Bowery Lives Matter · About
About Bowery Lives Matter
Bowery Lives Matter documents and supports the people who live on the Bowery, with a focus on dignity, visibility, and the right to remain rooted in place.
The project grew from time spent at the Sunshine Hotel, where Anna Barratt met residents, made portraits, filmed conversations, and listened to stories shaped by grief, housing instability, addiction, family estrangement, and survival. The work began as a personal encounter and became an effort to preserve the lives and histories that redevelopment can make easy to overlook.
The mission
The residents come first.
Bowery Lives Matter centers the people who live in single-room occupancy hotels and other precarious housing on the Bowery. Their homes are not temporary details in the story of New York. They are places where people build routines, relationships, memories, and belonging.
The project works to keep residents visible and to support their ability to shape decisions about their homes. It treats photographs, testimony, and records as evidence that these lives matter and that their histories deserve to remain part of the city.
The story
A record of people, place, and belonging.
Anna Barratt lived at the Sunshine Hotel for a year and a half. She came to it with her own experiences of grief, addiction, unstable housing, and family loss. Those experiences did not make the residents’ stories her own. They helped her recognize the loneliness and rejection that can accompany life without stable housing, and they shaped a practice grounded in attention and witness.
At the Sunshine, residents offered conversation, trust, and access to a world that is often described from the outside. The resulting work is part art, part archive, and part insistence that people pushed to the margins are not invisible or disposable.
The Bowery
Two buildings. Lives rooted in place.
Sunshine and 125 Bowery, formerly known as the Providence, are part of the Bowery’s living history. Long-term residents have built daily lives, friendships, and community in buildings shaped by changing ownership, redevelopment, and rising rents.
Bowery Lives Matter keeps attention on the people who live there now. The residents are not a footnote to the neighborhood’s past. Their homes, voices, and choices matter now.
What guides this work
Visibility is part of protection.
Resident voice
Residents should help set priorities for their homes and their future.
Dignity and stability
A room is more than a place to sleep. Housing should come with dignity, stability, and a meaningful say in decisions that affect home.
An honest record
Photographs, stories, and records help keep residents and their histories from disappearing.
Help them get through this winter.
Ten people. Food, water, clean bedding, laundry, hygiene supplies, pest treatment, safe repairs, and a housing attorney who knows SRO cases.
Anna is the organizer. Updates show what the money paid for. Receipts, not faces.