Remembering Leonard Abrams

This isn’t the post that was supposed to come next. But the sudden death of my longtime friend, Lower East Side homeboy and East Village macher Leonard Abrams has put his life on the front burner. I didn’t interview him; I didn’t expect him to shuffle off. But I remember him very well.

East Village Eye staff in the hallway of the Cable Building, mid-1980s. Leonard at center, grinning. (Photographer unknown)

Leonard Abrams was a smalltimer. He worked with modest means and did small things. He didn't have backing, no Warbucks behind him. No renovated premises in prime real estate. (Well, for one brief moment – but before the renovation, actually.) But he had some extraordinary strokes of luck.
I met the East Village Eye magazine in 1979 in a studio on Avenue B, in the middle of heroin highway. It felt like an abandoned bank lobby. Leonard was on good terms with the neighborhood dealers. After all they were working Joes, trying to make a living.
He came from community newspapers, the kind of ad-rag flyers that used to be everywhere in urban USA. Print culture has changed so much that it’s hard to explain how these things worked. I was in that circuit as a production worker. That was an early freelance haute proletarian ambience. We were precarious but very happy to work very little for a princely wage. When I walked into the Eye offices on Avenue B I spied the machine I knew.
“Oh, that’s a Compugraphic.”
“Do you know how to work it?” Leonard asked.
So began many years of work with that ad rag of the Lower East Side. Leonard’s was an ad rag with a difference. The capital came from a group of friends. The man who did the photostats was an old hand of the underground press. Lannes Kenfield’s stat room was littered with old copies of the East Village Other and many of the other lefty pubs he’d worked on in days of yore. His best buddy was Tuli Kupferberg. The Eye’s newsstand guy, Buzz, was also a vet of the underground press. He put the Eye on the newsstands around lower Manhattan, which was the bread and butter – along with the ads – which made the whole thing work. Still, the writers and photographers rarely got paid. Typesetters like me got paid; Lanny got paid; the printer got paid or you didn’t get your paper. That’s why I wasn’t really a writer during those years.
I worked with an artists group called Colab. One of our gang, the weird brilliant artist Christof Kohlhoefer was the Eye’s first art director. Christof had worked with Sigmar Polke, studied with Joseph Beuys. That meant nothing to anyone on the Lower East Side, but Leonard gave him a free hand with the design, which came to be an important definer of NYC punk aesthetic. Leonard let him do his own artwork as inserts, and invite in his friends to do the back covers and centerfolds.
The early Eye pimped Colab big time, as the organization came out of the shadows of artists’ lofts and did events in public spaces. The ‘zine featured our Real Estate Show, the Times Square Show, and a number of subsequent exhibitions at ABC No Rio. Sure, it was the Village Voice cover review of the 1980 TSS and Artforum’s big takeout by Lucy Lippard that put the group over for a time, and set some of its artists into career position. But the Eye was and remained our friend.
Leonard did his first Eye parties at the Mudd Club. Which was not an advertiser.
After Walter Robinson came on board as art editor – I’d worked with him at Art-Rite; he’d also been in Colab – the Eye started to be read by art people. The Eye became a smalltime art magazine. Supermarkets, laundromats and real estate agents didn’t advertise, but cafes and art galleries did. That was becoming the neighborhood. In time nightclubs took out full pages. This rag was a going business.
Yasmin Ramirez interviewed Martin Wong. David Wojnarowicz had a column, as did Cookie Mueller. Marc Miller, who also had a column, did a feature on white graffiti art collectors. Carlo McCormick turned up just in time for the East Village art gallery boom, and helped to make it happen.
Although musicians had a hand at the beginning and a continuing influence, the Eye didn’t go head over heels into rhapsodic saturation coverage of music. Other rags did that. Richard Fantina, who was among the founders of the Eye, went sideways to the New York Rocker (1976 to 1982). The Eye had Steve Hager as news editor for a flash, all whiskers and bravado, before he went to High Times. Hager wrote two books on the downtown scene, Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti (1984), and Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene (1986), and the Eye became the first – as Leonard always loved to brag – to print the term “hip hop”, in its “Chilly Xmas” issue of January 1982. I pulled numbers of that same issue from the trash later as the office closed down.
I first heard “hip hop” several years earlier in Edit DeAk’s loft from the lips of DJ Johnny Dynell. He’d made it into a disco ditty. That the term didn’t make it into print before 1982 is an index of how segregated the white print media was. (That can’t be right; is it?!)

The Eye crew soon moved uptown – 10 blocks uptown to CHARAS El Bohio, the abandoned public school turned social center on East 9th street. There should be a bronze plaque on that Lower East Side building. Instead it’s being tossed around like a bruised fruit between competing real estate interests, a game begun by Mayor Rudy. He didn’t like that it was run by recalcitrant Puerto Rican nationalists with politics on their minds. The damage Giuliani did by putting El Bohio up for auction has still not been undone.
Being there was peachy for me. I could relate to the Puerto Rican vanguard of politicos and poets who had taken that building over from the city. They had inspired my group to take what became ABC No Rio during the Real Estate Show occupation. El Bohio was a locus of culture, with artists, theater groups, political groups and community organizations sharing rooms there. Among the hybrids at El Bohio was P.A.D.D., the political art group, and Times Up!, the bicycle advocacy group who organized Critical Mass rides, built zany bike-floats like dragons and pirate ships, and held events in support of community gardens menaced by eviction.
Which is why Rudy closed it, of course. And why the City will never take it back as a center until every last person who remembers what El Bohio was and what it meant for the Lower East Side is dead and gone. Then it can be safely redeveloped, shorn of any messy, unpredictable political whiskers still hanging on to it.
But I digress.
As a publisher, Leonard was a realist. Winners are winners and losers are losers. Most people are losers. As a longtime loser himself, he was never mean about it. He was wily about letting people down. And he dropped a lot of people. Staying with the changes and keeping it fresh is an axiom of magazine publishing.
He wanted to take the Eye upscale. He took the office from El Bohio west to Broadway, to the historic Cable Building on the corner of Houston Street, luxury digs for sure. (Before the renovation crapped it up.) Down the hall was Richard Fantina’s type shop Strong Silent Type, where I would later work. The Eye HQ also hosted two spin-offs, Eyetype, run by another Eye co-founder, Celeste-Monique Lindsey, and Philippo’s New York New Papers distribution.
I’d hoped for another – Evil Eye Books, like Jan Wenner’s Straight Arrow, but Leonard would not take the bait and get involved. Me and ex-Eye book editor Josh Gosciak did one publication under the name of that fictional entity: A Day in the Life: Tales from the Lower East (Autonomedia, 1990). Cover by Martin Wong. It’s good as anthologies go; it’s being remaindered today.
I recall Jay McInerney hulking around the new Eye office in his lambswool coat – (he didn’t take it off) – and not making eye contact with anyone. He was clearly thinking, “What am I doing here? I should be in the New Yorker!” But Leonard was putting him on the cover, so he had to pay a courtesy visit. Kathy Acker also made the Eye cover, which I’ll guess mattered a lot more to downtown people than Jay-boy.
Downtown losers could be champion carpers. It’s salutary to remember the amount of shit served up to winners like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat from their own community. Those who dished it out should be ashamed, although the veil of selective memory has likely allowed them to forget and forgive themselves. I can’t recall Leonard carping about anything. Angry he could get, and decisively nasty. But bitching and moaning was not his thing.

Photo by Liza Bear
Later, as I did my turn in the archives of the NYPL, I learned that New York City once had dozens of newspapers and magazines in a babel of languages serving every conceivable community. I see the Eye as continuing directly that legacy of print. They served an immigrant and indigenous community of passionate artists.
But communities are like truffles – they grow only to be uprooted and eaten by pigs. In the end the Eye was murdered – or so I call it, mainly by a short-lived upstart competitor monthly called the The Talk, so ephemeral it doesn’t rate a webpage today. Word was it was funded by a would-be press baron as a bauble for his wife, specifically (as paranoid me believes) to clear the field of the competition. I forget the unverified details, but remember the tactics well. The Talk offered every advertiser in the Eye super-discounted rates for bigger ads. Our paper was already weakened by the raising of the drinking age from 18 to 21 at the end of ‘85. With significantly fewer customers many nightclubs closed, and of course their advertising ended. This new competitor spelled the end for the Eye.
Thereafter Leonard wrote a few things for Details, but he seemed to have no real ganas to be a writer. He launched a party project, the Hotel Amazon. He produced this not at El Bohio, but at the more culturally focussed Clemente Soto Velez center, down the street from ABC No Rio. I didn’t hang out at this club; my clubbing days were over. But I loaned some décor for the project, a painting on cardboard by Walter Robinson depicting the “Jungle” component of my project with Terry Mohre called the “Studio Melee”. (Walter painted the backdrop, and David Wells built the mobile element of the jungle.) Maybe that unsigned mural painting is in someone’s house today. More likely it’s in Fresh Kills, making gas. But it served a purpose.
The Hotel Amazon was a big deal, another site where future big names got their start. The project wasn’t run in midtown by mob-connected coke heads. It was in a social center named for a Puerto Rican communist. The club is recalled in a painting by Chris “Daze” Ellis in the Martin Wong collection at the Museum of the City of New York, and by ephemera, the invitation cards which we set at Eyetype.

Like others who find themselves at loose ends, Leonard went back to school, taking an MA in visual anthropology at Fordham. His thesis project was the documentary film Quilombo Country (2006). This look at the Afro-indigenous rural communities of Brazil struck into a vacancy in Anglophone literature. I was at the CUNY Grad Center then, and looked it up: there was nothing in English on these survivals of historic mestizo communities of fugitive slaves and indigenous peoples. They’ve since been recognized globally as a serious movement of land occupation with centuries of history. Leonard’s film was a first step in this direction, and was purchased by African-American history departments around the USA.
Thereafter Leonard drifted into what he called his secret business – “Don’t tell anybody that I’m doing this” – distributing santeria-like sacred objects to Latin-American botanicas throughout the tristate region. He’d go down regularly to D.F., where there were factories which made them and stock up. I recall the molded acrylic resin pyramids with a scorpion entombed within, so creepy. And the featureless lingam-like concrete figure with cowrie shell eyes. (I bought one of these.) This was a strange materialist commercial spirituality, which maybe led an old friend overseas to insist that Leonard would have an afterlife as a ghost, that he would reappear. Maybe from handling so much spiritually conceived merchandise.
Leonard asked me to look around in Spain where I live now for stock for the botanicas. I couldn’t find any. The syncretic stuff he was dealing in is distinctly American. But I recommended some mounted relics, called relicarios, shards of the bones and clothing of the saints. Those were big in Spain in centuries past, although few today even in churches are still “venerated”. So they’re being dumped regularly in auction houses.
“Too expensive for my clients,” he pronounced. A practical lad.

I doubt that Leonard lost money on the Hotel Amazon. Making community with parties you don’t tend to lose money. The problem for NYC and cities like it is one doesn’t make enough money with small recherché themed parties in marginal locations, not enough to satisfy your backer, not enough for the mafiosi to skim, or to pay off the police, or to pay your buddies’ cocaine bills. Nope, it’s just not a way to get rich, or to show that you are.
You can only break even, tread water, and do essentially capitalist community service, bringing people together who had been excluded or little regarded, catching the wave as all successful cultural entrepreneurs must do. That was him. Leonard will be remembered alongside Romany Marie with her cafe central for modernist writers and artists in the early 20th century.
Leonard spoke at a presentation of my memoir at the Howl gallery last year. It was a strange discourse. Howl never put it online as they said they would, and I didn’t take notes. But the theme of it as I recall was exactly how I began this text; Leonard spoke of the East Village as a home for losers. It was an odd speech I didn’t fully understand. (He read it, so there’s a text.) But in the end, I’ll take him at his word. We all were somehow losers who made it through the jungle of winners’ rule. Like the other Leonard’s novel title said, we were all together “Beautiful Losers”.

* * *

So that’s my story of the mensch Leonard Abrams. I have just watched the “viewneral” this afternoon (in Spain) of 5 April, 2023. It was pretty brief. Of the folks who turned up, I remember Pooch from those Avenue B days. He turned into Leonard's lifelong friend, and told some stories. Thomas Walker concluded the service, the son of Sybil. "My mother reached out to him while she was on her deathbed," and Leonard lived with Thomas to get him through his grief. A tall young man today, he wore a black leather jacket and sunglasses “for Leonard”. He was verklempt for long moments. And then concluded, "This isn't his kind of event. He was into soirees. See you at the soiree."

The last hurrah:
Hannah Gold, "The Archives of the East Village Eye Go to the New York Public Library: Leonard Abrams started the paper, which chronicled the cultural life of downtown New York, in 1979. After trying for eight years to place its archives, he handed them off to the library last fall", February 7, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-archives-of-the-east-village-eye-go-to-the-new-york-public-library

Leonard celebrating the acquisition of the Eye archives by the New York Public Library at a party last month. Photo by Stacie Joy from the EV Grieve