By Chris Lombardi

When Rosa Maria de la Torre starts talking about dance, she doesn’t bother mentioning the oft-quoted Emma Goldman line: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” But over lunch at Chelsea’s Café Rafaella recently, the coordinator of the Chelsea Housing Group made it clear to Chelsea Now that she finds the two inseparable.

When I think about it, all my discipline comes from dance,” she said. “You start having to think about it a lot—breaking the steps down, slow first, clean it up, clean it up. But then after a while, you don’t have to think anymore.... Building a movement is like that, too.”

Over the past 25 years, Rosa Maria de la Torre has become a trusted advocate in the neighborhood, where her Chelsea Housing Group and Chelsea Tenant Action Committee have helped thousands of tenants fight their landlords in court. While not a lawyer, de la Torre brings to her job an extensive knowledge of New York City’s rent laws, colored by the passion of a revolutionary, and years of experience at the law offices of the nationally known legal firebrand William Kunstler. Having begun her career as a tenant advocate in 1996, just as New York’s rent laws were being substantially weakened, de la Torre finds herself hoping for far more drastic changes in the future. At the very least, her longtime colleagues agree, she’s going to have to hire more staff—or else clone herself.

As a young girl in Piedras Negras, Mexico, (named for the coal deposits that still fuel the city’s economy) and its much smaller cousin Eagle Pass, Texas, (population then as now 21,000) de la Torre wasn’t thinking like a lawyer. “I was a dancer, an actress,” she said.

By the time she moved to New York in 1981, she was also an activist: “I was studying dance with some great people, and we were putting on plays, performances,” all of them political. By 1986, de la Torre had also decided that she wanted to have a child and, therefore, wanted some steady, but part-time, work. She saw an ad for a part-time secretary in a law firm, working for lefty hero William Kunstler.

At the mention of Kunstler’s name during the recent lunch, a smile spread across de la Torre’s face. “Ahh, Bill. Bill was a very special person in my life, a very special person, period.” By 1986, when she went to work for him, it had been many years since Kunstler’s most famous moments, such as defending Lenny Bruce on charge of obscenity in 1962 and dancing with the “Chicago Eight” defendants at their trial for “conspiracy to incite riot” during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Still, clients streamed into Kunstler’s small home office on the West Village’s Gay Street. “It was never a dull moment,” she told Chelsea Now.

Attorney Ron Kuby, now well-known for his morning talk radio show, joined Kunstler’s practice only a few years before de la Torre did, and worked with her until she left the firm in 1998 (three years after Kunstler’s death). He told Chelsea Now last week that de la Torre was a dynamo from the beginning, starting with her effort to tame Kunstler’s “rabbit warren” of papers and boxes. “Rosa Maria made sure Bill ran as smoothly as possible amid all the madness,” Kuby said.

However, he added, “Where she really shone was talking to clients.... The lawyers can be a little brusque, but she had the patience to listen and calm people.”

And soon enough, it became clear to Kuby and others that what de la Torre really wanted was to be an advocate herself. “As we went on and her skills improved, it became clearer what she could do,” said Kuby. “I still think that if she went to law school, it would have been brilliant. She’s a top organizer, a movement leader.”

But by that time, de la Torre’s son, Pablo Gerardo Solanas, was in first grade and de la Torre was looking for more work than the three days the firm could supply. Filling in the extra two days by translating for the city’s Legal Aid Division, she heard a lot about the housing struggles of poor people. “I started learning about the issues, and it [housing] is such a basic right,” said de la Torre. So when Meryl Stein, the new director of the fledgling Chelsea Housing Group, offered her a job in 1996, she was ready.

Stein, now a staff attorney at the public employee union DC 37, told Chelsea Now last week that when she hired de la Torre, she sensed she was ready to move from under the shadow of “Bill.”

“She wanted to break away, do something on her own,” said Stein. “Once she started working, the tenants loved her, because she totally believed in their cause.”

Such commitment was really crucial, added Stein, because New York City’s rent laws were then about to expire. So, in addition to helping tenants with their landlord issues and urging them to form tenant associations, Stein and de la Torre were filling as many buses as they could and heading to Albany to put pressure on lawmakers to preserve the rent laws that kept their homes within reach.

De la Torre remembers those days as a high point. “It was exciting. We did a great campaign around that issue, an exciting year for organizing.” The result, she and Stein agreed, was not exciting, but devastating.

“[Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver screwed us,” said Stein. “We were ready to stay to let the laws expire and fight. We would still be in Albany. But he came to all of us and said, ‘Go home. We have a deal.’ We thought we’d won.”

While the 1997 “deal” between former Governor Pataki, Silver and State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno did not mean rent regulation’s immediate end, it came with a number of permanent changes to those laws that have speeded the removal of apartments from rent-stabilization. For example, rents automatically rise 20 percent after a tenant leaves, landlords have more ways to include renovation costs in rent increases, and tenants’ rights in housing court have been curtailed.

The year 1997 was also notable in another way. After agonizing for years over its shaky finances, the board of the Housing Group asked the venerable Hudson Guild to host the group and ensure its survival. And along with Chelsea Housing Group, all agreed, came de la Torre. “She knew everybody,” said Miguel Pedraza-Cumba, the guild’s vice president for programs, in a recent phone conversation with Chelsea Now. “When our clients have housing issues, all they need is a letter from Rosa Maria and they know what to do.”

Over the years, said Pedraza-Cumba, de la Torre’s program expanded and connected more extensively with other Guild programs, especially as so many long-term tenants aged. “She’s more interconnected to our adult services program, and she now also gets referrals from us,” said Pedraza-Cumba said.

De la Torre agreed that her work alters as her population ages. But far more noticeable to her have been darker changes: As more and more units leave rent-regulation, the rest are stressed by the wrenching sea change wrought by today’s real estate market, wherein wealthy individuals buy buildings expecting a 100–200 percent return on their investment. “They just want the tenants out,” said de la Torre, adding that as the 2005 West Chelsea rezoning was being completed, “they were knocking on doors to ask tenants to leave for a few thousand dollars.”

In one building on Tenth Avenue, said de la Torre, “on one particular day, [the owner] had H.P.D., D.O.B. and the Fire Department all showing up” when tenants refused to move out. “But one of the tenants started seeing me, and they finally started working together.”

She grinned, though ruefully: a battle won, but not the war.

Asked if it is harder now than earlier to organize tenants, de la Torre demurred, “It’s always been hard. You’re asking people to change their life, not just come to a meeting.” But current conditions, in which many middle-class tenants who once fought for rent-control are now co-op owners, does make it harder for those who are left. “People have two or three jobs,” she said. “I don’t hold it against people who don’t come out. I’m a worker like them.”

Looking forward, de la Torre said she takes heart from the energy of immigrant groups fighting for recognition. They showed up in force last year at the Rent Guidelines Board hearing, she said, and changed the whole event, if not the outcome.

“It was really exciting, not the usual suspects,” she said. “Mexicans from the Bronx, a wonderful African-American woman drumming up and down the aisle.” With a huge laugh, she added: “They made so clear they know it’s a farce.”

While de la Torre keeps plugging away at the Hudson Guild program and beyond, longtime allies express one wish: that there were more than one of her.

“She’s funny, she’s thorough, she’s passionate about what she does,” said Maria Guzman, an aide to Assemblyman Richard Gottfried who has known de la Torre for nearly 30 years. “What I wish is that she could hire more people, to expand the work and help it grow.”