The late Bob Moses—hero from Harlem who went “inside the iceberg” to organize for voting rights in the Jim Crow South and then got a second wind as director of “The Algebra Project”—once mused America had a virtue: you could live a life in struggle here. Moses’s underdog’s version of American exceptionalism is on point when it comes to Tom DeMott’s life, which was marked by nearly forty years of imaginative organizing against rent intensifiers and gentrification. But Tom’s crazy early death—at age 67 in 2018—made everyone who’d walked with him wonder about personal costs of deep politics (which should never be conflated with come-and-go activism).
Tom came to stay in the neighborhood around Tiemann Place in 1969 when he entered Columbia. (He’d grown up in Amherst, Massachusetts but ended up becoming a true New Yorker.) Tom left Columbia around 1971 before returning to the College late in the decade to get his degree as one of the oldest ever returnee-grads. He was already working full-time in the Harlem post office on 125th Street where he stayed until he retired after thirty years. His deepest learning took place not in classrooms on Morningside Heights, but in Harlem and in his neighborhood where he partnered up with his Dominican-American wife, Maria Prestinary, who brought him into her extended family. Together they’d raise their son, Jamie (named after James Brown), and daughter Billie (named after Billie Holiday). Tom was a natural-born grandfather too. It’s possible that no-one misses him more than his grand-daughter Shai whom he animated, educated, and exhilarated.
Not that Tom didn’t make numberless other New Yorkers feel beloved too. Those souls who filed in to Tom’s apartment, once the neighbor-gram about his death started going around, went to the heart of the matter. You could get a hint of Tom’s worldliness from a checklist of nations repped on that first night in his house of mourning—Haiti, D.R., Barbados, Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, England, Senegal, Jamaica, China, Greece, Canada…
That list signifies only because Tom’s people don’t belong to a class-bound, polyglot elite. Nor can they be reduced to their places of origin. Each of them has their own tendency in time and Tom had grasped what’s unique about their no-such-thing-as-normal-lives. Someone trying to comprehend Tom’s life leaned on a litterateur’s line: Tom was “one of those upon whom nothing is lost.” With this nitty-gritty caveat, (per an old friend of Tom’s): “a lot just bounces off.” Tom had to armor up sometimes when he worked with hard-hit people. And humor was his super power. (He could get a smile out of almost anyone—from street people to crusty judges.) He never gave into despair, though he felt the harrowing of older tenants, in particular, who would call him up for help from all over the city, at all hours. He was almost always…Up!
“Tom ate trouble for dessert.” That was Sarah Martin—former head of the Grant Houses’ tenant association—lauding her late comrade at his Memorial, which was held at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem. Ms. Martin spoke to the appetite for struggle that made Tom an organizer for the Ages. His courage, endurance, and knack for solidarizing ensured he’d be a central player in efforts to rally neighborhoods threatened by gentrification (and iffy uses of eminent domain) throughout the city. His funeral at St. Mary’s Church became an occasion for representatives of community groups such as The Movement for Justice in El Barrio (based in East Harlem) and Mirabal Sisters (based in West Harlem) to show their love for him. But this short bio will focus on his place in the history of Tiemann Place. That’s where Tom made his bones as an organizer.
His future was written on that front when the dire state of his and Maria’s apartment in 550 Riverside Drive—on the corner of Tiemann Place—moved him to start the Tiemann Tenants Alliance in 1981. Or, as it would come to be known on legal briefs (and deposit slips): “55 and 69 Tiemann Place 550 Riverside Drive Tenants Alliance.” Terrible conditions in those three buildings moved scores of renters—individuals and families—to join the Alliance in the 80s. (As one tenant recalled at Tom’s Memorial: “When my wife moved in with me [in 1981], she was appalled by the state of my apartment. I had an umbrella in the bathroom for water leaks and we could see down three floors through the gaps.”) The Alliance began a legal rent strike. Back in that day, you didn’t need to establish an escrow account, but Tom et al. got every member to put their monthly rent into one in case a court ruling went against them. The escrow account grew, and attorneys at the Community Law Office (CLO)—shout out to the Honorable Andrew Lehrer and his associates—helped the Alliance manage it. Housing inspectors went into the three buildings and recorded over 1,500 violations, which the Alliance then moved to get repaired. In late 1986 all the court cases up to that date were settled together. The Alliance was awarded 50% of five years’ rent, totaling $270,000. Tenants had their first Alliance Christmas party and lease-holders in 70 apartments received checks based on what they had paid into the escrow account over all that time. Some parents cried as they realized that now their kids could go to college. It was a great day in West Harlem.
But the story of the Alliance didn’t end with that win. The struggle to implement the 1986 stipulation (and resist speculators who wished to turn Alliance buildings into vectors of profit for co-op owners) would go on for decades. It would take a book to do justice to it but a few turns are telling. In the early 90s Alliance buildings were assigned a federal receiver who wouldn’t spend a dime on upkeep, so the Alliance used their rent strike money to pay for oil deliveries to get all tenants—Alliance members or not—through three winters. The receiver sued, by the way, claiming his federal status overruled city directives to fix the apartments. The Alliance’s lead attorney Lehrer successfully won that case as a national precedent in front of Judge Kimba Wood in the Southern District.
In the 90s, Tom ran into another kind of hardball. A lawyer for an enraged landlord passed on a credible death threat. It was nothing to be scoffed at. A crack-house landlord had conspired with drug kingpins to murder Bruce Bailey and desecrate his body in the 80s. Bailey, founder of Harlem Tenants Association, had been an important mentor to Tom (who’d delivered a eulogy at Bailey’s funeral). Tom was forced to watch his own back for two years, as other members of the Alliance accompanied him to and from work and countless public meetings. [The late Hamidullah Al-Amin, pictured talking with Tom at the top of this biograph, was one his most stalwart compañeros.]
It would take another decade—with more threats and other landlords’ gambits—before the Alliance’s case was finally assigned to a Special Master who oversaw deliberations that led to a genuine settlement. One that linked completed repairs with incremental rent increases, allowing for claw-backs and penalties. Over the course of three years repairs were done under the watchful eye of a court-ordered engineer. All violations were cured, something the Alliance had been demanding for a quarter of a century.
Tom helped create other organizations like West Harlem Coalition and Coalition to Preserve Community, which resisted Columbia University’s imperatives in the local surround the University terms “Manhattanville” though West Harlemites call it…home. He was committed to those organizations—and he was permanently on call to stray tenants in trouble—but he never slighted the Tiemann Alliance. When he suffered his heart attack he was at his computer finalizing tenants’ response to an MCI rent increase request. As word spread, shocked Alliance members gathered and worked into the night, finishing the response, tracking down dozens of signatures, and delivering it to the post office in the early morning just before the deadline. Tom was gone but his Alliance survived, thanks to his undeniable focus and passion.
An Alliance member, Lynn Kraus, who worked closely with Tom for 26 years on rent cases, used bold fonts to underscore his contribution as she reviewed the organization’s history at his Memorial:
In 1986, represented by the Community Law Office, we entered into an agreement with the landlord that settled the rent strike and guaranteed repairs.
This stip was binding on successors in case the buildings changed hands — which happened almost immediately.
Our subsequent landlords were speculators, scoundrels and federal receivers. What they had in common is that they would do anything but fix the buildings.
Instead, they challenged 1986 agreement over and over in city, state and federal courts.
Ultimately the stip survived and our landlords made the repairs after two decades of litigation.
We stayed in our homes.
Throughout, we were represented by great lawyers from the Community Law office.
However none of this would have worked without Tom DeMott.
I cannot stress this enough.
He was relentless, pragmatic, inventive and always courageous. Nothing was too large or too small for him to tackle.
He made folks who had no faith in the system think they could win this fight.
We were successful because of Tom.
We are here because of Tom.
No doubt. Tom’s legacy is in the streets every fall when the annual Anti-Gentrification Street Fair takes place on Tiemann Place. Tom et al. invented that still vital tradition the year after the Alliance won their original rent strike. We feel graced to know the 35th annual block party on Tiemann Place will include the ceremonial unveiling of a sign co-naming the street: Tom DeMott Way.