Seeking alternatives to the gallery and the museum, whose doors were often closed to the most experimental art, many artists embraced their immediate environment as a place to make and display their work. By the mid-1970s,  New York City was essentially bankrupt, in disarray, and left to fend for itself—as telegraphed in the infamous 1975 New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Yet Lower Manhattan’s desolate industrial landscape yielded spaces for Downtown artists to establish not-for-profit alternative venues. In these factory lofts (where many artists also lived) and in the gritty streets, they created art that directly engaged the urban scene: Gordon Matta-Clark carved a parabolic aperture into the wall of an abandoned Hudson River pier, and Scott Burton cast a discarded Queen Anne chair in bronze and displayed it on the sidewalk. David Wojnarowicz photographed a friend wandering Downtown wearing a mask of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, while Adam Purple built a floral paradise on a rubble-strewn lot on the Lower East Side.