(Photo: Photo by Q. Sakamaki Courtesy of PowerHouse Books )

Last night at 8 p.m., a long line of folks were stretched along Avenue A by Tompkins Square Park, for some food, because they didn't have any. They were just south of the amazing banana plant shooting insanely into the air where St. Mark's Place dead-ends. The park's plantings, under the brilliant supervision of Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002, are at their best ever, as they are in other parks around the City. Well, at least in Manhattan. And then, after the sun went down, an even larger (and presumably less hungry) crowd assembled on the site of the park's dog run.

They were watching '80s camp semi-classic Better Off Dead, starring a very young John Cusack as a jilted and suicidal high school student who falls for a delightful French exchange student who restores his love of life! In the movie she shook up a Coke can and exploded it on some football bullies and everyone in the park laughed and laughed! They were all the right age to revisit this little bit of their common history. There were also some funny moments between the old park and the new park. One woman was clearly being menaced by an unwanted interaction with a man; she clutched her tiny dog tight to her. On the southwest side of the park there were the usual old guys, by the chess tables. "Give me a cigarette," said a somewhat shambly if nice man in an outrageous sombrero.

There are remnants still, behind the expensive plantings, beyond the freelancers running their dogs with their lattes in the afternoons, of what you can see documented by Q. Sakamaki in these photos of Tompkins Square Park in the late '80s, now collected in Powerhouse Books' Tompkins Square Park. There are still junkies; only fewer, and therefore less frightening than the '80s mass of heroin zombies. There are still traveling punk crusties, only they are fairly friendly and their puppies are cute. The tenements around and near the park are not in the best of shape but they are in no danger of being abandoned. Indeed they are bursting with tenants. There are no physical encampments in the park; yet people still sleep there, though largely roust themselves before the park closes for the night.

The park itself is intentionally landscaped and divided to prevent assemblies. It is, after all, surrounded largely by tenements, where historically workers have lived, and workers had a tendency to organize and mount protests. (Now they do not. Yesterday I ran into an old friend, a long-time resident, who embodies the new real estate economy mish-mash of a formerly cheap neighborhood that has strong pockets of market spike. He does not work much, and lets the bedroom of his rent-stabilized apartment just off Tompkins Square Park to a recent arrival to New York—who pays three-quarters of the rent.) And most of the park's walkways curve, except for the straight-through of 9th Street, making a trip directly through the park from residents of Alphabet City difficult. It is park design as a barrier, intentional or not.

So there are few assemblies of any untoward sort in the park now. In 1874 and again in 1988, brutal police suppression of demonstrations made the park infamous. In the first instance, it was Socialists riling up the workers. In the second, it was anarchists riling up the non-workers. The funny thing about urban parks is that, when times are tough, people come to live in them—in this case not as formally as the Hoover-ville of Central Park in the 1930s, but with the same effect. In 1988, the unemployment rate was falling in New York; the economy had been, overall, on the rise since 1982. But while the median apartment rent was $390 a month then, in actuality that number is artificially depressed by the large number of rent-controlled apartments that did not ever change hands, and the average rent for actually available apartments listed in the New York Times in 1988 was $1,250. The City boasted 40,000 homeless people. Anarchists, drug addicts, and folks with nowhere to go congregated in the park, roiled with frustration and resentment. And so demonstrations over the radically changing issue of affordable housing were charged by lines of police. The 1988 riot was one of the first police disasters to be thoroughly documented by portable recorders, a technological development that the city was not prepared for, particularly as the documentation made a lie of the NYPD's claims about the nature of the riot. Things were changing in all manner of ways. (Of course, some things were not.)

CLICK HERE FOR A GALLERY OF PHOTOS FROM Q. SAKAMAKI'S TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK