Walking Loisaida -- ABC No Rio 45 Years Post #5

Le Petit Versailles garden

Three years ago I published Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld.
There was a second part of that project, another book entire, which remains unpublished. As we work along on the epic “ABC No Rio 45 Years” project upcoming in April, this section of that unrealized book sprang up in a search. It recounts a walk I took with my partner six years ago. It began in the garden run by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters of Allied Productions. Jack is site coordinator for the “45” show. Peter is arranging the wall of artworks that will represent the years the duo ran ABC No Rio. Libertad, mentioned in the text below, is today the director of The Clemente center, a partner in the “45” exposition.



“Get Me Out of Here, Baby”

Soho is nice, white, soft and boozhee. It’s an international tourist district now, and pretty intolerable for one who remembers what it used to be. This open-air shopping mall was trashed during the George Floyd rebellion in 2020, which I can understand. The tiny bunkbed Soho perch I lived in for a year in the ‘70s was only a lookout. I was never a part of that scene. I could tell from the uneasy looks hosts at Soho parties would give me and my friends when we arrived at their cozy lofts. (The lyric above is from the avant-punk band Y Pants.) Where I feel at home in New York City is on the Lower East Side, and when I’m in town I can’t wait to get over there.
On this trip we went straight to the recently established Loisaida Center.
It’s across the street from one of the largest of the LES community gardens, and next door to a serious coffee bar full of glum black-clad computer-wielding white folks. We saw the last of a small exhibition at the Center devoted to the heritage of the Young Lords. 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Nuyorican nationalist party. Their example has inspired artists for generations. One group’s project was a working ATM machine which dispenses well-designed and -printed “community money” as a reward for answering some questions about the user’s experience in the community.

“Draw on My Jacket?”

We chatted with (then)-director Libertad Guerra, and ran into Paul Garrin, video artist and internet activist who is working on one of the Loisaida Center’s education projects. They’re picking up the ball from where Gordon Matta-Clark dropped it in ‘78. After a modest lunch at an extortionate price in a place I used to like, we wandered down to Le Petit Versailles garden. The garden is the current project of Jack and Peter, ex-directors of ABC No Rio. The garden was open, but the boys weren’t there.
As we began to worry about the ever-present mosquitoes, a local man popped by. He stood outside on the sidewalk and talked to us for a while. “I’m a Puerto Rican,” he announced, “born and raised in Loisaida.” Now he sweeps up at the barbershop on the corner. He recalled that the World nightclub used to be across the street. Yes, I said. I remember it. He told a story about going to the Paradise Garage, and you could get into the party free if you had a sticker or badge from Keith Haring. So he and a friend went to Keith’s studio in the Cable Building at Broadway and Houston (where I worked also at the East Village Eye), and he asked Keith to draw on the back of his long blue coat, “a duster”. He did. Now the coat is lost – “I don’t know what happened to that coat. It would be worth a lot of money now.”

This kind of conversational experience is not uncommon in Loisaida. People talk to each other, especially us viejos, adjusting with our age and experience to the constantly changing urban surround.
I still see old comrades and acquaintances wandering the subways from time to time. They are their young selves, just like they were, but of course it isn’t them. Maybe there are only so many souls to go round in New York. Some old people peer at me closely. Am I someone they knew who has changed with age, someone from the art scene, or political demonstrations when there weren’t so many people coming out? There aren’t so many of us now.

Young Lords

Juan González, a frequent co-host of Democracy Now!, in front of the group's headquarters on 111th Street ca. 1971. Photo by Hiram Maristany.

The heroic campaigns of the Young Lords were the high tide of late 20th century Puerto Rican activism in New York City. This ethnic nationalist political party was, like their model the Black Panthers, organized along Marxist-Leninist lines. The 50th anniversary was marked during our visit by events at the Loisaida Center and uptown, in East Harlem, El Barrio.
We were fortunate to catch the last of an extended tour of important sites of Young Lords activism marked by large scale photo murals on vinylized canvas. Miguel Luciano led them, carefully explaining each one. Malena took a photo of me as if standing in front of the YL headquarters mural. A stripling young Juan González, then Minister of Education for the YL, is standing in the doorway in that photo [posted above]. Posters are all over the window of that YL HQ. These were made for the anti-colonial movements of the ‘60s. Many were done by Puerto Rican artists specifically for the Young Lords.

Miguel Luciano’s bicycle-mounted artwork “Pimp My Piragua”, 2008 in front of a photo mural by Hiram Maristany, “Boys on Bikes”, East Harlem, c.1971. (The piragua is a shaved ice sugar treat sold from carts like this.)

Juan González is now a professor of journalism, retired from the Daily News, and co-host of the Democracy Now newscast. The late Patti Astor, downtown movie starlet and animator of the Fun Gallery in the ‘80s, wrote in her unpublished memoir that back then Juan was her lover. [FN - Juan] I was surprised to learn that the doyenne of promoting graffiti on canvas was a street fightin’ radical in college. [Astor, ca. 2013]
Luciano’s tour finished up with a curbside talk by Hiram Maristany, the official YL Party photographer. (He also has since passed away.) His photo mural hung above him, on the side of a former public school converted into artists’ housing and a community center. It’s called Artspace P.S. 109. Olivia Beens, artist and one-time Colab-orator is one of the lucky lottery winners living there now in El Barrio.

Loisaida’s Indigenous

The Nuyoricans of Loisaida were inspirational to us. At ABC No Rio we were happy to baptize our new cultural center with performances by some of the stars of that literary movement – Pedro Pietri, Bimbo Rivas and Jorge Brandon.

Jorge Brandon, "El Coco Que Habla," poet, sign-painter, and eminence grise of the Lower East Side. Photo by Bobby G. This appearance by El Coco at our storefront inspired a painting by Bobby, aka Robert Goldman.

El Bohio, a Nuyorican cultural center, was another of the important vectors of cultural life on the LES. The occupied old public school on 9th Street called El Bohio wasn’t a Young Lords project; their actions were all uptown. [FN - Christodora] El Bohio was a project of a group called CHARAS, most of them ex-gang members. [FN – CHARAS] Mayor Rudy evicted them from their 9th Street school building when he sold it in a sideways deal to a real estate crony.
A meeting during the course of our visit recalled that place and time. Billed as a “town hall” on Charas/El Bohio, the event at the Theater for the New City, run under the seal of Manhattan Community Board 3, arts and culture subcommittee, was basically a show with speeches. Vít Hořejš, a Czech puppeteer and theater artist performed. Bimbo Rivas’ niece sang. Some politicians gave speeches, vowing support, then split. Chino Garcia spoke, reminding us that Mayor Bill De Blasio called the sale of El Bohio “an injustice,” and held out the hope it could be restored to the community.
No questions were taken, there was no discussion. It was a theater, after all. One of NYC’s great theater artists, a genuine rabble rouser, was on the bill – Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. But the leaders closed the meeting before he performed. He arrived in costume with a sense of bewilderment. Why did this happen? The conveners were all quite elderly. Maybe they felt tired after such exertion, and wanted to get home. Rev. Billy would be too exciting for them. Who knows? Anyhow they pulled the plug. It was unsurprising. In the gentrified barrios of NYC today, there are no young lords left.

On the Roof in the Rain

Some time later, the visual arts group of ABC No Rio held a rooftop meeting at Steven Englander’s co-op apartment house. (It was once a squat.) Beneath a glowering cloud cover with a cold intermittent drizzle, I asked Steven (RIP) why the LES didn’t have a development like P.S. 109, the one we had seen uptown on 99th Street. He said the old-time activists insisted on getting back El Bohio intact, just like it was, and that is why so far they haven’t gotten anything at all.
Is the poignancy of the lost cause really what folks want to hold in their hearts and hands? That ‘town hall’ event holds open a space, or a lack of space, for that dirty, beat down, long-abandoned building that used to be alive. It caresses a wound, which becomes a prominent scar, a cicatrix of a past period of solidarity and convergence.

Close Study

My friend and colleague Yasmin Ramirez was in the thick of the Young Lords commemorative activity. She has been on this beat for years. Not long after I trod the same grounds of research, Yasmin wrote on the Puerto Rican contingent within the Artworkers Coalition, [FN – Yasmin cite] filling out the picture of that formative engine of artists’ political engagement. Both the Studio Museum in Harlem and El Museo del Barrio formed after the Artworkers Coalition.
El Museo was started by Raphael Montañez Ortiz, a renowned Puerto Rican artist known for his performative destruction of pianos. Ortiz enjoyed the early patronage of the Berlin Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck (d. 1974), who fled the Nazis and lived for years in New York working as a psychiatrist under the name of Charles R. Hulbeck. (Reminder: There were Nazis all over the USA during the war; the feds didn’t round them up and intern them for the duration like the Brits did.)

Raphael Montañez Ortiz chopping away for his "Ritual Piano Destruction Concert" in LA in 2017. Photo ArtNews.com

Busting up pianos is a favorite shock performance tactic among the artists of Fluxus. The Emily Harvey Foundation, our venue of the “ABC 45 Years” show next month, is the historic seat of the movement in Soho. It’s in a Fluxhouse that George Maciunas set up.

Not Artists, No. Revolutionaries!

The Young Lords weren’t artists. Theirs was a political organization contemporaneous with the artists’ organizations. The YL was then and has remained a touchstone and inspiration to generations of Puerto Rican artists and intellectuals. I was impressed by a show Yasmin and Holly Block (another ex-Colab person, RIP) had organized at the Bronx Museum and El Museo – “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York” (2015) – and tried to get the show to Madrid. (No luck; a lost colony should also be gone from memory, I guess.) This time around, the hometown effort had expanded with foundation support and a new venue, the Loisaida Center, in the LES itself, run by Yasmin’s former colleague.
Yasmin also co-organized a retrospective of Martin Wong’s art (d. 1999) for the Bronx museum a year earlier. She wrote an essay on Martin’s collaboration with Miguel Piñero (d. 1988). They met at the “Crime Show” at ABC No Rio, in 1982, the only group show organized by an artist of color, John Spencer, during our tenure at the space. Josh Gosciak and I put a painting by the Chino-Latino artist on the cover of our literary anthology A Day in the Life (Autonomedia, 1990).

Piñero was the most successful of the Nuyorican poets. He wrote Short Eyes in 1974, a hit play made a film in ‘77, and later wrote for the Miami Vice TV show. He was a junkie to the end. He hung out at Rick Van Valkenberg’s nightclub Neither Nor, along with numerous jazz musicians. I don’t know that he ever declaimed at ABC No Rio. (There’s a tape of him at the Magic Gallery in ‘84 which MWF Video distributed.) Bobby G ran into him one day on Rivington Street, reeling along in a daze. Bobby told the coffee shop owner, “That’s a famous Nuyorican poet!” The man replied, “He’s a bum.”

Miguel Piñero Poetry Reading at Magic Gallery (18 minutes)
ARCHIVE.ORG VIDEO LINK

NOTES

Sorry, it's from a book draft. Old school, no links.

[FN – Juan] Juan González recalls his Young Lord days in a 2005 interview with Lillian Jiménez. He describes the convergence of Puerto Rican activists and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) during the time of the Columbia strike and occupation in 1968. Patti was in SDS. (“Interview with Juan Gonzalez: His Road to the Young Lords,” posted at centropr.hunter.cuny.edu; accessed July 2020.)

[FN – Christodora] The Christodora building, which abuts El Bohio, was in fact occupied during the late 1960s by the Black Panthers, who then turned it over to the community. See “House Magic” zine #6, 2014.

[FN – CHARAS] The CHARAS group (the name is an acronym of the founders) came out of the Lower East Side gang scene in the 1960s. The huge school building was abandoned, falling apart, and they wanted to save it as a community center. They had already been squatting, working with Adopt-A-Building housing group, and starting community gardens with Liz Christy. (Plaza Cultural is the large garden on 9th Street; Gordon Matta-Clark was slated to work there before his death.) “When you did ask [the City] for permission, they gave you the runaround.” So they squatted it, a clear inspiration for the Real Estate Show in turn. Two days before leaving office, Mayor Rudy Giuliani ordered El Bohio evicted. Their $5 million building fund reverted to the City. (See “The Reminiscences of Carlos “Chino” Garcia,” downloaded at New York Preservation Archive Project nypap.org, April 2020.)
The CHARAS group’s move into community organizing paralleled the careers of other U.S. gangs, like the original Chicago Young Lords. The moment when these groups of delinquents could enter the public sphere was created by the Lyndon Johnson-era War on Poverty program. Rebecca Zorach describes this work in her book, “Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975” (Duke University Press, 2019). John M. Hagedorn, most recently in “The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia” (2015) was among an emergent wave of progressive gang researchers whose researches push back against the demonizations coincident with the Reagan-era “war on drugs.”

[FN – Yasmin cite] Yasmin wrote for the East Village Eye. (Papers of the publication have been acquired by the NYPL.). She later went to graduate school at CUNY-GC, and our times there overlapped. She wrote “Nuyorican Vanguards: Political Actions/Poetic Visions, A History of Puerto Rican artists in New York, 1964-1984” (PhD, CUNY, 2005).