Glass House

Book Description:

The young people, living in an abandoned glass factory in New York City’s East Village from 1992 to 1994, were nothing more than squatters in the eyes of police and city officials. But thirty-five inhabitants of the building took a radically different view of their situation. Homeless, unable or unwilling to return to their families, they formed a community with a strict set of rules and took up the hard work required to make the derelict factory into a home.

They repaired stairs and roof joists with wood scavenged from construction sites and police barricades, tapped electricity from a street lamp, and siphoned water from a nearby fire hydrant. Eventually they equipped the building with a communal kitchen and meeting area and living space for each member of the group.

Margaret Morton photographed the building and its residents and documented the transformation of Glass House into a vital community. Her photographs, combined with their oral histories, show how and why a number of young people left their families, migrated to New York, and found ways to survive on the margins of society. With determination and ingenuity, they reshaped their lives as well as a building.

In the words of Yale historian Alan Trachtenberg, "Margaret Morton’s Glass House is remarkable work, the best of her books on the demi-monde of homelessness and squatting in New York City. "