A Blowout on the Concept Level
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.
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.
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
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