Defiance Through Noise
With a short, swift ruling delivered in the afternoon on Nov. 26, 2024, Judge Jeffery Zellan decided that the occupants of the fourth floor of a building in Chinatown were to be evicted and with them, a punk haven that served the community for two years.
Roughly a year later, that same fourth floor remains vacant and the fate of Punk HQ still does not have a location. ABC No Rio is rising from the ashes, but as a non-profit. Nevertheless, New York City’s punks have proven time and time again, they are no strangers to adversity or to the fight for a space to call their own.
“Community spaces don’t really exist anymore. They all cost money, and they’re all for the rich,” said Lucifer Magdalene, a member of the punk band Datura. “If you’re poor, which is most people, you have nowhere to go.”
Third spaces in New York, locations outside of work and home, have steadily declined due to economic pressures, a trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Their disappearance meant not only the loss of physical spaces, but also the loss of community and skill-sharing.
PunkHQ
Project Reach, founded by the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), is a non-profit organization for the youth living in low-income communities. The occupants reclaimed the building into Punk HQ, a hub for marginalized youth from all walks of life, genders, and sexualities to come together in community, often forming bonds through the punk subculture.
The eviction is part of a Civil Court agreement that puts to rest a bitter dispute about the space on 39 Eldridge Street, the latest chapter in a long tradition of punk-led spaces fighting for survival in New York City.
Squatting in NYC
During the 1970s and 80s, punks, anarchists, artists and outcasted youth flocked to the Lower East Side, where they spearheaded the then-growing squatting movement in New York City.
The squatting movement rose from decades of intentional government disinvestment in inner cities. The Kerner Commission, tasked by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 with investigating the causes of the 1960s race riots, recommended a "reorientation of Federal housing programs” from urban cities to “non-ghetto” suburban areas.
Under the section of Why Did It Happen? The Kerner Commission echoed the experiences of Black citizens, “Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
On the State level, New York’s Housing Commissioner Roger Starr proposed planned shrinkage, whereas the city would stop investing in impoverished neighborhoods and shift funds to wealthier areas.
For Frank Morales, a squatter and author of Squatting in NYC, this housing proposal was a “counter-insurgency against the poor,” because it resulted in the abundance of abandoned property and homelessness in the Lower East Side.
His interpretation of both the Kerner Commission and Starr’s planned shrinkage, through “planned spatial deconcentration” which frames the logistics of social control, in particular police and military logistics, is deeply rooted upon racist white supremacist ideology.
Through this viewpoint, the purposeful indifference of poor urban areas was done so in order to break up pockets of politically active Black and Hispanic residents, to quell any future dissent.
Seeing an opportunity, Morales and around 500 others took a direct-action approach in the 80s to “actualizing their human right to a home” in about 30 vacant buildings.
“In that sense, squatting is a means of self defense,” he wrote in the fall 2021 update of his zine. “In other words, needing a home, they decide to take one!”
Among the best-known anarchist punk squats of the period was ABC No Rio.
ABC No Rio, located at 156 Rivington St., is a collective founded by artists in the aftermath of The Real Estate Show on Jan 1, 1980 critiquing the city's housing and land use policies. This “citizen center” was originally squatted on Delancey St., however the NYPD swiftly shut down the exhibition, leading the city to broker a deal with the artists, offering them the basement and ground floor of 156 Rivington St.
In 2002, after decades of negotiation between the squatters and the city, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani sold the city-owned property over to the squatters for $1 through the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, if the occupants raised the money to rehabilitate the property.
This deal established the 11 of the remaining squats as cooperative housing as laid out by the Housing Development Fund Corporation.
ABC No Rio gained the title to 156 Rivington on June 29, 2006.
In 2016, the community was displaced when the building was demolished. However, in July 2024, ABC No Rio broke ground on an updated building, at its original address, after receiving a $21 million contribution by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, which covered a majority of the construction costs.
In continuation of the original, the new community center will once-again be a hub for anarchists, artists and activists offering a darkroom, zine library, a printlab, and event spaces for mutual aid projects. ABC No Rio is set to re-open in July 2026.
But Project Reach wasn’t really operating anymore on Eldridge Street. The CPC opted to end the lease with 39-41 Eldridge Street Realty Corp. early, as its programs, services and curricula available through a school based model. Two former employees of Reach, Wren Quiles and Ru Orozco then picked up the mantle of serving at-risk youths from across the city.
Since joining Project Reach in 2021, Quiles and Orozco have witnessed and attempted to stop the bleeding of a steady decline of the program. In Sept. 2021, Quiles was originally a participant of Reach’s service and was there so frequently, eventually CPC offered them part-time employment. Two years later, what began as a team of five-people, dwindled down to only them two.
“ Ru joining with Project Reach ended up saving it.” Wren Quiles said, giving much of the flowers to Ru Orozco. “Ultimately when it comes to Project Reach, Project Reach as a whole was built by people who wanted to improve the space.”
Ru Orzoco was working for Project Reach as a workshop coordinator. In July 2023, Orozco brainstormed the various programs that brought in the community that now uses Eldridge Street.
“ All the things like the screen printing workshop, the music program that didn't exist. I brought that in there.” they said.
Those programs, originally, were used as benefits to “save Project Reach” as the Chinese-American Planning Council is no longer using 39 Eldrige. Orozco had turned these off-shoot programs into official curriculum, which they claim that CPC had “cherry- picked what they liked out of it” and used that foundation to get grants.
“HQ IS OUR LAST DIY PUNK VENUE,” Logout wrote in The ChaosStar #38, an anarchist zine. “IT HAS BROKEN FREE FROM THE NONPROFIT UMBRELLA IT FORMERLY EXISTED UNDER.”
Following the traditions set by prior anarcho-punks, Logout is a collective of squatters, musicians, graffiti artists hosting shows to financially benefit Palestine and NYC-based immigrant workers. Wren Quiles, Ru Orozco, and an unspecified number of others decided to occupy the fourth floor on Eldridge St. in defiance against the “non-profit industrial complex” and a post-covid New York City.
logout
Logout got its start in winter 2023 with a squatted show in an undisclosed vacant commercial building located in Manhattan. This kickstarted a series of “reclamation” shows in subversive spaces within the deep crevices of the five boroughs.
“ The grants that these people received, the funding that they receive, it's off the backbone of people like me and Wren,” said Ru Orozco. “It’s not these people in the suits, or the landlord, or any of these people. It's the existing community.