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
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
#EmilyHarveyFoundation
#ABCNoRio
125 Delancey Street, the occupation that began it all in 1979
Our German friend, Peter Moennig, out front of the "Real Estate Show"
Its a slam jam! Respect without sacrosanctity.
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