Customer Reviews

Glass House

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A pictorial essay of the lives of a group of homeless young people who find a way to build a community among the castoffs of society.

For several years, I lived in cooperative housing where all the residents participated in organized chores, ate together, relaxed and bonded together in common areas, and established house rules such as guest policies by democratic vote at weekly Sunday meetings. All this features of communal life were also present at the "Glass House," where young adults formed a community living in an abandoned factory in New York City. I found Morton's account of their experiences very moving. The pictures and narratives are beautiful, stark, evocative; they tell how these different people ended up at the Glass House, how they built themselves a home and community there, how they lived, and where most of them ended up ten years later.

I think people with a variety of interests, from photography to homelessness to urban life, would find much to reflect on in this book. For me, how the various inhabitants organized themselves, formed a family of sorts, and became emotionally invested in their shared living space was especially fascinating. I read the book as a story of people coming together in situations of deprivation or duress to try to survive, such as the 2010 Chilean miners who managed to survive while trapped underground for months. The Glass House residents were not necessarily physically trapped, but they often faced barriers and hardships such as poverty, mental health problems, and addictions. How can people endure and even build lives while trapped in a mine, or in an abandoned factory on the lower East Side? But I think there are many other approaches to this account, and I am sure that when I read it again I will form another interpretation.

One resident, Donny, said of Glass House: "I watched people change and grow up there. It was a transforming experience for a lot of people. I saw people come here with no skills, who learned carpentry, who learned plumbing, learned electricity, and learned installing locks, right here. And some of them beat ten-year, five-year drug habits while they did it. Basically, the family mattered more than the building. I mean, we were always working on the building, but we were always working on the community too."