Directed by Kelly Anderson, Kathryn Barnier, Ryan Joseph • Documentary • With Frances Goldin, Tito Delgado • 2022 • 82 minutes
In 1959 New York City announced a “slum clearance plan” by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit - not displace - residents, a working mother named Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee (CSC) and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification - cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty three years later, they established the state’s first community land trust - a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the “real estate capital of the world.”
Up Next in New Day Films
-
It Happens to Us
Directed by Amalie R. Rothschild • Documentary • 1971 • 32 minutes
Made in 1971 when a medically safe legal abortion was available in only one state, "It Happens to Us" was produced to bring to public attention the sometimes shattering, and always difficult, personal situations underlying a woma...
-
The Lost Bird Project
Directed by Deborah Dickson • Documentary • With Todd McGrain, Andrew Stern • 2012 • 56 minutes
Gone and nearly forgotten in extinction, the Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, the Heath Hen, the Carolina Parakeet, and the Passenger Pigeon leave holes not just in the North American landscape but in ou...
-
Safe Haven
Directed by Lisa Molomot • Documentary • With Robin Long, Joseph Bovard, Leah Main • 2020 • 80 minutes
Safe Haven weaves together powerful stories of U.S. war resisters who sought safe haven in Canada during wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The film shows how Vietnam era resisters participated in a mov...
