On January 11, 1980, city workers entered 123 Delancey Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, cleared the artworks from The Real Estate Show, and moved them to an uptown warehouse. The short-lived Colab occupation exhibition had opened on New Year's Day in a vacant city-owned building as a protest against landlord speculation and city land-use policy. Police and housing officials had already padlocked the storefront after a single day, and artists, joined by supporters including Joseph Beuys and Ronald Feldman, protested outside before the final removal. The seizure became part of the exhibition's meaning: an artist-run critique of property power that was itself displaced by municipal authority. Within days, negotiations with the city led to the artists' use of 156 Rivington Street, the beginning of ABC No Rio.
The confrontation helped produce ABC No Rio and fed directly into the activist energy around The Times Square Show.
