infamous second son waterfront hidden camera

For Rivera and her community, the piers were a place where bodies and a riverfront architecture turned permeable by the accumulative effect of decay, wall-cutting, makeshift additions, and material abandonees were entangled as interconnected components of a single medium constituted by material porousness.

The demolition of the piers showed the violent clash of two confronting forms of urbanism, radically differentiated by the way they shaped collective contagiousness. Rivera described the event as follows: “It’s called a sweep. The New York State Urban Development Corporation saw in the piers a sacrificial milieu of impurity and devaluation. Designed as a continuous extension of greenery, the park buffered the presence of the highway, an infrastructure intended to complete the large-scale plan of facilitating the daily commute of white-collar workers to and from the suburbs and their single-family detached dwellings.

The Hudson River waterfront project, designed by Quennell Rothschild Associates/Signe Nielsen, included a boulevard, trees, a seven-lane highway, and paths for bikers, joggers, and skaters. Her house, along with a dozen other dwellings where more than thirty people lived, was destroyed that morning in 1996 by the Hudson River Park Conservancy, a subsidiary of the New York State Urban Development Corporation as part of the clearance operation to build the Hudson River waterfront (from Battery Park City to 59th Street). Rivera was a Puerto Rican trans activist who changed LGBTQIA+ history through her involvement in the Stonewall riots and her fight for the rights of sex workers, incarcerated people, and the homeless. 1 It was the place where Rivera labored for decades as a sex worker, lived, and socialized with other members of the LGBTQIA+ community (mostly racialized, gender non-conforming people like herself), and the “homeless” population that actually found a “home” on that piece of land. Johnson, was found floating in the Hudson on July 6. After a brief period away from Manhattan, Sylvia came back to the piers in 1992, when the body of her friend, the African American sex worker and activist Marsha P. Rivera’s home was in Lower Manhattan at Pier 45, which faced the Hudson River on one side and the wrecked West Side Highway on the other, at the very end of Christopher Street. The camera focused on her rescued plants, her plush bear toy, her salvaged furniture, her little altars with photographs of her chosen family, and her outfits hanging in the improvised walls of her shack-a fragile structure made with broken doors, some plastics, and cardboard. On the bleak spring morning of April 6, 1996, the TV station WPQG interviewed Sylvia Rivera at her home in New York.

Infamous second son waterfront hidden camera