LES Heritage Film Series, Season 2, Pt.3

Showing films on the first Tuesday of every month. This FREE series will offer documentary and feature films that were shot on location in lower Manhattan on both 16mm and DVD formats. 

3rd part in the series:

The Rebuilding of Mascot Flats 
(1990, 60 min., 16 mm.)

Issues of housing, homelessness and community development are intermeshed in this film documenting the efforts of New York City homesteaders in transforming Mascot Flats, an 85-year-old abandoned building, into cooperative apartments. The urban pioneers were aided in their endeavors by Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based group dedicated to building housing worldwide. Habitat's most famous members, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, arrived via bus with other volunteers to help renovate the tenement. Hopeful residents describe their experiences being homeless or near homeless and reveal the satisfaction as well as the frustrations involved in a "sweat equity" enterprise. Completion of the Mascot Flats project was alternately helped and hampered by the expectations of Habitat and delayed due to lack of funds and building code violations. However, in November 1986, three years after renovation began, nineteen families moved into the rehabilitated building.



The Rebuilding of Mascot Flats courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.