DescriptionAt the pinnacle of urban crisis that had ravaged cities across America, from the 1950s to the 1970s, New York City embarked on a complete transformation that afflicted a wider radius urban space and affected the population in a much different way than the earlier crises. Gentrification and privatization of Manhattan not only displaced working and lower middle-class residents from their homes; the implementation of neoliberal economic policies paved the way for an unprecedented growth of the private sector through the 1980s, which began to impose a homogenized, conservative, suburban culture onto a diverse and heterogeneous urban landscape. In the late-1970s, artists in throughout Lower Manhattan reacted to the dramatic urban change that was taking place in New York City. They not only rejected the gentrification of urban space, which had displaced them from SoHo to the nearby Lower East and West Sides; their art and attitudes toward society was a direct response to the gentrification of urban culture. The counterculture that ensued originated in the East Village, taking shape around existing cultural institutions, but began to spread throughout Lower Manhattan, in isolated pockets, most notably at the Mudd Club, an underground salon in the Lower West Side. The art of the East Village underground was informed by two sources: first, through their collaboration with hip hop graffiti writers -whose subway graffiti was a direct protest to the substandard conditions of the South Bronx in urban crisis- underground art collectives in Lower Manhattan developed a unique Punk Art aesthetic that was use similarly to protest the inequities of urban change in the late-1970s; second, deindustrialization not only left a plethora of abandoned buildings, in which art collectives staged consciousness-raising alternative art shows; the post-industrial cityscape became the primary cultural influence that pervaded the span of countercultural art in the East Village underground. This perspective of urban change, from the point of view of artists in response, reveals the original effects of neoliberal economic policies on the urban landscape. Since the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of the private sector in New York City has dominated urban public policy; the public-private partnerships, first implemented in the revitalization of Times Square, have become mainstays in the administration of urban government and have set the tone for the increasingly expensive and gentrified urban landscapes were see today. Artists of the East Village underground sounded a concerning alarm in response to the city’s transition into late-capitalism. As private corporate interests conquered the city, which became increasingly too expensive for working and middle-class people and artists to live and work, underground artists rejected social and cultural norms of the new ruling class; in response to the same conditions that dominate urban space today.