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 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 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 , 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. ) 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 , 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 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 ’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. Miller visited the painter Beauford Delaney one to reside—not just work—in districts not official- Sometime around 1969 I first heard the epithet evening in the early 1940s at 181 Greene Street, ly zoned for residential use. The city agreed that SoHo to define an area South of Houston St., he found “streets which seem commemorated to no more than two artists could live in such a the capital H meant crucially to distinguish this the pangs and frustrations of the artist; having building and that their presence would be Manhattan neighborhood from London’s Soho, nothing to do with art. Shunned by all living as announced on the front of the building with a which was (and is) a neighborhood of social soon as the work of day is done, they are invest- sign six inches square with large letters declaring venues and small apartments resembling New ed with the sinister shadows of crime and with “A.I.R.” for “artist in residence” and identifying York’s Greenwich Village. prowling alley cats which thrive on the garbage the residential floors with numerals. The and ordure that litter the gutters and pave- assumption was that the A.I.R. signs would alert II ments.” Once inside Delaney’s top floor studio, firemen arriving on the scene to rescue the resi- Miller was overwhelmed by chill, even at the dents first. The buildings designated at the time “SoHo barely existed when I moved there in ’67. beginning of the fall: “In a few moments, the fire for partial artist residency were largely in the There were maybe 10 people living between died out—-and remained dead for the rest of the West Village, the Lower East Side, the , Canal and Houston Streets. I first lived down on evening. In about 20 minutes the floor became and further uptown in Chelsea/Clinton (west 20s Greene between Canal and Grand. Then, icy cold, the dead cold of cold storage in which and 30s) and Murray Hill (east 30s). “The artists around ’69, I moved to a building where the cadavers are preserved in the morgue. We sat in themselves did not enroll en masse, partly restaurant Jerry’s is now. During the week there our overcoats, collars turned up, hats pulled because they could not afford the improvements were trucks, rats, and rags, garbage trucks, down over our ears, our hands stuffed deep in required to gain legal residential status for their because it was part of the carting area, so rats our pockets.” lofts,” notes James R. Hudson. “The artists’ reluc- were just running everywhere. And the streets I once imagined that well-lit second floors tance to participate in a program designed for were filled with bales of rags and stuff like that.” would give artists a good deal of natural light, but their benefit and protection certainly made pub- —Chuck Close, “5000 Artists Return to Pat Pasloff, a veteran painter who came of age lic officials question their willingness to be Artists Space: 25 Years” (1998) after Word War II, recently assured me that any responsible citizens, to meet acceptable stan- space that could be rented for retail would have dards of conduct as loft tenants. Artists, after all, Prior to SoHo, many ambitious artists preferred been too expensive for emerging artists. Instead, were [thought to be] a rather unstable lot at best, to live in “artist colonies,” as they were called, artists worked in the floors yet above, customarily with little capital or other power to rebuild an where a dozen or more artists, customarily col- around 1,000 square feet, with rents under $100 urban area.” leagues already, purchased empty land and con- per month, often adding wood or coal stoves, or Compared to other Manhattan neighbor- structed studios. Other purposeful artists kerosene heaters to keep themselves warm at hoods, SoHo appeared less conducive to habita- settled in sparsely populated retreats, such as night. Even if the space was not zoned for legal tion: the cast-iron buildings were too big, the Fire Island, Provincetown, or Woodstock, estab- residence, the artist could spend the night surrep- spaces too large and too industrial, for individual lishing in those communities a culture more titiously. The rules allowed a shower, but not a artist’s studios. As the buildings were individually sympathetic to art and artists than could be bathtub; a hotplate, but not a stove; and anything constructed, often in disregard of those beside found elsewhere in America. These colonies dif- resembling a bed needed to be hidden away if a them, little in SoHo resembled the uniformity of, fer crucially from bohemia, which are usually city building inspector knocked. say, a row of residential brownstones. Indeed, within an urban setting, hospitable to counter- Many of these downtown artists were exhibit- while my co-op building has eight stories with bourgeois living. Political radicals, often promi- ing in their own neighborhood—in a model dupli- roughly 7000 square feet on each floor, as does nent in bohemia, are scarce in artists’ colonies. cated decades later in SoHo. Harold Rosenberg, another resembling mine two buildings away, the Within New York City, artists tended to cre- whose enthusiasm for his neighbors’ best work structure between us has only three stories with ate sympathetic pockets mostly in lower Man- was hugely influential, resided only a few blocks roughly 2000 square feet apiece. SoHo had no hattan. For nearly a century beginning in 1858, away on Tenth Street between Second and Third grocery stores, no dry cleaners, no schools, no a building at 51 West 10th Street offered 25 stu- Avenues. Nearby was both the Cedar Street Tav- pharmacies, no libraries, no churches, and no syn- dios, ranging in size from 300 to 600 square feet ern, where artists liked to talk and drink (and agogues. The only “restaurants” were pizza par- each, and a communal gallery that was very use- often fight, as some recall), and the Whitney lors and workers’ luncheonettes that closed ful not only for displaying but selling. Among Museum, then located on West Eighth Street, before sundown. The neighborhood was a 100-

2003 PROVINCETOWN ARTS__55 acre desert. “When artists moved into SoHo and heat. To a landlord owning a problematic quote the application, could obtain a “variance” loft spaces, few if any of those responsible for building, perhaps with building department to reside in the A.I.R. buildings. Approximately ‘saving the city’ recognized that their individu- violations or a leaky roof, this arrangement 3,500 people received certification. al efforts could significantly change land-use gave the landlord modest income while retain- Limiting SoHo’s industrial buildings to patterns,” notes James R. Hudson. “The entire ing ownership. Two strategic assumptions wholesalers or light manufacturers, who were ideology of 1950s urban renewal was based on were that the artists, “good with their hands,” scarce, and artists, who were more plentiful, large-scale development. [Individuals’] illegal knew how to make such spaces inhabitable the City had made SoHo spaces artificially conversion of lofts did not have any place on and that the landlord could confiscate much- cheap exclusively to artists. Inadvertently it the agenda.” improved space once the lease ended. created the conditions for an artist colony Because the neighborhood was regarded as A few pioneering artists moved into these whose setting was urban, not rural, with decaying, newer entrepreneurs desiring newer buildings, notwithstanding M1-5 zoning buildings that were renovated, rather than premises or more acceptable addresses tended (light manufacturing) that made residence ille- built from scratch. to locate elsewhere in the city; turnover in gal. “Raw space” was the epithet for a loft with proto-SoHo was scarce. Workers came mostly cracked walls and ceilings, broken or leaky III from the tenement neighborhoods of the windows, an abundance of garbage, and Lower East Side. Some took a city bus that lumpy floors. “Renovation” was the name of By the early 1970s I had begun to visit SoHo even into the mid-1970s came across Prince the procedures necessary to make it usable, if art galleries. A painter friend invited me to Street only in the mornings and went back not livable. Under the discouraging surface, conclude our gallery tour one Saturday at a only in the afternoons across Spring Street to some artists envisioned larger workspaces and tavern on the corner of Prince and Mercer Delancy Street and the East River, essentially hardwood floors more sturdy than those Streets called Fanelli’s that had photographs duplicating the earlier horse and battery trol- around East Tenth Street; others appreciated of boxers on its walls. Jonas Mekas opened the leys. Another factor keeping prices low was the existence of elevators, even if their opera- Anthology Film Archives in the ground floor the threat of a proposed Lower Manhattan tors kept workday hours. Arguments were of 80 Wooster Street, and the theater artist Expressway. Owners of SoHo buildings feared made that artists were “light manufacturers” Richard Foreman used this space for several T they might be insufficiently compensated and that they were living in “the back of the weeks to present one of his plays. I remember when their properties were demolished, much store.” The definition of an artist was expand- observing a stream of men, usually in pairs, R as the owners of industrial real estate in the ed to include those involved with theater or going down Wooster Street to the Gay Activist South Bronx were ripped off only a few years dance, but excluding professions that normal-

A Alliance Firehouse. Larry Qualls, later my co- before when construction of the Bruckner ly use work for hire and performed work in an op partner, remembered it later as the first gay Expressway destroyed their neighborhoods. office-like setting. Writers were also excluded. dance hall and meeting place that was not One element rescuing SoHo-to-be from the Likewise turned away were actors, who weren’t, connected to a university, a gangster-con- O lower Manhattan wrecking machine was the say, directors or stage designers as well. trolled tavern, or a church. In addition to

T “Rapkin Study” prepared in 1962 by Chester Partly to protect the light manufacturing offering dances, the Firehouse had on its Rapkin, then New York City’s Commissioner businesses, the city ruled that lofts with more upper floor offices and classrooms. Wherever N of Planning. A professor at Columbia Univer- than 3,500 square feet or less than 1,200 square artists went in America, homosexuals often I sity, he had recently co-authored a book on res- feet were not available for individual artists. followed, both desiring some distance, if only idential renewal. In the report, officially titled Likewise unavailable for residency were those a few blocks, from the straight-laced world. The South Houston Industrial Area, he noted located on the “Broadway corridor” between A few years before, I heard of George Maciu- S that the number of business establishments in Houston and Canal Street, which were meant to nas, the originator of an American artist group the area had declined from 651 in 1962 to 459 be reserved for manufacturers (and later for called Fluxus. In addition, he was purchasing E in 1963, and the number of employees from favored retailers and the small high-tech corpo- buildings that artists divided among them-

V 12,671 to 8,394. Nonetheless, Rapkin advised rations that by the 1990s gave this stretch of selves in a kind of cooperative venture. Some of

I the city not to destroy the “Renaissance-style” Broadway a new identity as “Silicon Alley”). those involved with Maciunas’s first co-op at 80 buildings that, though visibly dingy, employed After the early 1970s, the area from the west side Wooster, called Fluxhouse Cooperative II, paid L people in garment, rag, and hat industries that of Mercer Street to the east side of West Broad- less then $10,000 for an entire floor of 4,000 were important sources of tax revenues. When way (and also north of Broome) acquired a square feet; once renovated and securely occu- Rapkin died in 2001, obituaries credited him slightly different zoning from the areas east of pied, its value escalated over the years to several with coining the epithet SoHo in this report, Mercer Street (to Lafayette Street) and south of million dollars. Half-floors went for less than although others have likewise been credited Broome Street (to Canal Street). Whereas the $5000. In retrospect, Maciunas became one of with the christening. former was M1-5a, the latter was M1-5b. The the crucial people who made artists’ SoHo pos- Landlords unable to sell were relieved to difference in the last letter was crucial. Whereas sible. have tenants of any sort for empty spaces, retail spaces could occupy the ground floors in Another crucial figure was a commercial often at rents that now seem ridiculously northwest SoHo, as could bars and restaurants, real-estate agent named Jack Klein who per- cheap, with leases extending as long as 10 ground floors in the other parts of SoHo were suaded the neighborhood landlords, bur- years, some of them cynically assuming that reserved for light manufacturing and wholesale dened with empty loft spaces, to rent to artists residing illegally could be easily evicted. outlets. The fact that many galleries and restau- artists. Two other major early movers were In that last assumption they were wrong. rants nonetheless opened to streets designated Paula Cooper and . The former, a Prospective renters could get space that was M1-5b reflected either an outlaw mentality or strikingly handsome woman then about 30, either “raw” or renovated to various degrees. the successful efforts of a pricey lawyer. Even as established in 1968 a gallery in a second-floor For the latter, the new renter customarily need- late as 2002, a savings bank purportedly in New space on Prince Street. Previously, she had ed to pay a fixture fee, as it was called, often York City refused to give me a residential co-op managed an artist cooperative gallery north of amounting to thousands of dollars, especially home loan on the grounds that SoHo is still Houston Street. Karp, a frustrated novelist if assuming a previous lease. One common zoned for light manufacturing. As indeed it is, who had previously worked with the promi- proposal around 1975 was called a “net lease” residential neighbors all around me notwith- nent art dealer Leo Castelli at the latter’s for five or 10 years; this differed from the cus- standing. An Artist Certification Committee gallery in the ’70s on the Upper East Side, tomary rentals in making tenants fully respon- created by the city stipulated that only appli- took the more audacious step of putting his sible for everything except the mortgage, cants who could explain why their work O.K. Harris gallery on the street level of West including maintenance, insurance, repairs, “demands a large space for its creation,” to Broadway, the neighborhood’s widest thor-

56__PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2003 oughfare. Soon afterwards, Cooper opened a whichever floor demanded it. The person on that books, I made some visual art. When my own ground-floor space on the northern tip of latter floor would then first take the previous application was questioned, I could offer slides Wooster Street. Although working independent- user back to his or her former floor before pro- and a history of exhibitions, earning official ly, Karp and Cooper together demonstrated that ceeding to his destination. If one tenant needed permission. In 1985 my cover was blown when new art could not only be exhibited but, more the elevator continuously, say for moving stuff in my apartment was featured on the front page of crucially, sold in this newly credible neighbor- or out, he or she was responsible for responding the Thursday Home section of the New York hood. None of these developments—renting, to everyone else’s bells, no matter where he or she Times under the heading, “Living with Too purchasing, exhibiting, selling—would have was in their activity. People waiting downstairs Many Books.” I feared that my variance might been obvious in this neighborhood only a few would necessarily wait on the street. be revoked. Fortunately, it wasn’t, perhaps years before. Cooper and Karp also established What seemed a huge nuisance to outsiders because few of my SoHo neighbors read the less formal styles of office attire than their was acceptable to young residents of such build- Times or any other uptown papers. uptown colleagues, who tended to dress like ings. Some of these freight elevators opened People living near a thriving bakery smelled morticians. directly onto the street, without even a lobby in every night too much sweet-tooth stimulus. If Houston Street was the northern bound- between, better to facilitate moving heavy stuff Their neighbor Lucy Lippard wrote at the time ary of the new neighborhood, Canal Street was into an industrial building. Even now, I’m still in a description of her typical day: “12 P.M.-3 its southern end, with dense traffic flowing surprised by an elevator that lacks any lobby. A.M.: Wake several times to tune of screeching toward the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey. Once a building with an archaic elevator was wheels, sirens, calls on the street. The bakery Canal Street had a wealth of retailers with the cooped, one of the first major expenses was workers who load pies all night holler to each lowest prices in town for, say, stationery, installing an “automatic” cab that could be sum- other at the gleeful top of their lungs, crashing motors, plastic displays, used office furniture, moned to an upper floor by pressing a button on metal carts into each other. At three comes the art supplies. and Lafayette that floor. In buildings lacking elevators, the stair- garbage truck, louder and louder. We both wake Street were natural boundaries on the west and ways were invariably rickety, their steps uneven in every night at this hour, tussle with the blankets east, because in each case the neighborhood on height and not parallel to each other, which is to and each other’s bodies, curl up right, drift back the other side of it was predominantly residen- say slanted, often to bothersome degrees. to sleep as the noise slowly subsides down the tial with an abundance of small apartments. Picking not only furniture but art materials block.” To avoid interruptions, I put my bed- One factor initially making SoHo safe at night, off the street was a neighborhood game. Once I room in the back of my loft, overlooking an even to women walking alone in the evening, moved to SoHo, I found many of my bookcases alley, exchanging sunlight for quiet. When sell- was its location between Little Italy and a most- on Friday evenings, which has been the designat- ing my loft after nearly three decades, I adver- ly Italian-American turf; New York street thugs ed time for putting out larger trash in my neigh- tised it as “The Quietest Loft in SoHo.” It was customarily avoid neighborhoods whose streets borhood. Almost every evening I could find skids and probably still is. are carefully watched. Once safe, it never to keep certain furniture off the floors and tubes SoHo resembled European cities such as became unsafe. Indeed, for reasons never entire- varying in length and thickness for mailing Berlin, where I lived in the early 1980s, in that its ly clear to me, attractive young women told me posters and other large-format papers. The the- streets were named in clusters reflecting a similar in the 1970s that the street harassment they ater artist Terry O’Reilly mentions seeing a film origin. Thus Goethestrasse was near Schiller- might suffer in midtown, say, rarely happened projector lying on the street with a card attached strasse, as well as other streets named after 19th- in SoHo. On the other hand, cars left on the reading, “It works,” to make sure an artist would century German writers. Likewise, Kantstrasse street overnight, again taking advantage of get it before the trashmen. crossed Leibnitzstrasse, both named after Ger- industrial parking hours, were frequently bro- Dumpsters along the sidewalks, necessary for man philosophers. SoHo was one of the few New ken into, I think because the absence of door- interior renovation, were also rich sources for York City places whose streets were named after men, along with the paucity of residents, meant materials that could be turned to artistic uses. American generals from the Revolutionary War: that few were watching the streets at 3 A.M. “Picking over the discards from businesses Lafayette, Crosby, Greene, Wooster, along with As industrial buildings didn’t have doorbells, an became a regular nocturnal activity for those liv- Thompson, Sullivan, and McDougal whose upstairs artist often installed a bell near the front ing in SoHo,” writes James R. Hudson. “There names grace streets to the west of SoHo. The cur- door and ran a wire outdoors directly into his loft. even developed a certain etiquette governing the rent exception, West Broadway, was originally However, since the resident lacked an electrical process of pawing through the discards. The first named Laurens Street after Henry Laurens (1724- connection to open the floor door, he or she had to rule was not to approach any trash containers 1792), a president of the Continental Congress. run downstairs to open the building’s front door while someone else was selecting objects. It was Any sophisticated Berliner could have figured or, more conveniently, throw a key customarily also de rigeur to put the trash back into the con- that a street named after General David Wooster inserted in a thick sock. Those residents lacking a tainers when one had finished making choices.” (1711-1777) must be near one named after the front-door bell told prospective visitors to shout Well into the ’70s the streets of SoHo were filled Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834). from the street. If not heard, they were advised to with piles of wood, metal, rubber, textiles, con- go to the nearest pay telephone to alert their host struction material. RICHARD KOSTELANETZ is the author or of their proximity. Then the host and his guests Because most of SoHo was zoned to “pro- editor of numerous books on avant-garde writ- had to decide whether they wanted to be responsi- tect” (favor) light manufacturing, artists prefer- ing, film, and music. This essay is adapted from ble for the manually operated freight elevator. The ring to sleep where they also worked were forced SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony, hazards seemed implicitly designed to scare off to resort to subterfuges. I saw with my own eye forthcoming from Routledge, Summer 2003. those who didn’t belong in SoHo, such as building lavatories with showers but no bathtubs, inspectors, process servers, or an artist’s parents. kitchens with electric hot plates but no gas Some of these elevators had modest motors stoves. Beds were folded away. To alleviate such activated by moving a handle across a kind of residential inconveniences, the City in the mid- bell-shaped fixture within the cab. Others, more ’70s began, as noted before, requiring artists delicately balanced, depended upon pulling on a needing space to obtain variances to live legally vertical rope that passed through the cab to an in the lofts where they also worked. Visual array of levers. Only those inside the elevator artists were encouraged to apply, along with could make it move. After-hours the residents playwrights and composers, on the grounds agreed that whoever last used the elevator to get that they too needed extra living/working space. to his or her floor would be responsible for Literary writers, such as myself mostly, could answering the next bell, taking the elevator to not qualify. Fortunately, as well as designing

2003 PROVINCETOWN ARTS__57