The Grimy, Melancholy World of a Bed Stuy Squat House
In the Gothamist documentary above, we meet Dave, Bailey, Bucket, Jon, Mark, Tara, and Steve-O, a group of squatters who once lived in an unattended house in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. In June of this year, their landlord kicked them out and sold the building—you may have heard that the neighborhood is gentrifying—but before that, filmmaker Jeff Seal got a glimpse of the way they lived.
The way they lived: pretty gloomy. There's garbage, and holes in walls, and destroyed toilets, and a chunk of ceiling in the bathtub. Bailey, who wears a hood ornament from a Buick around her neck, says she was on "all three Law and Orders" before she started smoking crack.
There's also some camaraderie: the best scene comes when Mark, whose triumphantly stoned manner reminds me of Jim Breuer in Half Baked, describes a police attempt to make them leave:
They always say, "If we have to come back, you guys are gonna get arrested, or, you know, something bad's gonna happen, this isn't your house," all this shit. And we were like, "Listen, dude. We're, like, allowed to stay." And then they said, "We're just gonna leave." And they looked in here, they saw how much shit we had, and they're like, "It's gonna take you a while to pack up." They're like, "Listen, you guys need to bounce," and we ended up not doing shit, and fuckin' just came back the next night.
After the house was busted, the members of the group went their separate ways. Bailey is sleeping outside in Coney Island, Mark in downtown Manhattan.