Eighty-odd galleries and seven years

The seven years — 1981 to 1988 — when storefronts on Avenue B hosted the Fun Gallery, International With Monument and a hundred others that burned fast and left a record.

• Patti Astor and the Fun Gallery on East 10thThe Fun Gallery — Patti Astor and Bill Stelling's storefront at 254 East 10th Street, opened 1981 — as the first commercial venue to give wall space to hip-hop-adjacent graffiti painters including Futura, Lee Quiñones and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
• International With Monument and the Ironic StorefrontInternational With Monument on East 7th Street (1983–1988) showed Koons, Halley and Vaisman and set a cool, ironic tone against the SoHo star system.
• Seven Years, a Hundred Rooms, No Lease Longer Than ThreeA district-wide account of the East Village gallery moment — its geography (Avenues A through C, East 7th to East 11th), its approximate count (over 80 spaces at peak in 1984), the names that lasted and the names that did not, and the mechanism by which rising rents ended it by 1988.