Rabble Rousers

RABBLE ROUSERS began 12 years ago in an experimental class that brought together Hunter College graduate students in documentary film and urban planning. Ryan Joseph, one of the film’s directors, met Frances Goldin in her Lower East Side walkup apartment as he and his class partner, Dave Powell, were searching for a documentary subject.

Fran was 85 at the time, with dyed purple hair, a sharp-tongued wit and a radiant no-nonsense energy. A literary agent, Fran represented an impressive roster of radical writers including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Barbara Kingsolver and Adrienne Rich. But what struck Ryan and Dave most was Fran’s fierce commitment to the Cooper Square neighborhood where she lived – an involvement that had led her and a group of creative and committed activists on a 50-year journey to create the first Community Land Trust in New York City.

Fran died in 2020 at the age of 95. In the years before her death, the filmmaking team evolved. Ryan and Dave decided that the subject matter warranted a feature documentary, and brought in Editor Kathryn Barnier who eventually became a third producer and director on the film. Kelly Anderson joined in 2014 to help raise funds and clear archival materials. Along the way, in a case of life imitating art, Dave was hired by Cooper Square as their Director and had to leave the project.

The three of us worked together from 2014 to get the film finished. It was a labor of love we stuck with because we believed Fran’s legacy needed to be preserved and broadly disseminated. Cooper Square is a rare, replicable success story in a sea of stories about “lost neighborhoods” where gentrification and displacement were not prevented. It is an inspiration to communities and people fighting for equity at a time when the world needs concrete stories of community power and models of successful organizing.

Today, there are dozens of community land trusts in formation in New York City, and thousands all over the world. Cooper Square was the first urban land trust of its size, and its story should be seen widely. Rabble Rousers also documents a small space of old New York that will never be gentrified, a gem that exists because of 50 years of struggle by a committed group of residents whose story is inspirational and still relevant.