Results tagged “squatters”

Earlier this week, a former squat, the Bullet Space at 292 East 3rd Street in the East Village, was turned over to its residents. Or, as the NY Post puts it, "Nearly 30 years after an eclectic group of poets, performers, anarchists and artists illegally occupied a burned-out East Village tenement, they've officially become a Manhattan co-op."

Looks like the evicted squatters of 59 Orient Avenue are trying to reclaim their abandoned home. Caroline Stanley of Flavorwire, a neighbor of the Williamsburg house, tells us: "We heard people trying to get in last night around 12 and called the cops. The fence has been like that for two days now and when I called 311 to report it to the DOB they claimed that two other complaints had already been lodged." The house, of course, is famous for being Clementine's home in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the street made more famous by its real-life resident Michel Gondry.

Has the saga of the Eternal Sunshine crackhouse ended? The abandoned residence, used in the Michel Gondry film and located at 59 Orient Avenue in Williamsburg, had recently turned into a squatter's paradise--something neighbors were not too keen on. The Brooklyn Paper is reporting that the druggies and prostitutes residing in the house and lurking in neighbor's yards, have departed. The paper is patting themselves on the back, saying that once their "reporter questioned building owner Carlos Mery, he and his brother replaced the faulty plywood fence with a sturdier barrier, cleared out thick vegetation that gave trespassers cover for their illicit activities, better boarded up the first and second floors of the decaying mansion, and even fixed holes in the third floor and roof to keep vagrants out." One neighbor noted that once this took place, "the crackhouse problem was solved.”

Michel Gondry may have just moved to Orient Avenue in Brooklyn, but certainly not to #59, which was briefly in the limelight when it appeared as Kate Winslet's apartment in his film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Four years after the cameras stopped rolling, The Brooklyn Paper takes a look at the house in its current state--and it's in no way ready for its next close-up.

Squatters, junkies, and prostitutes have turned the vacant building into a crackhouse, and residents of the tree-lined block say their safety is at risk.

Continue reading "Eternal Nightmare on Orient Avenue"