ABC No Rio, the volunteer-run arts and activism center that has occupied 156 Rivington Street since 1980, is close to moving back home. The collective says its new four-story building on the same lot is slated to be finished this fall, after more than nine years of planning and fundraising and a construction run that began in July 2024. On October 17, during the Lower East Side Arts and Culture Open House, ABC No Rio director Gavin Marcus and architect Paul A. Castrucci led the first public hard-hat tours of the building.

The collective's most recent exhibition, held at a gallery a few doors down at 128 Rivington Street this summer, was billed as its last show in exile. The next one, ABC No Rio says, will be in the new building.

What is inside

The new center replaces the old tenement that ABC No Rio volunteers rebuilt into a community center in the 2000s. According to ABC No Rio, the building will hold a community photo darkroom, a screen printing shop, a computer lab, a zine library, a kitchen for mutual aid projects, office and meeting space for ABC No Rio and other groups, and two spaces for exhibitions and public events, including the punk and hardcore matinees the center has been running since the late 1980s.

The collective says the new building doubles the size of its gallery and performance space. It also adds an elevator and makes the building wheelchair accessible.

The zine library alone is a sizable collection. It began in 1998 when ABC No Rio took in the Blackout Zine Library from a South Bronx squat facing eviction, and it has grown from about 3,000 publications to more than 13,000, with a focus on zines from and about the Lower East Side and downtown Manhattan. While construction has continued, the library has been operating from a third-floor room at the Clemente, 107 Suffolk Street.

A Passive House on Rivington Street

Castrucci Architects designed the building to meet LEED Silver and the Passive House standard, which is built around a tight, heavily insulated shell that needs far less energy to heat and cool. ABC No Rio says it will also have low-flow plumbing, rainwater collection and an 1,100-square-foot green roof. According to the collective, the New York City Economic Development Corporation described it as the first Passive House project in that agency's history.

The city has put $21 million toward the project through the Department of Cultural Affairs, with funds from the Mayor's Office, the City Council and the Manhattan Borough President, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation added $275,000. ABC No Rio still has its own share of building and design costs to raise, which it puts at more than $1 million, and it is taking donations for a building fund.

The superstructure was finished last fall. ABC No Rio marked the topping out at the site on October 31, 2025, 15 months after work began.

How ABC No Rio got the lot

The center's origins go back to New Year's Day 1980, when a group of artists, many tied to the collective Colab, occupied an abandoned building and mounted a show about the city's housing and land use policies. Police shut it down the same day. The artists pushed the city into talks, and the city offered them the storefront and basement at 156 Rivington Street. That became ABC No Rio.

In 1997, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development offered to sell the group the building for one dollar if it could raise money to rehabilitate it for community use. ABC No Rio raised close to $500,000 and took title to the property on June 29, 2006. Volunteers then turned the tenement into a center with a gallery and performance space, a darkroom, a silkscreen shop and a walk-in computer lab. The center has never charged membership fees to use its programs or equipment.

Until the doors open

While it waits to move in, ABC No Rio keeps its programming going at other venues, including benefit shows in Brooklyn and punk matinees in Tompkins Square Park. Upcoming shows are posted in the news section of its website, and the collective takes volunteers for its zine library and its other volunteer-run collectives.

The building is at 156 Rivington Street, between Clinton and Suffolk Streets. The closest subway is the F, J, M and Z at Delancey Street-Essex Street, a few blocks south. To follow the opening, sign up for ABC No Rio's mailing list on its website, or write to abc@abcnorio.org to volunteer.

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