Glass House

Glass House documents a slice of life in the East Village of New York CIty where young squatters lived in an abandoned glass factory in the late 1970s and 1980s. They took over the building and set up a community in an area now gentrified, then known for drugs, late night clubs, and low rent apartments. It was "gritty." Most of the Glass House inhabitants were in their late teens, homeless, and unable to retrun to their family homes. Margaret Morton, a photographer who has concentrated her work on the so-called homeless in New York City, became friendly with the inhabitants of Glass House and after a year or so of frequent visits, gained access to community meetings, and essentially became one of them. The squatters allowed Morton to interview each of them and to photograph their living quarters. Glass House combines photographs and oral histories in such a way that it has the momentum of a narrative, as reader Luc Sante described. Glass House makes a significant contribution to the regrettably small body of literature on squatting and, beyond that, constitutes an historical record of importance to understanding late twentieth-century city. Sante justly compares Morton to Louis Hine, whose photographs have become an invaluable soure for understanding the harsh conditions of life and work in early twentieth-century America.Morton, Margaret is the author of 'Glass House', published 2004 under ISBN 9780271024646 and ISBN 027102464X.