Come and get square everywhere, come and get square everywhere, come and get square everywhere, come and get square everywhere, come and get square everywhere.
I grieve for Monica.
Our hearts are broken about this. We're really very sad.
There's a short list of people who, when they say let's do something, they mean they're going to do it.
Catherine was in the center of it.
Everything starts somewhere, and this is where it started.
No heat, no running water, not for quite a while since last December.
Paul Shea was in the squatter, but he came in and helped them put just the basic water in the toilets, which most of these places didn't have.
You see people outside of squat in the middle of the winter taking their piss buckets out and putting them down the storm drains.
Lower East Side had a lot of abandoned buildings and warehouse buildings, and it kind of didn't make sense to people why would they have all these abandoned buildings and all these people living on the street.
This is around the time when all the homeless were being brought to Tompkins Square Park, and the reason to bring them to the park was to make an international example of the homeless crisis that was going on in New York City.
It was an eyesore, I mean it was, but it was a real statement about the city's shelter system, how people would rather live out in the cold.
So a political movement sort of came up and got started.
It was in this struggle and in this background that I met Paul Shea and Kathy Shea, and we were united under the struggle of what we were fighting for, people housing.
They were really fighting, they weren't just walking around the street in protest and they were putting up a fight.
He was willing to make that kind of commitment for the struggle.
Even Paul got gentrified out of Lower East Side because he used to have a real good plumber, which was the name of his business, and he used to be beside East Third Street.
He eventually couldn't afford to be there anymore and he moved.
When I go through the neighborhood and look at my old photographs and things and realize that there's very few old permanent businesses down here,
almost everything has been transformed into something that's new.
And that newness is about a different philosophy, it's about a different point of view.
Paul and Kathy had the vision and the ability to foresee this, and they were staunch allies in this struggle to try to preserve what it was that we felt
New York City represented.
I was actually looking on my Facebook and I seen a report come down and I kind of just glanced at it.
I saw the name Paul Shea and I saw it was out of state and I'm going, well that's probably not, but then I saw the name of the Plumber Company and I go, oh no, that's Paul, I know him.
And I was just totally shocked.
I read something I wrote in advance.
I just want to thank you all for being here.
What has happened to the Shea's and their guests?
It's not only horrible but devastating.
The loss of anybody, especially people who are good organizers, really hurts us all as a whole because there aren't a lot of us left anymore.
And we're old and we need a younger generation to come in and pick up the torch but it isn't happening.
There's something great about going to your local plumber and knowing the guy who's there.
Hey Paul, how you doing? All good. You know, maybe two years from now you need a plumber. All Paul, you know, it's a loss of a neighborhood.
It's a loss of a community.
