The view from the window of 156 Rivington Street in 1980
So I was packing boxes to ship from Madrid to Milwaukee, USA – 30 in all, they just went out last week. They’ll go on a ship, to be a bit greener. Such a delay to get back to this blog, what with taxes, yada yada. And now I find that my folder of blog posting papers has disappeared. Must be on its way to USA. Miao! I am forced to start again, from what’s on the computer. I was about to tell the story of the near-breakup of the Colab artists’ group in ‘79, based on my reading of Andrea Callard’s files at NYU in late ‘19. It was to be called “#12 All for One or Fall Apart?”. This phase of Colab’s story was to be a complex write, really, and it proved to be a stumbler. So for now I’ll leave it for later, and number this post 13.
The gist of #12 was that Colab in late ‘79 was on the verge of falling apart. 1980 saw some sudden dramatic events that changed the situation completely.
This post is about ABC No Rio, our pride and joy in Loisaida, NYC. I've told the story of the Real Estate Show, of how we got ABC, rather completely in a special issue of House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence, no. 6 “The Real Estate Show Revisited”, April 2014 – still only $4!.
That Big, Loud Squat We Did
A group of us artists occupied a city-owned building with a fast throw-up exhibition. We called it the Real Estate Show. The building was in a boulevard location just off the Williamsburg Bridge, above a subway station exit. We got a huge rise out of the city HPD (angry assistant commissioner on the scene), coverage in the New York Times, Joseph Beuys came to our streetside press conference. And the city gave us a “relocation”, i.e., another place to put our art show.
Why they dealt with us so quickly given our near-totally uninformed and creampuff nature as activists was always a mystery to me. It’s because, as a city official we talked to explained to Bobby G, “You didn’t open a can of worms. You opened a can of pythons.”
How so?
Orchard Street in 1926. Via boweryboyshistory.com
The Scandal of the SPURA
Our motivation in doing that action was indignation at the housing situation in lower Manhattan with so many vacant buildings, and the impossibility of procuring space to show work. In truth we had little notion of the real politics and economics of housing that surrounded us.
As well as being a charming little commercial building, 125 Delancey Street, the original site of the Real Estate Show, looked at its outset as if it could become more than a show of angry art. It could be a venue for organizers and a meeting place for people concerned with housing. A lot of people were being evicted by the city only a block away.
125 Delancey was on the edge of the SPURA, an urban renewal zone notorious in the history of US urban renewal. Historian Barry Goldberg explains:
“In 1965, the New York City Board of Estimate, an eight-member body that once had authority over the city’s budget and land-use matters, but has since been declared unconstitutional, approved a plan to create the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). At the time, the site was one of lower Manhattan’s most racially and ethnically diverse communities, a fourteen-block area of small businesses and tenements in the heart of New York’s Lower East Side. Over 1,850 families lived there and roughly 80% were low-income. In 1967, the city took possession of – and began to demolish – the old SPURA buildings. Housing authorities provided a written guarantee to displaced residents that they would have priority rights to one of the roughly 1,800 new apartments built on the site.”
Nothing like that happened. 50 years of fighting over the area ensued. Sheldon Silver, a powerful pol, went to jail over his role in the long-term land-parking of what had been thousands of families’ homes. Our Real Estate Show came along 10 years into that stagnation, “‘one of urban renewal’s grandest failures,’ a string of vacant lots and abandoned land that embodied the city’s broken promise and broader neglect of low-income communities.”
(Goldberg was reviewing Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.)
What's there now? A 2,000,000 square feet billion dollar development called Essex Crossing, part of the new gold coast Lower East Side. The luxury condo part has the same address as the Real Estate Show – 125 Delancey Street.
Big Talk, How’s the Walk?
The Committee for the Real Estate Show had boldly announced its action to the press:
“"This is a short-term occupation of vacant city-managed property. It is pre-emptive and insurrectionary. The action is dedicated to Elizabeth Mangum, a middle-aged Black American killed by police and marshals as she resisted eviction in Flatbush last year. The intention of this action is to show that artists are willing and able to place themselves and their work squarely in a context which shows solidarity with oppressed people… It is important to show that people are not helpless--they can express their resentment with things-as-they-are in a way that is constructive, exemplary, and interesting… It is important to try to bridge the gap between artists and working people by putting artwork on a boulevard level… It is important to do something dramatic that is neither commercially oriented nor institutionally quarantined – a groundswell of human action and participation with each other that points up currents of feeling that are neither for sale nor for morticing into the shape of an institution.”
ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington St., NYC, in 1980. ©1980 Becky Howland, all rights reserved.
Writing in 2012, Deborah Frizzell quotes this as “Colab’s manifesto”, which it certainly is not. While the text did call out “racism, class differences, [and] predatory capitalism”, ABC was going to be an art center. We didn’t get active in housing struggles. No one came to us to ask us to host their meetings. Not until over a decade later did ABC No Rio get busy on that. The place became an active node in the movement of LES squatters. But by then the original group of us was long gone.
Next: Running the Place
LINKS and CITATIONS
House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence, no. 6 “The Real Estate Show Revisited”, April 2014 paper copy available at: https://printedmatter-linkedbyair.herokuapp.com/catalog/41685
It is also an online PDF somewhere.
Barry Goldberg, "Art, history, and urban contestation: a review of Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani’s Contested City", n.d.
Metropole blog, at https://themetropole.blog/2019/10/24/art-history-and-urban-contestation-a-review-of-gabrielle-bendiner-vianis-contested-city/
For a brief exposition of the situation, see:
Wikipedia, "Essex Crossing"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_Crossing
Deborah Frizzell, “Whose World is This? Jane Dickson and Charlie Ahearn”, exhibition brochure, University Gallery, William Paterson University of New Jersey (2012); accessed on academia.edu
Lugnut, "X is for...", from the current online exhibition "Polemic"
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