“ABC No Rio 45 Years” Sleepless Nights Far from Home

An occasional blog on the jobs of organizing “ABC No Rio 45 Years” for April of 2025. Second post, in which the producer succumbs to 3a.m. despair, then pulls himself together by remembering the hard travel road that led us to here.

A Blowout on the Concept Level

Yes, it’s AI. “A dark room in which there is an old chair on which a tired [old] man sits, burning photographs and papers, on the floor puddles displaying a trace, on the window Cloudy” stablediffusionweb.com/es/image/20394546-a-tired-man-burning-documents-in-a-dark-room

The committee which was organizing the “ABC No Rio 45 Years” exhibition has dissolved. This shit is now up in the air. The two of us who conceived this project for April at the Emily Harvey Foundation have been thrown back on our own resources.
I’m having sleepless nights on this, with an anxiety that mounts commensurate with that of others’. We can’t be waiting for someone to sort it all out – a “Jim Dandy to the rescue”, no. The leader of ABC for the last near-30 years has left the building. And I do so miss his deep knowledge and sharp intelligence.
The problem with this project, a synoptic history of the culture of ABC No Rio in one tiny room, is that it can’t be true. To be true it would have to be Borgesian, a map the size of the territory, or years of Groundhog Days, whole lives lived over.
I can’t blame those guys for bailing out. It’s reasonable that no artist would want any part of constructing histories. Diogenes’ lamp is a heavy burden.

The Duty to Organize

Still, in the settler English manner, we gotta and we gonna muddle through.
The walls of the exhibition are fairly pretty clear now. The show is about the place, the building, what we wanted and what we got. And all that went on there. As I learned during researches in Andrea Callard’s Colab files, there was disagreement within our late ‘70s Colab group about having a space, a place to do shows and mount projects. Even then the burden of maintenance was viewed by many as a distraction from the job of creation and making art.
In the end, after the “Real Estate Show” occupation of one ideal space for artists to work in – which we couldn’t have, they said, I guess because it was better to become an enormous luxury shopping center which it is today – the City of New York gave us a vacant rundown storefront. And so it all began….
The artist activists who took over in the place we started and called ABC No Rio went through a similar crisis in the later ‘80s. They were the third wave of users. Under heavy pressure from the City to take back the building that had been so unwisely ceded years before, a bunch of ABC folks decided to pack up and leave.

We’re Out of Here

Thus began the caravan phase of ex cathedra ABC history, in which a band of folks toured around the region bringing their punkified creative presences to the people. A sort of Magical Mystery Tour for the Reagan era, an adventure experiment in chaosmosis, vaguely alluded to in Fly’s 1998 book Chronic Riot Spasm from Autonomedia.

The local punks back home, however, the Loisaiders, didn’t want to let go of the only venue they had for making noise and moshing. So they held on…
Soon the 156 Rivington building was squatted. “No, we won’t leave.” Don’t care about your court order. That made eviction a serious project for the City during a time when there were a good score of similar squatted buildings throughout the Lower East Side.

We The People Won’t Go sign on a Lower East Side squat c/o Amy Starecheski (at 99percentinvisible.org)

Then Steven Englander came in (came back, actually), an experienced squatter “war leader”. I remember walking into the place during those days. Steven was sitting in the front room with Frank Morales and Seth Tobocman. All of them had taken arrests during building defense actions. It was an intense meeting.

Thanks to Resistance, ABC Is Still Here...

It would be great if cities allowed their citizens to take constructive actions to better their circumstances, to gather, to hang out, to make art, music, culture, in places and times of their choosing. Even better if they could be allowed to improve their basic living conditions by themselves and with each other. But the urban worlds of neoliberal capitalism are not Who-ville. Control must be maintained, control by law and control by dollars.

Struggle, and Incredible Persistence…

Not always. And not in the case of ABC No Rio. But money will have its way. The building was decrepit. To be in the basement during the “punk matinees”, when hardcore music by some band from out of town was playing upstairs, and the floor was literally bouncing up and down was architecturally educational.

The floor of ABC No Rio, in a photo on the Wikipedia page. As I recall, it was painted by Vandana Jain.

In ‘97 the City said, “You can have the building, but you have to fix it.” And so began the “long march” through the halls of capital, the raising of the money to – well, the building could not be fixed. It had to be torn down and rebuilt – keep ABC No Rio an alive thing.
A capital campaign is an entirely different animal than organizing to fight the cops on the street. But Steven managed it, bringing the long-standing, long-suffering, incredible anti-institution he was leading to the point of reconstruction.

A Great Story

That’s a great story, and it has been often told. Most recently and most lucidly in architect Nandini Bagchee’s text Counter Institutions: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side (2018).
There is a museum in NYC dedicated to that period, when squatters tried/failed/succeeded to hang onto homes for themselves and spaces for culture in the Lower East Side, and gardeners fought to hold their flowering plots in vacant lots. It’s called MoRUS – the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space.
MoRUS has a permanent display commemorating that resistance, and the Critical Mass bicycle organizing, which led Mayor Bloomberg to finally make NYC bike-friendly like so many European capitals.
Around the corner from MoRUS, at East 9th Street and Avenue C is La Plaza Cultural, a large open community garden named for Armando Perez, one of the CHARAS group which ran the nearby boarded-up public school that was once a major Loisaida social center – El Bohio.
Lash LaRue Mayor Rudy succeeded in putting the Big Kabosh on that place in ‘01. Debilitated DeBlasio didn’t dare to bring it back. And Adams… well. So Loisaida’s biggest public cultural center has been empty all these years. And ABC No Rio has been raising money all these years.

A Hopeless Task

But it’s only part of the story we seek to tell in April at the Emily Harvey Foundation. What woke me up so early this morning was hearing in my mind’s ear the soundscape of those days, the water pouring into the bucket from the broken plumbing in the earliest days, the junkies breaking the wall to get in (actually, we didn’t hear that), and squabbling over drugs in the hallway. The COMA jams of aleatory sounds, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Miguel Piñero. Food Not Bombs banging pots and pans. Sweeping, shoveling, cleaning up beer bottles. Keys clicking in the computer lab and the zine library. Winchester Chimes’ rhyming declamations at Matthew Courtney’s open mic. Punk thrash from Washington, D.C. Musicians setting up and breaking down. Artists taking a look and taking notes. Curious internationals wandering by. “Can we come in?” The silence of the house cat moving through the hallways.
It’s too much to show, but we’ll try. It’s too late to back out now.

“ABC No Rio 45 Years” at the Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway, 2nd Floor April 2025

LINKS

ABC No Rio history on WikiP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_No_Rio

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space
https://morusnyc.org

Around the corner at East 9th Street and Avenue C is La Plaza Cultural
https://www.laplazacultural.com/

“Squatters of the Lower East Side” (2019) on 99percent Invisible website
Audio of 22 minutes; text and photos
Producer Delaney Hall spoke with Dr. Amy Starecheski, author of "Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City". The episode also featured oral history interviews, conducted by Amy Starecheski, with former squatters Maggie Wrigley and Peter Spagnuolo. Thanks to Paul DeRienzo for recordings of the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot and to WNYC for additional archival tape. Thanks also to Dr. Alexander Vasudevan, author of The Autonomous City.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/squatters-lower-east-side/

This is the wall, broken up by doors and openings, which awaits this part of the story to be shown

"ABC No Rio 45 Years", April 2025

The ass end of history; the infamous toilet at 156 Rivington. Photo by Jade Doskow

One of these annoying Facebook groups specializing in NYC "back in the day" photo nostalgia posted this snapshot of a white girl, a brown boy, and a black boy on a stoop in the East Village with an awkwardly painted "SAMO©" tag on the door behind them.
Naturally I asked Al Diaz, the other half of SAMO if that was him and Jean-Michel when they were kids. "No," he replied; some people even asked him if the white girl was Madonna.
Hundreds and thousands of folks are prompted every day to look back on the days when celebrities, great and small, walked among them. Before their elevation into the mediatic stratosphere, the gods of modern times were like you and me. They hung out on the stoop of your neighborhood.
Being in art and making culture means trucking in fame. That’s the shiny gold star on the top of tree. If you don’t grab hold of it, maybe you get to be one of the lower ornaments. And if you don’t get even that, you might quit. Or you might just keep on for the love of the life.

And You Don’t Stop

NOT Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz, his co-conspirator in the SAMO graffiti campaign. And also NOT Madonna! (Photo by John Maher)

Keep on trucking, keep on keeping on – this is what we did back then. We did our thing, got together with friends, opened places to do it together. This, rather than the brass ring, was a kind of utopia, a terrain of possible actualities in the ‘meat world’, when celebrity was made on printed paper and on TV. (Both of which we did, as ‘underground’ magazines and cable TV.)
Now, a bunch of us are launching a project of remembrance around the Lower East Side of 1980 and after. That’s “ABC No Rio 45 Years”, which kicks off at the Emily Harvey Foundation space in Soho during the month of April, 2025.
ABC No Rio, as you may know, is a collectively-run nonprofit arts organization on the Lower East Side of NYC, running on Rivington Street. It's had several generations of leaders and key players, both artists and activists.
We are planning this show now. It’s a process of drawing together people from multiple generations, with very different perspectives on their experiences and what they mean.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Did Not Sleep Here*

For some striving young artists in the 1980s, ABC was a stop on their fast tour of the alternative art world, a flashing self-launched star place boot-strapping in a Latin American neighborhood.
ABC No Rio has an art collection which we will mine for exhibits. There’s work by Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, and many more established artists. Some of them played organizing roles at No Rio, and others have been steady friends of the place.

Could Call it “GayBC”

ABC’s next stop on the fast moving train of NYC sub- and counter-culture was the dynamic grounded queer art and performance scene generated by the crowd around Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, Matthew Courtney’s “Open Mic”, and other refugees from the Pyramid Club.

The angry young kids moved in during the ‘90s to mosh and thrash as the ABC punk music collective took over management of the decrepit building. ABC became a legendary venue in the international hardcore punk music circuit, and soon a key node in the anarchist squatting movement on the Lower East Side.
This radical history is recalled today in the MoRUS (Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space), an unofficial partner in the “ABC 45” exhibition. Activists from No Rio were part of the crowd facing off the cops as the police tank they called “Little Rudy” after our own Lash LaRue city mayor, moved on the squats of 13th street.

“Squat or Rot”

ABCers fought for their own building, which was squatted by then, and surprisingly acquired rights to it in 2006. Immediately thereafter began the long arduous trail of fund-raising under the steady hand of Steven Englander.
All those years the music roared on. The poets and singers declaimed. Artists celebrated collaboration, international networks, and the radical causes they held dear.
In 2016, the building at 156 Rivington Street came down. Fly bottled the rubble as artistic therapeuticals. Today the long-for new building is at last under construction.
Those few coming weeks in April will be a rare opportunity for as many who care to, as many who can stand to do it, to face up to it, to share their truths, their dreams so fondly remember or so rudely dashed.
Social media is littered with obituaries, ephemeral pixel memorials to friends, lovers, comrades, colleagues, gone who mattered to us. A few words, a “care” emoji, and on we go into our own darkness.
I fell upon one today looking at this photograph from our 1985 book. That’s Marc Brasz, who was a link then between ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda when both were new. “The Moda” was the South Bronx art space that played a vital role in the art and culture of NYC. Marc Brasz was an artist and jazz aficionado from New Orleans, who certainly hung out with Juma Santos, who was running Fashion Moda after founder Stefan Eins moved on.

The crowd at Marc Brasz’ show at ABC No Rio in 1981. Left to right, Delano Greenidge; ?; Fiona Templeton; ?; ?; (below her) Jody Culkin (?); Kevin Wendall; Franz Vila. Paintings by Marc Brasz.(Photo by Lisa Kahane; posted at 98Bowery.com)

Stefan at one point had the money to make a book like ours, ABC No Rio Dinero, but he spent it on something else. The pieces, which are many, shiny and varied, have yet to be picked up.
Like everyone, artists pass will. They leave behind in their work a shimmering hole, an outline of the kind of life they loved and lived for. We shall gather this spring for ghost dance and an augury of the future. You may want to join us. It will be fun – and a challenge for the young folks too.

* Yes, No, Jean-Michel didn’t come to No Rio, so far as we know. But he did participate in Colab’s Times Square Show in the summer of 1980, both as "SAMO©" and with his first exhibited painting. Colab produced the Real Estate Show, and supported ABC No Rio for the first couple of years.

Marc Brasz, "Portrait of Noc" (@noc167) from "fashion moda: 35 years later" at wallworksny.com

#ABCNoRio45Years
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125 Delancey Street, the occupation that began it all in 1979

Our German friend, Peter Moennig, out front of the "Real Estate Show"