The mansion had clearly once been a place of great wealth. The original owner, J. E. Rebstock, built it in the early 1890s. Rebstock was the founder of Crystal Beach, which was once known as “Buffalo’s Coney Island.” But by 1960, the house had become a nursing home. The mansion’s current residents led me down to the basement, where, from boxes of dusty medical records, they had unearthed creepier aspects of the mansion’s past. One record noted that a patient was “awake all night tearing bed apart.” Another read: “Yelling loudly. Still scratching.”

When Majewski and his fellow squatters arrived, the house was still filled with the bedpans, walkers and knitting needles that had belonged to the nursing home’s residents. There were also rotting furniture, burned couches, dead birds and so much other garbage that some rooms had debris from the floor to the ceiling. Cleaning up took the better part of a year.

Eventually, one of the city’s “board-up crews,” which seal off abandoned homes, discovered the squatters and reported them to Judge Henry Nowak at the city’s housing court. At first, Nowak didn’t know what to make of the situation. Then, one evening, while the judge was attending his son’s Little League baseball game, he was approached by a group of neighbors who lived near the mansion. They said they wanted to discuss the squatters. To the judge’s astonishment, the neighbors praised the young people, saying that they had kept the thieves, drug dealers and arsonists away. What’s more, they attested, the squatters were fixing up the place, making it less of an eyesore. Their presence, and the fact that the mansion was now occupied, had made it easier for people on the block to get homeowners’ insurance. Odd as it seemed, the freegan kids helped stabilize the neighborhood, and the concerned neighbors wanted them to stay. “They said, ‘Don’t you dare kick those kids out of the house!’ ” Judge Nowak told me.

After this encounter, the judge found himself in a difficult situation. “I was left with two options essentially,” he told me. “One would be to put the house in receivership, where I would tell all of these children that if they want to stay, they have to now pay rent.” This option was problematic, Nowak said, because the squatters were “enamored with the fact that they moved into a house that wasn’t theirs,” and given their freegan sensibilities, they would not consent to paying rent. Or, Judge Nowak explained, “I could essentially let things stay as they are and trust that the children are going to make the repairs to the property.”

For the time being, the judge decided to let the squatters stay. “It was a close call,” he told me. “It was an awfully close call.”

When he was done working on the patio, Tim gave me a tour of the house. On the first floor, there was a spacious kitchen laden with food taken from various Dumpsters, a brew room stocked with homemade beer and dandelion wine, a dining room that had been converted into a performance space for bands and a computer room equipped with a PC that one of the mansion’s residents had built entirely from found parts. The computer even had Internet service thanks to a “cantenna” (an antenna made of cans) that picked up a wireless signal from a college nearby. There was also a library, furnished with old couches that looked as if they might be vestiges of a 1920s speakeasy, and a vast collection of books and periodicals organized by subject headings like “Sex and Sexuality,” “Prisoner and Crime” and “It’s Not Theft.” There were bedrooms on the second floor, and the third floor was a bunkroom for the many drifters who passed through. Several bunks were made up with dusty Thomas the Tank Engine bed sheets. On the wall above the bunks, travelers had scrawled messages like “Thanks a lot! — Fred from Belgium” and “Escape while you can.” The third floor also was home to the mansion’s Craft Room, which had supplies for stenciling, bookbinding, silk-screening and sewing. In the basement there was a wood shop loaded with carpenters’ tools and a repair shop where residents could fix their bikes. Perhaps the most interesting nook was a very large closet dubbed the Free Store. It was stocked with racks of secondhand clothing that visitors were welcome to take. One day I happened to witness the Free Store being restocked. Paul, one of the long-term residents, returned home with a huge bag of clothing that he obtained from the lost-and-found at a local laundromat. “I got a thousand dollars’ worth of designer jeans!” he boasted. A crowd soon formed.

“You got a washcloth?” someone asked.

Paul tossed a washcloth up into the air.

Soon everyone was rifling through the clothing. “I haven’t worn underwear in eight years,” declared Tim, as he clutched several pairs of boxers with a grin. “I am feeling fancy as hell!”