The New York art world is full of origin stories, and some of them are true. One begins on a winter night on the Lower East Side, with a bolt cutter in a guitar case, a snipped lock and a guerrilla art show in an abandoned building.
ABC No Rio, the fiercely indie art center that arose from that 1979 break-in, became a haven for radical art and radical politics, squatters and hardcore punks. Over the decades, as other downtown spaces went under or were priced out, No Rio — perpetually on the verge of eviction or physical collapse — endured as a link to a New York that now exists mainly in memory.
Now, the center is getting a brand-new building, courtesy of $21 million from the city that for years fought to evict it. Construction began this summer on Rivington Street, in a neighborhood that has been completely transformed.
No Rio’s legacy is one of rat infestation and falling plaster, of wild music and anarchist leanings. In the complicated way of arts institutions, it is also a story made possible by decades of state and federal grant money, in which artists cracked open the door for gentrification.
On a recent afternoon at his East Village apartment, Steven Englander, the center’s director, addressed some of the twists in No Rio’s narrative. What does it mean for an oppositional arts organization to run on public money? And as the Lower East Side became prime real estate, what responsibility does No Rio bear for the low-income neighbors who have been displaced?
A mural outside Englander’s apartment, also in a former squat, shows three figures with Molotov cocktails and the stenciled text: “If yer gonna eat the rich, you gotta cook em first.”
From the start, he said, No Rio’s founders were aware that artists and galleries are often the leading wedge of gentrification. “But what can you do?” he said. “We supported the squatters. We were active in housing movements. But gentrification is a behemoth.”
The new building at 156 Rivington Street — with its zine library, hardcore punk matinees and community print shop — will face a Hot Pilates studio and abut an apartment house offering $4 million condos. After years of eviction battles, the anarchists’ longtime nemesis is now No Rio’s primary benefactor.
“We’re the dog that caught the car,” Englander said. “Well, now what?”
‘It really was a dump’
The roots of ABC No Rio date to the late 1970s, when the East Village and Lower East Side were littered with abandoned buildings, many owned by the city. Members of an artist collective called Collaborative Projects, or Colab, saw the derelict buildings as an opportunity: break into an empty building, mount an exhibit on the theme of real estate and invite the public.
The Real Estate Show opened at 123 Delancey Street with a party on New Year’s Eve 1979, and a manifesto that called out “the way artists get used as pawns by greedy white developers.” Two days after the show opened, the city padlocked the building again.
But by then, something was happening. The artists held a news conference outside the shuttered show, drawing coverage in The New York Times and other outlets. Within days, the city housing department offered the artists a choice of other abandoned storefronts, all in comparable states of disrepair.
The artists chose a battered former beauty salon in the four-story tenement at 156 Rivington, amid a cluster of wedding stores and street-side drug businesses. A decaying sign across the street read “ABOGADO NOTARIO,” its few still-legible letters giving the new space a name: ABC No Rio.
The rent for the storefront was $200 a month.
“There was so much water pouring down that we had to put up a 50-gallon drum to catch it, and it filled up every day,” said Alan W. Moore, a writer who was one of the early organizers. A sculptor built a wood-burning stove for heat. Rats from the matzo factory next door flowed into the space, sometimes turning up afloat in the water drum. “Yeah, it was rough and ready,” Moore said. “And tremendously exciting.”
Exhibitions followed themes, like “Murder, Suicide & Junk” or “Not for Sale,” about gentrification on the Lower East Side, and often included poetry readings or musical performances. Artists formed a house band of sorts, the Cardboard Air Band, miming old songs on painted cardboard instruments. Others created arts programs with local schools. It was less an alternative space than an alternative to the alternative.
No Rio’s relationship with the neighbors was uneasy. “Every time we’d have an art show, it would get broken into that night by neighborhood thieves, and things got stolen,” said Tom Otterness, a sculptor.
To prevent thefts, Robert Goldman, a painter who went by the name Bobby G, moved into the basement. One Sunday morning, he remembered, he returned from breakfast to find the building in flames, a fire probably started by drug users setting debris ablaze in an upstairs hallway. After that the residents in the three upstairs apartments moved out, and their apartments became shooting galleries for heroin users, Goldman said.
“It was really a dump,” he said. “One time I met Allen Ginsberg, and he said, ‘I did a reading there.’ And then he said to me: ‘You should clean that place up. It’s a dump.’”
The years were chaotic. Peter Cramer and Jack Waters, dancers who became the center’s second directors, remembered an upstairs neighbor coming into the space waving a gun, tottering on a wooden leg. When people in the crowd tackled him, Waters said, they discovered that the gun was a toy.
Squatters — including Englander, the current director — replaced the shooting galleries upstairs, but the building remained in rickety condition. Marc H. Miller, an early board member, remembered a fight in the gallery when someone got pushed into a wall and bricks fell out, exposing the building’s exterior. “I quit the board because someone told me I could get sued,” he said. “There wasn’t any insurance.”
But even in the building’s dilapidated state, the artists were aware that they might be complicit in gentrifying the neighborhood — as was happening in SoHo and the East Village, and would happen in TriBeCa and Williamsburg, said Ann Messner, an artist.
“Artists move into housing or facilities that either are abandoned or in disrepair,” Messner said. “The neighborhood becomes a little more palatable then — you know, the restaurants, the stores. Real estate prices go up, and the people who are living there get priced out.”
Grants from Colab and state and federal arts agencies paid for the programming. For rent and building maintenance, the artists held fund-raisers or sold drinks, buying a bottle of vodka and selling shots for a dollar, said Rebecca Howland, a sculptor and founding director. The art on exhibit was never for sale.
The city, which owned the building, did not make essential repairs, Waters said, so the organization withheld rent, setting off a long stretch of eviction proceedings.
A hardcore haven
In December 1989, Mike Bromberg, who uses a saltier surname professionally, organized the first hardcore matinee concert at ABC No Rio, after the weekly matinees at the punk mecca CBGB had grown increasingly violent. The hardcore shows, which had a very physical mosh pit, explicitly barred racist, sexist or homophobic bands. They attracted young people from all over the city and brought a new energy to the space.
On one of the most forbidding blocks of the Lower East Side, ABC No Rio was a safe haven for the people who found it. “You could be the biggest nerd or dork, and you could help take money at the door or work the record table,” Bromberg said. “Or you could take pictures. You could start a fanzine. People were happy to get involved. The people really stepped up.”
Repairs, though, remained minimal; the space itself conferred hardcore bona fides.
“We had one lightbulb down there, and there’s a bathroom upstairs that barely functions,” Bromberg said. “There were studs with nails hanging out. We’d have plaster falling down. It was so cold guitarists would cut the fingers off their gloves to play and not freeze.”
By 1993, the collective that ran the hardcore matinees assumed leadership of the space, and the focus shifted. The punks aligned No Rio more closely with the squatter and anarchist movements, which were more confrontational in fighting eviction than the artists who started the space. Volunteers were instructed not to allow process servers or police into the building.
“I went to a performance, and I saw Steven Englander bounce a cop out of the backyard,” said Rebecca Howland. “It was kind of amazing to me. I was like, OK, that’s pretty cool.”
Esneider Arevalo, lead singer in the Latino hardcore band Huasipungo and member of the hardcore collective, helped No Rio tap into a worldwide punk network.
“There were kids in the Czech Republic who did a protest in front of the U.S. Consulate, and so did France,” said Arevalo, 56, who now gives culinary tours in Queens. “Punk kids in Mexico made a run of a cassette tape that they sold there, and they sent us copies. And all the money benefited ABC No Rio. There was a collective in Basque Country where they made T-shirts, and they made a couple of benefit shows. There were benefit shows in England, France, Italy, just about anywhere.”
Shows were cheap and ended early, before the drug dealers claimed the streets. Dave Powell, a member of the hardcore collective who now works as a tenant organizer, recalled an older woman from the neighborhood who would park a lawn chair in the mosh pit during shows. “We’d say, ‘Lucy, you sure you don’t want to sit to the side or in the back where there’s less noise?’ And she’s like: ‘No, I like it here. I like the energy.’”
How to talk to rich people
In 1997, dozens of No Rio supporters entered the Department of Housing Preservation and Development with locks and chains, to chain themselves to office doors. But instead of calling the police, the commissioner, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, began negotiations to turn the building over to the activists for one dollar, to be used as a cultural and community center.
There were two conditions: The squatters had to vacate the upstairs apartments, and the organization had to raise enough money to repair and maintain the building. Raising this money took nine years.
“We went to a bunch of trainings about how to talk to rich people, but none of us knew any rich people,” said Victoria Law, a writer who was a teenage volunteer at the time and is now on the board.
With the squatters gone, No Rio expanded programming. A free-food program, Food Not Bombs, took over an upstairs kitchen. Volunteers moved a zine library in from the South Bronx and started a darkroom, a print shop and a program to provide books for people behind bars. Each program was run by its own volunteer collective.
Robynn Europe, who found No Rio in 1996 as a curious 13-year-old from Coney Island, followed the evolution of the organization. She came first to a hardcore matinee after not seeing many other Black faces at other punk shows. She soon began volunteering at the matinees, then at Food Not Bombs and then in the zine library.
“ABC was really the birth of my commitment to politics and my commitment to community and my investment in a music scene,” she said. “And I don’t think I would be where I am politically if I had not started going to ABC No Rio at a really young age and committed to being there every single week.”
On June 29, 2006, after nine years of fund-raising, the organization finally took ownership of 156 Rivington from the city. But the cost of repairing the nearly 200-year-old building was too much, even after No Rio received an anonymous donation of $1 million.
“The interior bearing walls are all wood, and the wood was next to dust,” said Paul Castrucci, an architect who helped found a nearby squat and gallery, Bullet Space, and who advised on renovations.
What they needed was a new building, which required a new level of partnership with No Rio’s old nemesis, the city. Englander, who had given up his squat after the original agreement, took on the task of assuaging the anarchists within the organization.
“I say, I make the compromises so you don’t have to,” he said.
In 2016, crews demolished the old building. But construction bids kept rising. For eight years, the site sat idle.
Finally, construction began this July, on a four-story building designed by Castrucci, expected to open in 2026. The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs committed the funds for construction.
The department will have no say in the programming, the commissioner, Laurie A. Cumbo, said in an email. “We want to make sure that the vital artistic tradition embodied by ABC No Rio lives on and thrives, even as the city around it changes.”
But what will ABC No Rio be after 10 years away, and what need will it answer? Much of its identity came from its battles with the city, its forbidding neighborhood and its decrepit building. Now the city is a partner, and the Lower East Side is a tourist destination. No Rio’s regulars, if they still exist, cannot afford to live there.
Will the hardcore matinees and anti-eviction concerts be the same in a gleaming new building with a Pilates studio across the street? Will the spirit of anarchy flourish amid protective grates that cover the artwork during hardcore shows?
“We have talked about the future of No Rio,” said Julie Hair, an artist and musician who is on the board. “And we don’t have to figure it out because everything’s going to be different. We do know that. But it’s going to happen organically. That’s part of the beauty of it. And I also think that it’s really, really important for us to hang on to this little footprint that we have in the midst of all this hypergentrification.”
The world that created No Rio is gone. But the center’s survival, as so many other spaces have disappeared, suggests some need for it, however inchoate.
“You could argue that it’s anachronistic,” said Carlo McCormick, a longtime chronicler of the downtown art world. “Which is probably why New York needs it all the more.”
The post An Artists’ Squat Fought New York City for Decades. Did It Just Win? appeared first on New York Times.
