Eight years after the rickety tenement that housed the Lower East Side cultural center ABC No Rio fell to the wrecking ball, a replacement is on the way.
A new four-story building will occupy the same lot on Rivington Street as the old center, which for decades symbolized the grit and defiance of the Lower East Side. No Rio cultivated political protest and the artistic avant-garde, with performances by Karen Finley and Beck, while also serving as a base for people to help prisoners and distribute free food.
The new structure will be built with the aid of the City of New York, which over the last several years has put $21 million toward the project, allocated through the Department of Cultural Affairs by the mayor’s office, the borough president’s office and City Council members.
That building will have a kitchen, a free computer lab and a zine library, just like its predecessor. It will also include environmentally conscious touches meant to insulate the building and conserve energy, including a roof garden and rows of plants along the facade.
The center’s relationship with the city, which for years was its landlord, has not always been smooth. In the 1990s, city officials tried to oust the group that ran the center. No Rio fought back, with protests and street theater.
But on Tuesday, at a ceremony as the construction project broke ground, the evolution in the relationship was clear.
“ABC No Rio embodies the DIY creative energy and legacy of the Lower East Side like few other places,” Laurie Cumbo, the cultural affairs commissioner, said in a statement, adding that the new building will “be rooted in the same mission and ethos that has made this a vital space for pioneering artists for more than 40 years.”
Cumbo and several No Rio members, including Steven Englander, the group’s longtime director, dug shovels into the ground during the ceremony. Excavation and actual construction are expected to begin within three weeks, said Englander, who described the groundbreaking as a “long awaited and very auspicious day.”
Becky Howland, who is among the artists credited with starting No Rio, said the survival of the center was “a testament to the power of communal action over time.”
The basement and ground floor of the new building will be completed within about 20 months, Englander said, and the three upper floors will be left partly finished, with walls, windows, ceilings and lighting, but little else. Additional work on those floors will take place during a second phase of construction that has yet to be scheduled, he said.
No Rio traces its roots to 1979, when a group of artists took over an empty city-owned building on Delancey Street and held what they called “The Real Estate Show,” a commentary on gentrification replete with a manifesto that cited the importance of doing “something dramatic that is neither commercially oriented nor institutionally quarantined.”
The group soon moved with the city’s permission to Rivington Street. Its name came from the remnants of lettering on a nearby sign that had once read “Abogado y Notario Publico.”
In 1994, the city took steps to evict the group, starting a battle over whether the Rivington Street building would be given to a developer or retained by the artists and the activists they had allied with, including squatters who had fought the city over possession of empty buildings in the nearby East Village.
The artists and activists prevailed, at some cost. Those who had taken up residence inside No Rio had to move out. And the group had to prove it could afford repairs by raising $100,000, relying on fund-raisers and private donations. The center eventually raised just over $2 million, some of which came from the auction of donated artworks by people like Yoko Ono and Hans Haacke, That money is now going toward expenses like architecture, engineering and legal fees.
After buying the building for one dollar in 2006, No Rio members concluded that they could not simply shore it up. The center was razed in 2016 and as years passed a maddening cycle repeated: The group would solicit bids, prepare for construction, only to be blocked by ever-rising construction costs.
After the event on Tuesday, No Rio members marched north to celebrate at Umbrella House, a squat-turned-limited-equity co-op on Avenue C where Englander began living after moving out of the old Rivington Street building.
Along the way, Eric Goldhagen, a co-chair of the board of No Rio, said the new building would provide a chance for new people to get involved with the group.
“The history of No Rio has been one generation handing the project to the next,” he said. “We’ll call the rebuilding a success when a new generation of artists and activists have made the space their own.”
Read More: With New York’s Help, a Center of Art and Protest to Get a New Home
