But Mr. Abrams was no cheerleader. Under his watch, the Eye chronicled the ravages of crack cocaine, the devastation of AIDS and the rising tide of gentrification, all of which would ultimately help splinter the scene.
The Eye peaked in influence in the early 1980s, Mr. Musto said, filling a relative gap between the ’70s heyday of the Soho Weekly News, which shuttered in 1982, and the rise of the original Details magazine, which started that same year and covered the same general turf, but with a glossier approach.
Within five years, however, Mr. Abrams had folded the paper, wearied by the grind, the soaring real estate values that were pushing out the hungry young artists, and the lack of revenue for the paper, which even in good times only had enough money to pay a few staff members, Mr. Fournier said.
Mr. Abrams is survived by his brother, Lawrence; his sisters, Debbie King and Bethany Haye; and his partner, Angela Sloan.
Following the demise of the Eye, Mr. Abrams poured his energies into his club, his documentary and, in later years, a business importing religious products from Mexico. For decades, the legacy of the Eye was largely kept alive in the yellowing copies that Mr. Abrams kept in a storage locker in Queens. That changed in November, when the New York Public Library added those 72 issues to its archive, the culmination of a long campaign by Mr. Abrams and Mr. Fournier.
In an article in The New Yorker in February about the library’s acquisition, Mr. Abrams, unassuming in most circumstances, allowed himself a rare moment of self-approbation.
“I had a nose for news,” he said, “and the news I had a nose for was 10 years ahead.”
