Artists' Soho

housing moved into the THE RISE OF large empty interior spaces that could be rented for as little as $100 per month through the 1940s into the Artists’ Soho 1960s. I first became aware of someone actually residing in the area when I was intro- duced on Canal Street to a Korean artist, Nam June BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Paik, who had just arrived in America. He rented a nearby “loft,” a word new to me at “Choosing a place to live has been for the the time, referring to the American artist a problem of the first order.” upper floors, customarily open spaces, of a factory or —Harold Rosenberg, warehouse. Already promi- “Tenth Street” (1954) nent in European avant- garde circles, Paik had come to New York to further his career. I later learned about such urban pioneers as Ali- T son Knowles, who, in the late I A century and one-half ago, this area below 1950s, had rented space in an industrial build- R Houston Street attracted wealthy New York- ing on Broadway just north of Canal Street, where she lived with her husband-to-be, Dick A ers, who patronized elegant stores and theaters HEN I CAME BACK to New on Broadway. “This was the Fifth Avenue of its Higgins, who decades later became my closest York City from college day,” according to one guidebook. In the wake professional colleague. The industrial supply in 1962, the area below of minstrel halls came gambling casinos and stores then on Canal Street seemed a long O Houston Street was an eventually brothels, especially on the side way, culturally, from my apartment on the T industrial slum that I streets. Walt Whitman wrote in 1857: “After edge of Harlem, down the hill from Columbia Wmight have walked through reluctantly on dark any man passing along Broadway, University, where I was a graduate student. So N the way from Greenwich Village to its north between Houston and Fulton streets, finds the did the cast-iron palaces that stood out from I or Chinatown to its east. Industrial debris lit- western sidewalks full of prostitutes, jaunting the smaller, shabbier, mostly older buildings tered streets that were clogged with trucks up and down here, by ones, twos, or three—on that were never more than a few stories high. during the working day but deserted at night. the look-out for customers.” From the Direc- By the time I relocated downtown, first to S Streets were not numbered, typical of most of tory of the Seraglios in New York comes this the East Village in 1966 (and incidentally Manhattan, but named: Mercer, Greene, entry for Miss Clara Gordon at 119 Mercer changed my cultural outlook from academic E Wooster, Crosby running from north/south; Street: “We cannot too highly recommend this to bohemian—from “uptown” to “down- V Prince, Spring, Broome, and Grand running house, the lady herself is a perfect Venus: beau- town”), I became aware of artists who had I from east/west. The rectangular blocks, tiful, entertaining, and supremely seductive. rented large open spaces in which they roughly observing a perpendicular grid, were Her aides-de-camp are really charming and worked and incidentally lived. Around the L far longer from north to south than from irresistible, and altogether honest and honor- corner from me on Second Avenue at that east to west. During the 1960s, city planners able. Miss G. is a great belle, and Southern time, Yoko Ono, later famous, had a loft repeatedly proposed a ten-lane Lower Man- merchants and planters patronize her man- briefly above a store. A young California hattan (a.k.a. Broome Street) Expressway that sion principally. She is highly accomplished, woman I knew that year, the daughter of a would link the East River bridges on the east skillful, and prudent, and sees [that] her visi- poet, had rented on Warren Street, yet further with the Holland Tunnel on the west. tors are well entertained.” The historian Timo- downtown, just west of City Hall, part of a In his book SoHo: The Artist in the City thy J. Gilfoyle in his classic about New York loft sloppily divided, as I recall, from another (1981) Charles R. Simpson writes, “In the City prostitution, City of Eros (1991), writes, woman who had already lived there for sever- 1700s, the land that is now the SoHo district “Directly behind the hotels and theaters on al years. I wish I could find my friend now, was largely a portion of the Bayard family farm, both sides of Broadway, Mercer, Greene, because I’d like to know how someone new to which stretched over hills and meadows from Wooster, and Crosby streets were known for New York at that time had made such an Canal Street up to Bleecker Street. During the their rich collection of brothels.” In the 1870s, unusual move. I visited Robert Rauschen- Revolutionary War period, wooden palisades according to Gilfoyle, Wooster Street had 27 berg’s on Broadway around 12th Street, were built across the Bayard farm, and two whorehouses while 52 were on Greene (not which was the loft center for a previous gen- forts were erected in 1776 on hills situated at even art galleries were as numerous a century eration of artists. In Calvin Tomkins’s classic the present site of Grand Street, marking the later.) Before long, these brothels moved fur- description, written in 1964: “The loft was northern defensible limits of the city. The war ther uptown. about a 100 feet long by 30 wide [or 3,000 left Nicholas Bayard, the farm’s owner, finan- Most of the cast-iron buildings that came square feet—a measure to keep in mind]. A cially devastated and he soon after was forced to mark the neighborhood for architectural row of supporting columns ran down the to mortgage 100 acres west of the unimproved historians were constructed between 1840 middle, but otherwise it was clear, unob- wagon road that was to become Broadway. and 1880, generally for use by the textile structed space. Tall, grimy windows let in the This tract of farm land, comprising most of industry. Once much of this textile industry distinctively white light of downtown New what became the SoHo district, was subse- succumbed to Southern and foreign competi- York—also the roar of trucks on Broadway. quently laid out in streets and sold in lots.” tion after World War II, printers and ware- [Within the space] stood a group of large 54__PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2003 objects—a car door, a window frame, a roof ven- the more prominent working and sometimes where some liked to exhibit because, unlike the tilator mounted on sheets—components of an living at this address were William Merrit Museum of Modern Art, it was exclusively devot- unfinished five-part sculpture. Chase, Frederic Church, and Winslow Homer. ed to American work. Many lofts in this area were “Paintings, combines, and sculptures from Nearby on Washington Square North, Edward torn down for “urban renewal” in 1961, which the recently concluded Jewish Museum retro- Hopper long had a studio. The writer Thomas marks the demise of the Abstract Expressionist spective were stacked against the wall farther Wolfe briefly shared a loft with his paramour, movement. Compared to what became SoHo, along. There was a big table in the middle of the the theater designer Aline Bernstein, at 13 East Tenth Street was a remarkably tiny scene. room, its surface cluttered with magazines, pic- Eighth Street. “The fourth floor had recently Around Coentes Slip, then on the lower East tures clipped from magazines, felt pens and served as a sweatshop, but it could easily be River south of Wall Street, several painters lived pencils, and tubes of paint and other materials. cleaned up, and those skylights, they were who a decade later became well known, including Toward the back of the room, a counter pro- ideal!” writes Ross Wetzteon. “So in January Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, Ellsworth jected from the end wall formed an alcove for 1926 they moved in, Tom insisting on sharing Kelly, Agnes Martin, and Fred Mitchell. A build- the refrigerator, the electric stove, and the bed— the $35-a-month rent.” Artists in 20th-century ing on Monroe Street on the far-eastern Lower a mattress lay on the floor. All the rest of the loft Paris, by contrast, tended to work in small but East Side offered cheap rents to the composer was workspace.” well-lit ateliers on the top floors of residential John Cage and the sculptor Richard Lippold, Walking south of Houston Street at the time buildings-—penthouses to some; attics to oth- among others. So did Chinatown, which was said I noticed in certain upper-story windows house- ers—-often residing in an apartment immedi- to be the immediate source of the gigantic laun- plants or interior lights shining into the night, ately below. These Parisian ateliers were dry bags Lee Bontecou incorporated into her both signifying that someone might be residing perceived to be so attractive that non-artists sculptures. there. However, the area between Houston and eventually wanted them as well, sometimes In the early 1960s, an informal group calling Canal Streets was still largely terra incognito. opening up the floor to create a living room itself the Artists Tenants Association petitioned Taxi drivers at the time customarily didn’t know twice the height of their bedrooms. the office of New York City’s mayor, Robert Wag- the names Wooster Street, Greene Street, or Mer- When The New York-born writer Henry ner, whose brother was an artist, for permission cer Street and had to be guided block by block.

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