Acorn Building becomes Focus of Bronx Battle
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No sooner had the city granted the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now a South Bronx building to rehabilitate than posters sprung up in the neighborhood calling the group "Bloodsuckers of the Poor." The dilapidated building has become the focal point of a bitter battle between old allies over what Mott Haven needs more of: housing or culture. Rafael Bueno, who has rehabilitated the tenement's first floor to create a center for indigenous persons of the Americas, Casa del Sol, has called the housing advocacy group's director, Bertha Lewis, "a known lefty hooligan who has been sucking from the poor." Ms. Lewis, one of the city's best-known neighborhood advocates, shot back, "Hell, I'd like to suck his blood." The fight between the pair should get even nastier this month, when they face off in state Supreme Court in the Bronx. As unlikely as it may seem, the two once organized together for control of the 136th Street tenement, occupying the building, leading protests, and filing lawsuits. When the other squatters abandoned the building after 13 years in 1997, Mr. Bueno stayed on. He says he does not live in the building, but oversees 24-hour care of Casa del Sol. "We feel it's a crime to destroy a place like Casa del Sol to create more subsidized and transitional housing," said Mr. Bueno, a Dominican native who calls himself a member of the "Caribbean Nation." "This is the largest concentration of public housing in the United States. We don't need more of it. We need a cultural center to provide for the tens of thousands of public housing residents who have no culture whatsoever." While Acorn organizers agree the neighborhood is overrun with shelters, they say the building would provide much-needed permanent, not transitional, housing. Acorn's plan is for homes for families with incomes between $15,000 and $62,000. "Our members are pretty convinced that we need housing more than we need a community center or an art gallery, and they're pretty clear that it's not fair for one person to occupy a 50-person building," said Acorn organizer Heather Appel. The history of this battle dates back to 1984, when a former owner placed an ad offering low rents and "fix-it yourself" apartments. After a few months of paying rent, Ms. Lewis and the 20-odd other residents found out the building had been issued a vacate order two years earlier, but they stayed on as squatters, restoring the building themselves and fighting for legal title. Four years later, the city sold the building to Cypress Holding Corp., but the squatters refused to go. They barricaded themselves inside, with Ms. Lewis leading the fight. The Guardian Angels came to defend them against the owners. Civil rights lawyer William Kunstler picked up the case, which was the first to be filmed by Court TV, Ms. Lewis said. They held on for a while, but the city declared the building a firetrap in 1997 and 200 police officers accompanied by fire trucks, a bomb squad, and a helicopter swarmed it. All the remaining residents agreed to leave the building -except Mr. Bueno. "Eventually we said, that's it, we're out of here, and the city put a vacate order on the building. There was only Bueno," Ms. Lewis said. "It's ironic that this thing has come all the way around and I should be working with Acorn. I had decided to put this building behind me." On a recent visit to Casa del Sol, an Ecuadorian musician was repairing his harp in a garage studio and a Chilean man, who said he was in New York for a meeting at the United Nations of indigenous communities, worked in the office, which was equipped with a computer, fax machine, and a wood-burning stove. With most of its windows broken, the outside of the building is alternately scrawled with graffiti and painted with suns and tepees. In the immaculate garden that falls under the shadow of the Bruckner Expressway, tepee poles stand prepared for an upcoming summer solstice celebration, flats of tomatoes sit ready to be planted, and piles of split wood lie strewn on the wall next to the building. One government employee said on a recent trip to the site, all he could find were a few homeless men "hanging out." Neighbors say they don't know much about what goes on at Casa del Sol. Mr. Bueno describes a continual flow of "native peoples," saying in a recent phone conversation that he had visitors from the Taino Native American community. In a letter to the Department of Cultural Affairs commissioner, Kate Levin, he wrote, "Our efforts to present this neighborhood as a safe, welcoming and tolerant community have engendered a nascent art scene in Mott Haven and Port Morris." Mr. Bueno also knows he has a formidable foe in Ms. Lewis. After all, to hear him tell it, she learned her community organizing skills from him. The so-called mentoring relationship went sour decades ago. Mr. Bueno says Ms. Lewis became power hungry; she says he only had his personal interest in mind and ruined it for the group. "There is one man who stood in the way of at least 30 families 20 years ago getting a home. And here he is again, after all these years, standing in the way of that building being converted for at least 35 to 40 families," but, Ms. Lewis vowed, "We're going to fight him."
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