Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, Community activism museum in East Village, Manhattan, US.
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space is a small museum in East Village, Manhattan, housed inside a former squat building known as C-Squat. It documents how residents turned abandoned buildings and vacant lots into community spaces, using photographs, objects, and multimedia displays.
The museum was founded in 2012 inside C-Squat, a building that residents occupied in the 1970s when New York's economic decline left much of East Village empty. The stories of those occupations and the community projects that followed form the core of the collection.
The museum displays protest posters, stencil art, and records of community gardens that locals created over decades. These objects show how people in East Village took back their neighborhood through direct action.
The museum is in East Village, a walkable neighborhood, so nearby historical sites connected to the collection can easily be visited on foot. Guided walking tours of the surrounding area are available and give a broader sense of the neighborhood's story.
The reception desk inside the museum is built from old police barricades that were used during evictions in the neighborhood. The same steel that once kept residents away from their occupied buildings now forms part of the museum's entrance area.
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