from forgotten to found

MEET myles smutney: founder of the free store project

What happens when we look at what a community has been taught to overlook, and imagine what it could become instead?

That question has shaped much of Myles Smutney's work as an artist, community organizer, and founder of The Free Store Project. Since launching in 2020, she has proudly created community-focused shared spaces where New Yorkers can give away items they no longer need and find the things they do, turning excess into a resource and strangers into neighbors. What began during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic has since grown into a broader vision for building more connected and sustainable communities. 

But the idea was never just a free-exchange barter system. At its heart, The Free People Store is centered on building community equity, by creating infrastructure for people to truly look out and care for one another. By making generosity visible and accessible, The Free Store Project creates opportunities for neighbors to be active participants in their communities and find new possibilities in spaces and resources that would otherwise go unused. This philosophy has continue to guide her work throughout New York City, and most recently, the Lower East Side.

Now Myles is turning her attention to a long-abandoned public restroom at Allen and Delancey, imagining it as something far more valuable than a vacant building. 

The Lower East Side Cultural Center is envisioned as a permanent, community-rooted home for arts, culture, education, and connection in a neighborhood with a long history of shaping New York City's cultural landscape. Still a grassroots project, the initiative would preserve and reactivate the existing infrastructure, transforming a long-forgotten building into a third space where local artists, cultural organizations, educators and residents could gather to connect, learn, and celebrate the history of LES. 

The idea is ambitious, but is deeply connected to the work Myles has already been doing. Rather than imagining community as something that only happens inside established institutions, she's spent years creating the conditions for people to come together whenever she finds an opportunity. The Free Store Project turned sidewalks into places of exchange, operating under the belief that public spaces should serve the public, and now she hopes that same spirit can take root at the LES Center.

For Myles, that abandoned building on Allen and Delancy isn't meant to be the end of a story, but a reminder of what New York City already has: the people, places, and possibilities just waiting to be seen differently.