Clayton: L.E.S. ch-ch-changes

[media-credit name=”Clayton Patterson” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″][/media-credit]In the early 1990s, “a lot of people felt the city was out of control,” recalled documentarian Clayton Patterson. A poster on a bus shelter of then-Mayor David Dinkins with a graffiti scrawl over his face, “The city is burning,” evoked the feeling. Occupy Wall Street’s recent tent city at Zuccotti Park was called a Hooverville for our times. But for a year in the early ’90s, there was a “Dinkinsville” on an empty lot at E. Eighth St. between Avenues B and C. The spot had been home to a squatter building where Tia Scott was a resident, which was demolished on April 1, 1989. As for why it was razed, Patterson said, “Well, they always have an excuse,” adding that a bulldozer coincidentally had slightly damaged the building’s front while clearing an adjacent lot. Back then, Satan’s Sinners Nomads were the last of the Lower East Side street gangs. They didn’t ride motorcycles but did like to chill in their casita at Third St. and Avenue D. Also there just used to be a lot more kids running around the neighborhood, Patterson recalled, like the group at lower right who came all the way from Jackson St. to have their photo taken in front of the documentarian’s “Wall of Fame” door at Essex and Stanton Sts. (“Juice” is at the rear left.) “It was like a big deal to get photographed in front of the door,” Patterson said.