It’s hard to believe, but after years of fundraising and legal hassles, construction on a new building for the historic Lower East Side art space ABC No Rio is finally underway. Congratulations go to Steve Englander, No Rio’s longtime director who, before convincing the city to sell the building for a dollar if he could bring it up to code, had first to fight off efforts by the city to reclaim the building. Now Englander has pulled off the near impossible feat of securing both the money and city approval to construct a completely new building designed by architect Paul Castrucci!
No Rio is certainly not a likely institution for such privileged treatment. The gallery was the byproduct of the “Real Estate Show,” an illegal exhibition held in a vacant city-owned building that artists broke into on New Year’s Eve 1980. The police quickly evicted the artists, but at a time when the Lower East Side was riddled with abandoned buildings, the city saw the advantage of letting artists take over a nearby building on Rivington Street. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement but ABC No Rio persevered.
At first, No Rio was affiliated with the artist-group Collaborative Projects Inc. (COLAB); next, performance artists from Pyramid nightclub took over; Steve Englander, who was mostly associated with the LES squatting movement, became director in 1990. During its 45-year history, the space sponsored political exhibitions, hardcore music matinees, a zine library, and silkscreen and photography workshops for neighborhood residents. Under Englander’s leadership No Rio remained committed to its three founding principles: “DIY,” “Collectivity” and “Community.”
In 1985, Alan W. Moore, one of the original founders of the gallery, collaborated with Marc H. Miller on the book ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery, much of which is now posted online. No one would have guessed that these were only the first five years of an unbroken forty-five-year history. In 2025, Moore will organize an exhibition at the Emily Harvey Foundation that will spotlight No Rio’s complete history. Soon after, in late 2025 or early 2026, ABC No Rio’s new building will be inaugurated. For those who were there at the beginning, this is a small miracle.
