Sooah Kwak

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space

New York, NY, U.S.A.

Sooah Kwak is a researcher whose work examines the making of meaningful and socially purposeful archives. Currently, Sooah is assisting with research at the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. She holds an MA in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University (NY) and a BAS in Art and Technology from Sogang University (KR).

Recycled Places: The Journey of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space from Squat to Museum

The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) is a small community museum on the first floor of a former squat building in Lower East Side (LES) Manhattan. MoRUS chronicles a meaningful history of housing, public and private space, community gardens, and recycling systems in New York. With the economic crisis in the 1970s, New York City was in massive debt, thus making budget cuts by reducing social services and urban maintenance, mostly in lower-income neighborhoods. Community members and squatters of the LES reclaimed abandoned buildings that were decaying and repaired the neighborhood by creating community gardens where they grew food and medicinal herbs. 

Not only does MoRUS chronicles the history of community resilience of the LES, but it also remains as an important hub for the community and a place for empowerment towards sustainable change. Film festivals and events coordinated through the museum are held in community gardens that the museum volunteers maintain. Workshops on composting, repairing bikes, and beekeeping are organized to educate community members and the broader public on how the LES community maintains sustainable lifestyles in one of the most populated and busy cities in the world.

As the museum building itself is a former squat, MoRUS is both a museum and a historical site at the same time. While refurbishing the squat into a museum, certain parts were preserved—such as walls with murals—and some parts were recycled and repurposed. The process of changing a residential building to a museum had somewhat sparked conflict between community members; some residents were ironically, ‘displaced’ during this process. By broadly contouring this history of the making of MoRUS, my talk will aim to introduce the efforts MoRUS made for sustainability while reforming the squat into a museum, the pitfalls in between, and how MoRUS navigated through those conflicts.

Sustainability, Community Museums, Public and Private Space, Recycling