The Real Estate Show was a Colab sponsored illegal occupation exhibition on the subject of landlord speculation in real estate held on New Year's Eve in January 1980 in a vacant city-owned building at 123 Delancey Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The squatter action followed a year of long and frustrating campaigning to rent the property for an exhibition space from officials of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).
On New Year's Day the show was officially opened to the public. It was to be a two-week occupation/exhibit but was closed down by the police. On the morning of January 2, the Colab artists discovered the storefront padlocked from the inside, their work locked within. Phone calls revealed it to be the doing of HPD. The Real Estate Show had been open exactly one day.
On January 8, the artists, accompanied by art dealer Ronald Feldman and German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys assembled at the site to protest its closing in the company of reporters from the New York Times, Soho News, and the East Village Eye. There was a photograph taken of Beuys at the front door of The Real Estate Show standing with Feldman, Alan W. Moore, Joseph Nechvatal, Cid Collins and others taken that day.
On January 11 city workers swept into 123 Delancey, cleared out the exhibited work and trucked it to an uptown warehouse. It was not until a few days later that artists were granted entry into the warehouse to take their art back home.
On January 16 a deal was reached with the city that gave birth to ABC No Rio when, as a compromise, a city agency gave the artists control of nearby 156 Rivington Street.
The Real Estate Show Revisited
In early 2014, there were four concurrent art exhibitions in New York City around The Real Estate Show: at James Fuentes Gallery, ABC No Rio, the Lodge Gallery, and Cuchifritos Gallery/Essex Street Market.