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.
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.
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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