By Pam Tice
A scroll through real estate ads for the Upper West Side today turns up apartments in gracious century-old brownstones and prewar buildings, chic glass-walled high-rises, and the occasional sprawling celebrity home selling with a multi-million-dollar price tag.
It can be hard to imagine that the neighborhood’s history includes eras when the shacks and shanties of squatters were not an uncommon sight. After World War I, for example, veterans camped along the Hudson River, and in the Depression of the 1930s, squatters lived in “Hoovervilles” in Central Park and along the Hudson.
Decades before that, when much of the city – including the Upper West Side – was undeveloped, squatters began camping out on city lands they didn’t own. The first news accounts of squatters in New York City were published in the 1850s, as impoverished German and Irish immigrants surged into the city. Charles Loring Brace wrote about them for The New York Times, describing the rough cabins they lived in and the rough living many eked out, by picking through the streets to collect and sell anything of value.
By the 1860s, squatting in New York City had a bit more of an organized structure. Real estate speculators, waiting for the value of their vacant properties to increase, charged squatters nominal rent for the right to live on their lands. But once land values started to rise, the speculators didn’t hesitate to evict them from their shanty homes of scrap wood and tin. Squatter communities were described in the press of that time as “dens of wretchedness, murder, theft, and riot.” Some blamed squatters for the 1863 Draft Riots.
Real estate values increased uptown in the 1870s, and landowners began to organize to push for infrastructure that would boost development. The West Side Association, formed in 1866, pushed the city to build streets, a job made difficult by the West Side’s rocky outcrops. Workers had to blast and cut through the rock, grade the pathways they created, establish water and sewer lines, and finally pave the new streets of the Upper West Side. In 1879 the building of the Ninth Avenue elevated railroad helped spur the area’s development, and the West Side Association pushed for completion of Morningside and Riverside parks to serve new residents settling there.
With new development underway, the West Side Association sought city and state help in removing the squatters who still dotted the West Side. Among the laws they and other landlords lobbied for were statutes forbidding shanties to be relocated from one lot to another; landlords also advocated for requirements that all structures be connected to city water and sewage lines.
In May 1880, city landowners served illegal dwellers with 10-day eviction notices, after which marshals removed anyone who stayed on and demolished squatter shanties. On May 23, 1880, The New York Herald described how the squatter raids targeted 50 “hovels extending from West 65th to West 72nd Streets.” The paper said that some 13,000 squatters lived between 59th and 110th streets on the West Side, in 2,500 squatter structures. Deputy marshals carrying out the raid described by the Herald were attacked; one had a milk can emptied over his head.
A few months after the eviction raids, in September 1880, Harper’s Monthly published an article portraying the remaining squatters of the West Side in a somewhat romantic light. They were described as hard-working, tending numerous garden plots throughout the neighborhood. The author noted the contrast between the new buildings going up in New York and the hand-made hovels of the squatters, quoting another writer who called the city “Paris, but with a backwoods.”
“If you stand in the hollow at the corner of 86th Street and Eighth Avenue, you will see a long stretch of garden with a weathered old cottage near the middle, and if you do not raise your eyes, it will seem to you that you are in Ireland,” the Harper’s Weekly author wrote. But the buzz of the elevated Ninth Avenue trains was a giveaway that this was not Ireland. And so was the image of “an abandoned mansion with an aristocratic cupola blinking in the sunshine.”
By the 1890s, news reports about squatters focused mainly on the demise of their settlements, though photographs of new apartment flats might show a wooden shanty still standing nearby. Photographer Robert Bracklow documented the final days of old wooden buildings on the West Side.
Occasionally, a journalist would write about holdouts on the West Side. A group of men living on an empty lot on West 96th Street survived in a cave-like room carved out of a rock outcrop.
And in 1898, The Irish-American newspaper reported the death of Mary Ann Burns, who lived in a three-room shanty near Grant’s Tomb. Burns maintained she had legal grounds to remain there, “by right of long occupancy.”
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In the 1970s there were vacant abandoned decrepit buildings that were homes to squatters, havens to drug abusers and dens of wretchedness, theft and murder.
Read the story in The City today about the financial state of rent controlled buildings. A four-year rent freeze will drive a lot of buildings back to the same condition:
https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/07/bronx-rent-stabilized-apartments-freeze/
Back to the future.
The recurrent history of undesirable and underused space, desperate need, and people making do in any way they can to put a roof over their heads. Till said space is wanted, or its value improved (often with the hard work of those who cleared and worked it), and the people making do are seen as people interfering with progress (and profit) and so they are vilified, dehumanized, and their homes destroyed, all in the name of ‘progress’ (and profit for the Haves pushing away the Have-Nots).
I think one of the big pieces of the difficult problem is that people who become homeless today are often the ones with the fewest resources, AND the reason why many are so without resources is because they are drug addicts, mentally ill, or alcoholics. Those are people who will least be able to afford a residence. And there’s the complication that their situation is partly an outcome of their choices, partly an outcome of the way the system is set up in what borders on oligarchy … I don’t know what else.
Do you have suggested solutions? Surely you’re not advocating street homelessness?
Not sure we can blame drug and alcohol addiction on oligarchy. Oligarchy destroys wages, true. But plenty of homeless people are working and staying in shelters while they seek a better living situation. Street homeless are there because of their addiction.
What do you think should be “done about” addicted and/or mentally ill street unsheltered? A huge problem, obviously, is, who has the right to decide what about whom. It seems incongruous that society should have NO right to decide about people who persist in behavior that impacts society negatively, even when some of those people are of diminished moral responsibility for one reason or another. One example: I think that the notion that mentally ill people with a history of violence can be “treated in the community” has failed in too many cases. Ditto drug addiction. But “advocates” oppose solutions principally tied to law-enforcement. So I am stumped, quite frankly.
86th and 8th ??
Central Park West & 86th St.
As Eighth Avenue continues uptown its name changes to Central Park West, then to Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Ninth Avenue becomes Columbus. Tenth Avenue becomes Amsterdam. So 86th and 8th refers to today’s 86th and CPW. I’m assuming the name changes occurred as the UWS became more developed and fancier.
Many of the buildings on the UWS are the first structures ever built there, in the 1880s.
Blue eyes
Great article on a topic still affecting people today, especially rent stabilized tenants who are denied rightful tenant succession claims and accused of being “squatters” in their own homes they’ve lived in longer than most of their newcomer neighbors.
Enlightening and important reading