Leonard Abrams, the founder of the East Village Eye, a community newspaper dripping with attitude that captured in newsprint the do-it-yourself post-punk ethos that ignited the explosion of groundbreaking art, music and fashion in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, died on April 1 in New Jersey. The cause was a heart attack at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike on his way home from a business trip, said Arthur Fournier, a close friend and longtime colleague. The Eye, a monthly publication that Mr. Abrams published and edited from 1979 to 1987, scarcely made a dent above 14th Street in Manhattan — to many the traditional dividing line of “downtown.” But to those who lived a short stroll from Tompkins Square Park, it functioned as a house organ for the graffiti artists, New Wave (and No Wave) bands and maverick fashion designers who came together in the 1980s to create one of New York’s storied cultural flowerings. “There were performances, there was art, there was rock ‘n’ roll, and people were just showing up and meeting each other,” Mr. Abrams recalled in a 2005 interview with the website Gothamist. “These people who would work together, party together, have sex or maybe be at each other’s throats were all just getting together and forming the East Village scene.”

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