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Week in Shows: Sonic Immersion Excursion and Girls, Girls, Girls

(Flyer via Le Poisson Rouge)

Concert for Immigration Rights: Glasser, Underground System, Tigue, Elena Moon Park & Friends, Ashley Bathgate, and Ljova
Wednesday March 22, doors 7 pm at Le Poisson Rouge: $25

Le Poisson Rouge is hosting a benefit this week for the New York Immigration Coalition, which is cool. As you might expect, they’ve put together an eclectic lineup to help rake in the cash for a chill cause: defending immigrants rights. Funds are going directly to the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) which provides services that LPR says are “particularly crucial in the wake of the recent presidential executive actions.” Hear, hear.

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Photos: ABC No Rio's Last Hurrah at Its Home of 36 Years

Hardcore legends Mad Diesel closing out ABC No Rio's final punk/hardcore matinee in the original building, 6/25/16. (Photo: Nick McManus)

Hardcore legends Mad Diesel closing out ABC No Rio’s final punk/hardcore matinee in the original building, 6/25/16. (Photo: Nick McManus)

The closing of two beloved record stores wasn’t the only blow dealt to Manhattan’s music scene over the weekend. Down on the Lower East Side, the social center known as ABC No Rio hosted its last two shows in its home of over three decades.
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ABC No Rio Bids Bye to Current Digs With Final Art Show and Close-Out Concerts

(Photo: John Ambrosio)

(Photo: John Ambrosio)

Artists from all eras of ABC No Rio’s radical history, including some who founded the legendary Lower East Side squat in 1980, have turned the dilapidated tenement into a top-to-bottom exhibition space before it’s demolished and replaced by a new eco-friendly building.

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‘Literally a Rat Hole’: How Seventh Street Squat Grew on a Governor’s Meadow

This week and next, we present a series of longer pieces unraveling the histories of storied buildings.

209 E 7 is tucked between Graffiti Baptist Church and the Lower East Side Ecology Center Garden. Credit: Nadeen Shaker)

209 E 7 is tucked between Graffiti Baptist Church and the Lower East Side Ecology Center Garden. Credit: Nadeen Shaker)

In late October, I emailed Fly, a resident of the former Seventh Street Squat, to tell her that I was able to find out when her home of two decades had been built. The six-story apartment building at 209 East 7th Street was completed in 1897. “Interesting!” she wrote back, “There is a marker on the top of our building commemorating 1899 as the year the building was completed.”

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Anarchy-Lovin’ Film Fest to Occupy Local Community Gardens

11119867_985279054836993_1839671042149029268_o (1)It’s no secret the East Village has gone through immense changes over the last few decades, but some institutions from the pre-$20 cocktail days have stuck around. The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, a DIY project that occupies the storefront of C-Squat, is dedicated to preserving the history of that squat and others. And MoRUS’s third-annual film fest, I Heart NRCHY: Subversion & the City continues the narrative of political and social activism and anarcho-community organizing.

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ABC No Rio Co-Founder Recalls a New Era of Hardcore in Exhibit and Screening

Freddy (Photo: Loizos Gatzaris‎)

Freddy Alva (Photo: Loizos Gatzaris‎)

Once upon a time there were things called subcultures, that managed to thrive despite promotion through “social channels” or sponsorships from energy drinks. Since 1980, 156 Rivington Street has been a subculture enclave for activists, artists, counter culturists, and assorted noisemakers, providing a non-profit space to exchange ideas and physically interact. It’s not secret that the hardcore punk scene was once a magnet for such individuals, so when the storied matinee shows at CBGB became too violent in the late-’80s, punk turned off the Bowery to Rivington Street to ABC No Rio.

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ABC No Rio and Its Zine Library Hope to Turn a New Page

ABC No Rio Zine Library (Photo: Nicole Disser)

ABC No Rio Zine Library (Photo: Nicole Disser)

ABC No Rio is falling apart, as it has been for decades. But it sort of comes with the territory– as a (now former) squat house, punk venue, and art-making community space since the late 1970s, the building has leveled some expected wear. Minor repairs, such as patching up a massive hole in the wall that read “rat poison” back in 1989 and the roof encapsulation twenty years later in 2009, haven’t done much to seriously improve the conditions of what, deep down, is an ailing tenement house.
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Maggie Estep Has Died at 50

Maggie Estep, May 1994, New York City. (Photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images)

Maggie Estep, May 1994, New York City. (Photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images)

Writer and spoken-word star Maggie Estep has died at the age of 50. A friend tells The Times she died two days after having a heart attack at her home in Hudson, New York.

Estep was a fixture of the East Village slam-poetry scene who rose to national prominence via her grunge-era appearances on MTV and on HBO’s Def Poetry, and went on to perform in front of massive festival audiences.
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Mental Note: See This Exhibit at ABC No Rio Before Its Building Is a Distant Memory

tumblr_mw6ah9bxx81qd3ydao1_500There was something I was supposed to post this afternoon, but it seems to have slipped my mind.

Oh, right. “Collect, Store, Retrieve” — a new gallery exhibit at ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side — opens this evening featuring artistic takes on the science of memory.
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