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ABC No Rio or ABC No Dinero?
Spencer Sunshine

The Lower East Side (LES) is one of the trendier—and pricier—neighborhoods in Manhattan today. Tucked between the East Village, Chinatown and SoHo, the LES is packed with moneyed hipsters and culture workers who swamp the swanky cafes and bars that inevitably accompany such a locale. In the last 6 years, storefront performance spaces like the House of Candles, Todo Con Nada, The Piano Store, Expanded Arts, Surf Reality and the Present Company Theatorium have all been forced out by rising rents. The last holdout on Orchard, the collectively-run Collective Unconscious, is waiting for the guillotine to fall this summer. Rumor has it that its one-story building will be demolished to make way for high-rise luxury apartments.

In the midst of all this, a few blocks away on Rivington Street between Suffolk and Clinton, is one of New York’s unlikeliest holdouts of fervently anti-commercial community activity: a building adorned with a brightly colored mural and the words ABC No Rio. Founded in 1980 by artists affiliated with the Collaborative Projects collective, the space has been continuously in use as a community center, art gallery and concert hall for non- and anti-commercial cultural activity. In 1980, when the city lent the building to the shush up the artists, its value was in the ballpark of $100,000. Today, the market value is $3 million. And unless ABC No Rio raises another $120,000 for renovations within the next year, the city could try to take it back from the former squatters, punk rock kids, experimental musicians and radical artists who use and operate the space.

GC alum Alan Moore is one those trying to help prevent that from happening. In 2000, Moore finished his PhD dissertation in Art History, which looked at artists’ organizations in NYC from 1969 to 1985. The subject was close to his heart, as Moore had been a member of Collaborative Projects and was one of the founders of ABC No Rio. Although he stopped participating actively in the project in the early 80s, he has recently become involved again and has rejoined the board of the 501(c)3 non-profit organization that (legally, at least) oversees activities there.

And the activities are numerous. The space is famous for serving as a focal point for the DIY (do-it-yourself) political punk rock resurgence of the early 90s, which contributed to such cultural phenomena as the commercial “alternative music” fad, the revival of left-wing anarchism and the subsequent “anti-globalization movement,” and third-wave riot grrrl feminism. This is all in addition to the great hardcore bands associated with ABC, such as Born Against, Nausea and Huasipuango. New York, city of a billion bars, is a brutal place for the under 21, and the weekly Saturday afternoon hardcore matinee makes it the only smaller all-ages rock venue in Manhattan.

ABC No Rio is also home to some of the best-priced arts resources one is likely to find in NYC outside of a corporate- or city-funded institutional setting. There’s a photography darkroom and a screen-printing workshop; also a by-donation computer lab, run by computer radicals from the Interactivist Network. The third floor hosts the Zine Library stocked with self-published periodicals, usually reproduced via photocopy in tiny print runs. The second floor houses a kitchen used by Food Not Bombs, a group which collects food slated for trash from local stores and cooks hot vegan meals, which are then given away in Tompkins Square Park as an act of protest against militarism and the production of commodities for profit instead of use. Also housed in the space is the LES Autobiography Project, which creates video biographies of LES residents and provides training for video equipment, and Books Through Bars, which collects donated books and sends them to prisoners.

Despite the anarchist tone of many of the activities here, the actual owner of the building is HPD, New York City’s Housing and Preservation Department. “ABC has been permitted to use this space by—and has been at war with—the city since Day One,” said Alan Moore. The space was given to them to use after the city shut down the notorious ‘Real Estate Show,’ which opened on New Years Eve, 1979 in a squatted former furniture showroom on Delancey Street. At the time, there were several blocks of empty buildings in the area. The city had seized these spaces by eminent domain while trying to build the Cross Manhattan Expressway—a project defeated by sustained grassroots political action which involved such notables as Jane Jacobs and the GC’s own Stanley Aronowitz. After being denied permission to rent the Delancey space from HPD, the artists took it over for a show about real estate in NYC and its effects on local residents. Included in the show were a group of tenants in the nearby buildings who were resisting eviction. The police shut down the show and seized the artwork on the morning of January 2, but the bad publicity that resulted—aided by the attendance of well-known artist Joseph Beuys at the press conference denouncing the seizure—convinced HPD to give the artists another space. At the time, HPD owned thousands of buildings which had been abandoned by their owners in then-blighted and crumbling Gotham.

But these days things are different. The ‘New Economy’ ripped through the East Village in the late 90s, and the neighborhood, formerly a center of heroin-dealing and home to dozens of squatted buildings, became a gentrified yuppie playground. The city cracked down on the squatters, and things came to a head in 1995 when an armored personnel carrier was brought onto 13th Street to support a phalanx of cops who evicted multiple squats. Around the same time, the city attempted to evict ABC No Rio, which was closely connected to the squatting movement, in violation of a legal agreement that had been previously made. ABC resisted with legal appeals and direct actions, including a sit-in at office of then-HPD commissioner Liliam Barrios-Brown. There they found an unlikely ally: a former radical, Barrios-Brown had been at the Tlatelolco massacre—the Mexican Kent State, where the army killed hundreds of leftist student protestors in Mexico City in 1968. Instead of calling the police, she invited the protestors to a conference where they were offered a deal: if they could raise the money for renovations themselves, the city would sell them the building for $1. The offer was a shock to the anarchist community around ABC, which was unaccustomed to making compromises—or being offered deals. “Us actually winning something was so rare that people were able to palate the compromise in doing that,” said Steve Englander, administrative director at ABC.

In 1998 the fundraising began, and the current building fund has over $200,000—an impressive figure for a project from this community. But the total renovation costs will probably add up to around a half million, and until recently HPD insisted that ABC No Rio raise all of the funds first before proceeding. But that put the organization in a Catch-22 situation: “We can’t get the money because we don’t own the building, and we don’t own the building because we can’t get the money,” Englander said. The building, too, is crumbling—attendees at events in the gallery space are regularly sprinkled with plaster from the ceiling above, and this kind of rawness turns some people off from using the space, thereby generating less money for the building fund.

But after a meeting last year with the HPD, it was agreed that the full funds for renovation need not be raised before the ownership transfer begins. Legally, this transfer will take place through the ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Process) application, a legal procedure which, if approved, will grant ownership to the 501(c)3 non-profit that oversees the space. This, in turn, will make ABC No Rio eligible for grant money needed to allow them to finish their renovation fundraising. However, by their agreement with the HPD, they must raise the money for the first of the three renovation phases by the time the ULURP is done, which will probably be in the spring of 2005. A $120,000 chasm looms between ABC No Rio’s past and its future.

Rumors about the impending financial crisis have flashed through the radical left and political punk communities in New York City, but Englander remains nonchalant. “People are anxious to get their noses to the grindstone,” he said, seeing fundraising as a distraction to the real goals of the center—providing space and skills to the community at large outside of a market situation as much as humanly possible. While tenured Marxist professors talk about the refusal of the commodity form while pulling in hefty salaries and relaxing in their Hampton homes and West Village apartments, it is community activists and anarchist punk rockers who actually put this idea into effect.

Alan Moore’s latest contribution is two art auctions to benefit the space. The first one, tentatively called the Clothesline Show, will be held at Pace, and will offer drawings, prints and photos for $25 to $50. A second, larger event is planned for later in the year. “I think we can raise $20-50,000 in a good auction, maybe do better,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Hardcore Collective, which books the weekly punk shows, have pledged to raise $10,000 for the building fund, according to ABC volunteer Ari Silverman. In fact the next year will feature a variety of benefits of different scopes and forms, united in their bid to save one small piece of New York City from the hyper-capitalist system that surrounds it. More importantly, it will provide some permanence to a space where use and meaning—and not monetary value—is most prized.