Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space to open in EV

Manhattan has a fair number of niche museums to offer— the Tenement Museum, the Museum of Sex, the Transit Museum. Add one more to the list, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, which will open at 155 Avenue C in the East Village, the New York Times reported.

Laurie Mittelmann, co-founder of the museum, told the Times that the goal of the museum was to preserve the memory of its recent history, one which has seen gentrification as well as successful preservation efforts. A spokesperson for the museum indicated to The Real Deal that the museum would open as soon as it found sufficient funding, “probably two to three months.”

In 2002, then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer won a lawsuit against the Giuliani administration, preventing the sale of many of the neighborhood’s public green spaces to developers. A number of lawsuits and agreements have dealt with the neighborhood’s many “squatters,” some of whom have become legal owners of the buildings they occupied.

The museum, which will tell “how activists in the East Village took over abandoned properties and over the years,” according to the Times, will also provide former-squatters still living in the residential portion of 155 Avenue C with some income. [NYT]