This is 99% invisible.

9 Roman Mars.

Three years after moving to New York City, Maggie Riggly found herself on the edge of homelessness.

It was 1987.

She and her boyfriend at the time had been living in a warehouse in Brooklyn.

But their landlord was shady, and they didn't trust him.

We weren't going to stay and pay him all this money, and you know, he got kind of crazy and violent.

We didn't really know where we were going to go.

Around that time, they heard about an abandoned tenement building on the lower east side.

It was owned by the city, but it had been left empty and unmentained.

A friend told them a group of squatters had taken it over and started to fix it up.

It was a place they could live without paying rent to a landlord.

And he said there's an open space.

If you want to come, it's rough.

You know, you got to go through these meetings to get in.

They got to approve you.

It's pain in the ass. We need a place to go.

So, wriggly and her boyfriend packed up their belongings and drove their old car from Brooklyn into Manhattan.

In fact, the day that we drove here to move in our axle broke.

On the car, just fell apart, literally.

It's like right outside the front door.

So it was like, okay.

...