Entering the rotting, slumping former tenement at 156 Rivington St. feels like traveling back in time. Since 1980, this building has been the home of an alternative arts organization, ABC No Rio, and in “Ides of March 2008,” an exhibition that has taken over the entire building, the spirit of the early 1980s, of the legendary Times Square Show and the long-defunct “East Village scene,” lives on.

Once a squatters’ dwelling, this structure was officially given over in 1998 to the artists’ collective that runs it, one of a number of such ad hoc transactions overseen by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. If it can raise $2.6 million, ABC No Rio plans to demolish the existing building and erect a plant-covered modernist affair designed by Paul Castrucci, a local architect. But, as the director of ABC No Rio, Steven Englander, sees it, that could be a long way off. The decrepit stairways, which feel as though they might give way at any moment, and the rooms redolent of decades of stray cats (including the 10-year-old incumbent, Cookie Puss), make it hard to imagine that that moment will ever come.

So much has changed in the art world and in Lower Manhattan in the nearly 30 years since ABC No Rio was founded. But buildings have a way of capturing, if not entombing, the past better than any digitized archive. And here, in this four-story tenement, it feels as if all the new hotels and boutiques that have arisen on the Lower East Side have melted away, leaving behind a ramshackle residue suggested in the very name of the institution that is housed here: It derives from a sign, with a few letters missing, for a Spanish-language notary public, or notario, who worked across the street when the organization moved in all those years ago.

In addition to weekly events such as punk rock concerts and a vegan collective that makes food for the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, ABC No Rio boasts one of the biggest zine libraries in the country. It may come as a surprise to many readers that, in the age of the Web site, these blotchy, warped, cheaply printed artifacts of a previous generation are still being produced. But apparently they are, and many of them (often with the word “Anarchy” in their title) end up in neat boxes on the third floor at 156 Rivington.

But the biggest event that ABC No Rio stages is its biennial “Ides of March” art show (which the organization insists on calling “biannual”). Like the four previous “Ides of March” exhibitions, the current one coincides with the far better known Whitney Biennial uptown. And though Mr. Englander insists that this is mere coincidence, a comparison inevitably suggests itself, one that is especially serviceable this year: For the first time, the Whitney has invited some 20 artists and artist collectives to take over the Armory on Park Avenue and 67th Street. In that part of the Whitney Biennial, which closed this past Sunday, the participants transformed the Armory’s dusty old rooms into all manner of installations. But the results were pallid and tedious, and, more important, reeked of money and attitude, as if these ostentatiously low-tech, countercultural poses represented a kind of “slumming.”

At ABC No Rio, by contrast, you are in the presence of the real thing. Unless you happen to have a potent affection for artists’ collectives (largely a throwback to the 1960s and 1980s), it is unlikely that you will find that the works on view are significantly better than those of the Whitney. But they are somewhat better, less ironic, and they feel far more at home here. Though many works, such as those of Just Seeds/Visual Resistance or “The War Show 3” by artcodex, purvey the expected dosage of environmental and anti-military-industrial-complex agitprop, others are more nuanced and even manage the sort of formal grace that was entirely lacking at the Armory. Among these is a string sculpture by Harrah & Kipp that hangs down from the ceiling and recalls some of the later works of Eva Hesse. In one of the stairwells, the Pipeline Project has created a mazy circuit of interconnected pipes that are finely drawn. And in the entrance to the building, Broadthinking — a women’s collective including, among others, the estimable Peggy Cyphers — has produced a sequence of neatly conceived, feminist-inspired lunettes along one of the walls.

It is one of the marvels of New York that, despite the intense scrutiny enjoyed by the artistic mainstream in Chelsea and on Madison Avenue, there remain many venues, such as ABC No Rio, known to few people inside or outside the art world. According to Mr. Englander, it is rare that more than 40 people a day visit the “Ides of March” during its three-week run, which ends this year with a party and art sale on April 4. However that might be, the “Ides of March 2008” is well worth a visit.

Until April 4 (156 Rivington St., between Clinton and Suffolk streets, 212-254-3697).