing. That I can guarantee you.

So is there still litigation outstanding over the sale of Charas?

Yes, it is still under litigation, and we are looking for other avenues, other lawsuits, other actions. We're going to call in the leaders of this community and come up with other plans demonstrations, rallies, marches. We want to continue sending letters to Giuliani telling him that this is an outrage and that we are not going to stand for this any longer, that our land here in the Lower East Side and other parts of this city should not be sold. A moratorium should be put in place so that we can have the opportunity in the future to build affordable housing where its needed and not somewhere in the boondocks where they can't see us but yet close enough so that we can commute to work for the rich. And I believe that that is the plan. And that's not acceptable. We here in this city have got to wake up and start fighting, cuz if not, we're gonna be outta here...

There's talk of developing some kind of community-based, perhaps even inter-neighborhood land development plan. Because obviously the plan which is in place if it is a plan and isn't completely haphazard has not been drawn up with any kind of democratic input from the people it's going to effect.

I think we have to look at the whole process, everything that is taking place. I'll give you a perfect example of where we can start. We can start looking at our Community Board. Now, I m on that board. I ve been a member of that Community Board 3 for over eight years now, and I ve gone through hell. That's the right word. It's been very painful. A lot of people ask me, Armando, why the hell do you stay on that board? Are you a masochist or something? And I says, no, I stay on the board because I m a voice and I can try make sure that these folks that are on the board are held accountable one day. Unfortunately, that's not yet the case. It is a very conservative board, and has voted against the wishes of this community for the past six years and this is why the Lower East Side has been gentrified in such a speedy way. We cannot continue to recognize this body as representatives of the people of our community. So one of the first things we should do is not recognize it at all. And let the Borough President know, and let our elected officials know that we do not recognize this body. Because it does not, in reality, represent our community. And how do we do that? We just go over the head of the Community Board, and go directly to whoever we have to deal with, whether it is the Borough President or HPD whatever department we have to deal with, we should just go as the community. We do that by demonstrating in front of their offices: this is what we want, this is what we don't want. And not let the Community Board send a message saying, We support market-rate housing. We have to get rid of people working in community-based organization who are not doing the work that they should be doing. For example, we have this woman by the name of Zulma Zayas who is executive director of Lower East Side Coalition Housing Development. And I say her name, and if she wants to try to sue me, that's fine, because everything that I m saying is true, and I have it on record. At a Community Board meeting she made a statement that we need market-rate housing on the Lower East Side. Now this is the director of a Lower East Side housing organization that's supposed to advocate for low-income housing and she's making this statement!

I guess the argument is that it'll raise the tax base for the neighborhood and some of the money could be put into housing projects. Wasn't that what the old Cross-Subsidy Plan was supposed to be about?

The Cross-Subsidy Plan that's another joke. This is what we're stuck with now. We're stuck with the 80-20 plan, when what we need is one hundred percent affordable housing. And I when I say affordable housing, I really mean affordable, I don't mean the kind of affordable that they're talking about, an affordable apartment for five or six hundred dollars a month and the family is making ten thousand dollars a year and they have three kids that's not affordable. So I mean looking at the whole problem and making it one hundred percent affordable.

Well, I m with you one hundred percent on it, but most people are going to say, you can't turn back the clock, its not the 1970s anymore, its a new New York City now, its a new Lower East Side its no the Lower East Side anymore, its the East Village or NoHo or whatever...

This is why we need to put this moratorium in place. We cannot continue to deal with a Cross-Subsidy Plan that was put in place when things were different on the Lower East Side. As I say, things have changed, and we have to revisit that and say, this is not going to work...

What's changed since the mid-1980s when the Cross-Subsidy Plan was drawn up that makes it no no longer valid?

Well, first of all, they didn't build the affordable housing that they were supposed to build, OK? Second, the folks in the affordable housing that they did build are now doubled and tripled up, and there is no more affordable housing available in the Lower East Side. Yet, there's an abundance of market-rate housing that is available. So that is our argument. Now, the president of the United States in his state of the union address said what we need in the United States is affordable housing. So what I say to the president of the United States is, put your money where your mouth is. This is what we need. We need the money in place to build the housing that we need. And we should get it from the state, we should get it from the city, and we should get it from the federal government.

Well, it sort of flies in the face of the prevailing ethic today that you leave everything up to the free market and things will just sort of take care of themselves. Meanwhile, the money has not actually transfered yet for the sale of Charas...

According to the reports we have gotten, no it has not, and I think they re just stalling at this point. They may want to wait until the lawsuit is dealt with, hoping that we'll lose. But I m gonna tell you this. Whoever purchased this property, they have to know that they are not going to be welcomed in this community. They ought to be ashamed of what they are doing. I could understand it if we were an organization that hasn't done anything. I could understand if we were doing something like Zulma Zayas is doing. But we're not. We have a tremendous amount of different areas that we tackle all the time community education, recently I was dealing with the Latin Kings who came to me several years ago asking me for a meeting space. We have people from this community that have no money, groups that are fighting for better housing, fighting against the destruction of the gardens they meet at Charas, and they meet there for free because we know that they don't have the money. So you're going to destroy or be a part of trying to destroy, because I m not giving up, they are not going to destroy us, we're gonna fight them all the ways... And I'll tell you this: they will have to kill me before they throw me out of that building. And I mean that literally. I am not joking here.

So if you fail through the courts and the legal system, you're prepared for actual physical resistance...

As I said, they will have to kill me. I am not one to make threats, and I won't make any. I don't even want to look that far down the line, that we will lose. I believe that we will win. But I just want to send a clear message to whoever bought this property that they don't know what they ve gotten themselves into and that if they were smart they would pull out. They would pull out right now.

UPDATE: Since this interview, it has been revealed that the purchaser of the building that houses Charas/El Bohio is Greg Singer, a developer who owns condominiums in Yorktow n and malls in Westchester. In March, Charas/El Bohio exhausted its legal remedies and at the time of this writing Singer must present his development package for the site to the city. If he fails to line up non-profit tenants for the development package by a city-imposed deadline, he stands to lose his $640,000 down payment.