REST IN POWER

Steven Englander, Visionary Director of ABC No Rio, Dies at 63

SCION OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE, NYC

Jan 9, 2025

From Hyperallergic
December 17, 2024

Known for his collaborative spirit, Englander helped secure the Lower East Side nonprofit’s property for a dollar after decades of eviction threats from the city.

Steven Mark Englander, longtime director of the historic Lower East Side artist squat-turned-nonprofit ABC No Rio, died on December 12 in Manhattan at the age of 63 from complications related to a rare lung disease that he had been battling for over a decade. Among other achievements, Englander was known for leading ABC No Rio’s fundraising campaign to secure its property for a dollar after decades of eviction threats from city officials.

The news of Englander’s death was announced by the organization, which stated that he passed away “comfortable, pain-free, and surrounded by the two things he lived for — his family and the ABC No Rio community.”

Born on June 11, 1961, in Chicago, Englander grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. He moved to New York City in 1980 to study film at New York University and quickly became involved with groups like the Black Eye zine, the Libertarian Book Club, and the Anarchist Switchboard. He was introduced to ABC No Rio in 1987 through Matthew Courtney’s Wide-Open Cabaret performances, where he would “occasionally take the mic to give voice to his anarchist writings and musings,” Gavin Marcus, the nonprofit’s new director, told Hyperallergic.

Known for his collaborative spirit, fairness, and honesty, Englander served as the arts collective’s director twice — first in a temporary stint in 1990 when then-Director Lou Ancierno left for Hamburg, Germany, with other ABC No Rio members to mount the exhibition 10 Years, Seven Days at Künstlerhaus in commemoration of the group’s 10th anniversary. The role evolved into a co-directorship alongside Ancierno that lasted until 1991, when Englander resigned over leadership disagreements. In 1994, when ABC No Rio was facing increasing threats of eviction from city officials, he stepped into the leadership position once more.

“When [ABC No Rio] called an emergency meeting, Fly urged me to attend as I was familiar with No Rio’s history with The City as well as squatting and political organizing,” Englander said in a January 2011 interview with comic book artist and ABC No Rio member Fly Orr.

In 1995, Englander met his life partner, ABC No Rio activist, writer, and photographer Victoria Law. They were serving on the collective’s board when they got the opportunity from the city to purchase the 156 Rivington Street tenement building property for a dollar, provided that they could raise the funds for the renovation costs. He became ABC No Rio’s sole paid staff member in 1997, spearheading the group’s fundraising efforts from his office desk in a passageway between the computer lab and silkscreen print shops on the building’s top floor, which was “always buzzing with people coming in and out,” Law told Hyperallergic.

“People would come upstairs to use the bathroom and they’d stop and say hi to him, or sometimes random people would wander in and be like, ‘What is this building?’” Law recalled, describing Englander as someone who “thrived in that collective environment.”

Comic book artist and squatter rights activist Seth Tobocman, who met Englander in the mid-1990s during an uncertain time for the group and its Rivington address, told Hyperallergic that he was “very impressed with the number of different people who came together to defend ABC No Rio.” He attributed the group’s success in obtaining the rights to the property to Englander’s organizing skills and his “ability to reach out to different people and make them feel respected and included and listened to.”

When ABC No Rio was finally forced to vacate the deteriorating space in 2016, Englander’s role changed as its various facilities, including the zine library, silkscreen studio, and exhibition space, became scattered across the city’s boroughs.

“He was still the director, but doing things in exile is not the same as being in the midst of people coming in and out, volunteers using the facilities, random people who are like, ‘What is this weird building with the door unlocked and all this weird art all over the place?’” Law said.

Even as his health deteriorated over the past year, Englander continued to work to bring back ABC No Rio’s physical space until his final days. At the end of August, construction finally began on the group’s long-anticipated four-story building, which is slated to partly open in mid-2026.

“I think that’s a testament to his willpower … and he held on long enough for that groundbreaking to happen, to keep going. This was his life’s work,” Law said.

Englander is survived by two brothers, a sister, and his daughter.

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Steven Englander, Leader of an Outsider Art Outpost, Dies at 63
From New York Times
December 23, 2024

As director of the fiercely independent cultural center ABC No Rio, he led the battle to halt its eviction and later raised money to build a new home for the organization.
December 23, 2024

Steven Englander, who helped lead the pioneering Lower East Side cultural center ABC No Rio for more than 25 years, directing the anarchistic, fiercely independent organization during a long clash with New York City over the occupancy of a crumbling building that ultimately preserved the group’s presence, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 63.

His death, in a hospital after a lengthy battle with a lung disease, was announced by No Rio. In a statement, the organization praised him for helping to create “a sanctuary for New York activists, artists, and musicians through the simple act of believing that what you had to say was relevant, powerful, and, if given a platform, transformative.”

ABC No Rio, an activist-minded collective born out of the New Year’s Eve takeover of an empty city-owned building for a guerrilla art exhibition in 1979, has long provided a venue for outsider and D.I.Y. art and culture. It has hosted eclectic, sometimes experimental programming including art shows, poetry readings and eardrum-splitting punk matinees. The singer-songwriter Beck, the punk band Bikini Kill and the performance artist Karen Finley were among the notable acts to perform there early in their careers.

The band Nausea performed at ABC No Rio in 1991. The venue was known for, among many other things, its eardrum-splitting punk matinees.

But No Rio’s story is equally about its contentious battle for a home, one that began with the break-in of the vacant building on Delancey Street on the city’s Lower East Side by a group of artists to mount a show — fittingly, a critique of gentrification called “The Real Estate Show.”

City officials immediately kicked the artists out of the building but offered them part of a ramshackle tenement, also owned by the city, a block north on Rivington Street. The organization took its name from the remaining legible letters of a Spanish-language sign across the street that had bore the words “ABOGADO” and “NOTARIO.” (Only half of the first O was visible, leaving a C.)

Mr. Englander served two stints as director of ABC No Rio, briefly sharing that job in the early 1990s and then holding it alone from the late ’90s until his death. He defined his role as combination curator and facilitator.

“That was my artistic practice,” he said in an interview in his hospital room two days before his death. “To create an environment in which other people could realize their visions.”

No Rio forged a reputation well beyond New York City, forming alliances with artists and activists in Europe and Latin America and organizing shows that addressed weighty topics like real estate speculation and displacement, war in the Middle East and the unexplained disappearance of young Mexican women working in foreign-owned factories.

Mr. Englander described his programming philosophy as saying yes — giving artists a chance to succeed or fail and believing that even an unsuccessful project could have merit or be part of an artist’s development.

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But he was also capable of saying no, sometimes bluntly, and he was unafraid to chide No Rio volunteers or visitors whose behavior he saw as reckless or inconsiderate.

The ability to maintain boundaries was especially important in an environment that questioned any form of top-down or centralized power, said Eric Freedman Goldhagen, a No Rio board member who founded a free computer lab there.

“Steven’s position came with a responsibility to uphold community norms and rules,” Mr. Freedman Goldhagen said. “He approached that with the kindness and respect of a caretaker, not as an authoritarian.”

But the building was a wreck, plagued by water leaks, falling plaster and rats. Break-ins were common, and at one point early on, when No Rio had use only of the ground floor, heroin users took over upstairs rooms. The building was, as the poet Allen Ginsberg once put it, “a dump.”

Saying that the city landlord did not make needed repairs, the organization withheld rent, setting off a long stretch of eviction proceedings. When city officials moved in the 1990s to oust No Rio from the building, artists including Hans Haake, Yoko Ono, Tom Otterness and Kiki Smith wrote letters of support or donated artworks to be auctioned to help pay legal fees.

In 1997, the city finally dropped the eviction effort and agreed to sell the building to No Rio for one dollar. The group was first required to raise money for repairs, which took nine years. In 2006, No Rio took ownership of the tenement, whose foundation dated to the Civil War, but the building was deemed too rickety to survive. In 2016, the structure was demolished. The city eventually allocated $21 million for a new building.

In July, at the lot where that building had stood, Mr. Englander joined the Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, and the commissioner of cultural affairs, Laurie Cumbo, for a ceremonial groundbreaking for a new four-story building that is expected to open in 2026.

Steven Mark Englander was born in Chicago on June 11, 1961, and grew up in Racine, Wis. His father, Stanley, was a pediatrician, and his mother, Barbara, worked as a nurse and a bookstore manager.

Steven was a “film geek,” according to an interview published by the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; as a teenager, he sometimes traveled to Milwaukee to see European art-house movies.

In the late 1970s he attended New York University and, after graduating with a degree in film, worked part time as a video production assistant.

He attended his first No Rio events in the late 1980s and was asked to serve as the organization’s co-director. The job came with a perk: a small apartment in an upper floor of the creaky Rivington Street building, where Mr. Englander was the only occupant. It was a grittier, pre-gentrification era on the Lower East Side, when sidewalk heroin bazaars operated openly.

Mr. Englander had to contend not only with the drug dealers but also with police officers who wanted to use the nearly empty tenement as a spot from which to spy on them.

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Englander told the police, according to an interview for an oral history project. “These guys are going to kill me.”

On another occasion, he ejected an officer who had made it inside.

“I went to a performance, and I saw Steven Englander bounce a cop out of the backyard,” Becky Howland, a sculptor and founding director, told The New York Times this year. “It was kind of amazing to me. I was like, OK, that’s pretty cool.”

Mr. Englander soon resigned as director because of disagreements with No Rio’s board. But he returned in 1994 when the city moved to oust the group, and led its efforts to fight the eviction. He moved into the building, along with others involved in East Village squatter and anarchist movements, and later joined No Rio’s board.

Around that time Mr. Englander met Victoria Law, a writer who served with him on No Rio’s board in the mid-to-late-’90s and who became his longtime partner. She survives him, as do their daughter, Siuloong Englander; two brothers, Eric and Brian Englander; and a sister, Alison Englander.

While fighting the eviction in court, the group also used more confrontational tactics. It protested against a developer that the city wanted to turn the building over to and held a sit-in at the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

After the city and No Rio reached a détente in 1997, Mr. Englander resumed the job of director. He later worked with the city, his old nemesis, to smooth the path for a new building.

He described the process as more collaborative than contentious, although flashes of the old anarchist leanings still emerged. When the groundbreaking was being planned, he said, a city official called to ask whether the group preferred silver or gold-colored shovels.

“Are you kidding?” Mr. Englander replied. “We want black.”

By then the old, dirty, dangerous Lower East Side had been largely gentrified. ABC No Rio will return as something of a relic, as many fellow D.I.Y. and indie art spaces that once peppered the neighborhood have been forced out or faded away.

Days before his death, Mr. Englander said he took solace in the fact that construction of the new building was underway and that No Rio would live on. “I’m going to die,” he said. “But the project is going to be finished.”

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Steven Mark Englander 1961 - 2024
From ABC No Rio
December 13, 2024

To the entire ABC No Rio community --

It is with tremendous sadness that we announce the passing of our visionary director, Steven Englander.

As many of you knew, Steven was diagnosed with a rare form of lung disease over a decade ago. Despite a successful lung transplant 6 years ago, Steven passed away last night, Thursday, December 12th, comfortable, pain-free, and surrounded by the two things he lived for - his family and the ABC No Rio community.

Those who knew Steven were touched by his commitment to the New York City DIY arts community. He helped mold ABC No Rio into a sanctuary for New York activists, artists, and musicians through the simple act of believing that what you had to say was relevant, powerful, and, if given a platform, transformative. Steven dedicated his life to inclusive, community-run art spaces that give voice to oppositional culture, and we will be forever grateful for his work.
steven-in-the-pit

Not only did Steven’s philosophy shape what ABC No Rio became, but he also shaped what it will become. A true visionary for what was possible, Steven began planning and fighting for the creation of a brand-new arts center over 20 years ago. And as a testament to his ‘by hook or by crook’ mentality and his belief in collective power, it’s happening. His dream’s realization is underway, with ongoing construction work following July’s groundbreaking ceremony.

When the new ABC No Rio building opens its doors, Steven’s philosophy will once again have a home to flourish and inspire the next generation of DIY art culture. To finish making this philosophy a reality and complete our new building, we still have more work to do and funds to raise. We will need the continued help of community volunteers, new and old, to help run the collectives that make ABC No Rio what it is. Please get in touch.

In recognition that we will all be grieving as a community, we welcome you to send us your stories and musings (written or recorded), photographs, and videos of Steven that symbolize your time with him and the impact he had on your life. Who knows, maybe we’ll create something with it all. Please send to abc@abcnorio.org.

In solidarity,
-- From all of us at ABC No Rio.

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From 0ssuary (instagram)
December 14, 2024

Steven Englander died Thursday night. He didn't really care about punk music but he was an anarchist and tenant activist who acted as a mentor to a lot of us. As the general director of ABC No Rio he acted as a bridge that connected many disparate groups in the New York underground. Musicians, visual artists, playwrights and performers. I came back to ABC No Rio every weekend because of the resources and community. I learned how to screenprint; I read zines in the zine library. I learned some rudiments about setting up and breaking down sound equipment. I hung art and learned local history from the people who lived it. I tried to document as much of it as I could, because in the 2010s there was still some collective consensus that the internet was a permanent archive, but these days I have less faith in digital permanence. Centers like ABC develop communities that generate and preserve materials. Us old heads have been talking about how important that work is, and how nobody is going to do it for us. We need us.

Thanks Steven.

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From worldinfernofs (instagram)
December 13, 2024

Let Us Now Speak of Brave Men. It's heartbreaking to hear about the loss of ABC No Rio director Steve Englander. Steve has been a long-time supporter of both World/Inferno and Sticks & Stones. After Jack passed, Steve volunteered to organize "Pete" 's old zines, flyers, art, and papers. He was an ally to the end and beyond.

It's with a heavy heart that this was written, but things are not all grim. Heres to celebrating Steven's life work and his victory. For those that dont know, No Rio was a squatted art center, and their all ages Saturday hardcore punk matinees once upon a time became one of Inferno's early homebases.The wifs played enough benefit shows for the thing, so we are really glad that it's all working out! Against all odds, ABC defied eviction against the city, bought their building for $1, and then over the course of several years, ambitiously raised several millions of dollars to knock down its old crumbling walls and rebuild a new building in its place. No Rio is a collective, it took a village or two to make this happen, but Steve unquestionably was the visionary and the driving force.

There's still more to fundraise and more work to be done, but its gotten this far because of this man behind the scenes who stubbornly persisted and flatout refused to give up on this longshot beautiful anarchist dream. It took years, but the groundbreaking was this past summer, and the foundation is being completed as you're reading this. Thanks to Steve, ABC No Rio will live again. The future generations of punks, artists, and activists of Gotham will soon have a new all ages DIY community center to call home. You will be missed, you are missed, but it's due to your legacy that subsequent cultures of resistance and opposition will have that much more to look forward to.

In solidarity with all comrades of Mr. Englander, from our community to yours, let us now celebrate and speak of brave men who lived their lives just as they would have it.