Art: The Last Studios

If America has an art capital, it may well be an unlikely-looking area of Manhattan called SoHo, a place of grimy warehouses and zigzagging fire escapes, delivery trucks and wholesale machine shops. Its dark and sullen buildings are filled with lofts that house the heaviest concentration of art activity in the country.

SoHo is an abbreviation of the city planning commission’s original title for the place—”South Houston Industrial District.” Its exact boundaries are uncertain, but it can be said to be bordered on the north and south by Houston and Canal streets, and by the Bowery and West Broadway to the east and west. In these 50-odd blocks, a large proportion of New York artists, some 700 of them, with their families, now live and work.

The artists’ move there was their answer to a perennial question: “Where can I work in Manhattan?” Giant scale is still built into American art, and that entails large work space. Traditionally, artists seek out a district where space is cheap and plentiful, like the Greenwich Village brownstones four decades ago. Then a price spiral begins with the arrival of uptown people seeking a chic downtown pad. Rent up, artists out; the drift begins again. New Yorkers, being neurotically fashion-addicted, not only use artists as their Seeing-Eye dogs but promptly usurp their kennels.

In the early 19th century, SoHo was New York’s brothel area. After the Civil War, most of the district was razed. Warehouses were built. By happy circumstance, it was just when New York architects were discovering the possibilities of cast iron in a facade. Today the buildings are cavernous and filthy, half-empty, with successive impastos of paint flaking from their arched windows and delicate, rusting Corinthian capitals. But SoHo is a kind of museum of the style, containing some of the best buildings that were made within that idiom anywhere in the 19th century—strong-boned, forthright in detail, free of pomp and fuss.

Until 1960, when a few artists began to move into its lofts, SoHo was entirely given to light industry —twine manufacturers, nut-and-bolt shops, metal platers, rag wholesalers, lumberyards and dealers in new and used cardboard boxes. The floor rent was low; ten years ago, 3,500 sq. ft. cost $75 a month. But because SoHo was strictly zoned for light industry, nobody could legally live there.

Out of the Tureen. Yet artists managed to, at first by subterfuge. A sculptor might rent a loft for $100 or less a month, clean it out and install a folding bed that could disappear against the wall if a building inspector called. He had no security of tenure. The typical habit of SoHo slumlords, which persists today, was to offer no lease, wait for the artist to spend a few thousand dollars renovating the loft, and then arbitrarily double the rent. The pattern of exploitation worked because artists had nowhere else to go. There was no space uptown. Greenwich Village was already turning into the Skag Alley it now is, a tureen of thieving junkies and grimy plastic bars among the too-expensive brownstones. The East Village, with its tiny roach-filled apartments and manic adolescents shooting speed in the air shaft, was a dismal alternative. As for Brooklyn or Queens, one artist remarked: “You might as well work in Iowa.”

From Flophouse to Gallery. For New York’s better-heeled artists, the reaction was straightforward: buy a SoHo building outright, or convert it into a coop. A pioneer of that gambit was Louise Nevelson, who purchased a vacant five-story sanitarium on Spring Street and turned it into a succession of mysterious caves lined with her black, white, gold and Plexiglas constructions. Roy Lichtenstein acquired one vast floor of a bankrupt bank on the Bowery (other floors were taken by Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman). Kenneth Noland bought a storage building; Robert Rauschenberg, a flophouse-cum-church on Lafayette Street. The first artists’ coop was set up in 1967 at 80 Wooster Street; by 1968, there were 15 such buildings, and there are at least 28 now. Today, a loft building that would have gone for $30,000 in 1960 is likely to carry a price tag of $250,000.

By 1969, SoHo was beginning to stimulate a political cleavage in the art world. Artists, fed up with seeing their work presented, if at all, as a luxury item at 50% commission on Madison Avenue, were talking of short-circuiting the dealer system entirely and selling work out of their own lofts. Meanwhile, the prodigious overhead of running an uptown exhibition space made it economically difficult for dealers to show new or unfamiliar art in the fading years of the ’60s boom. Opening a branch in SoHo became a necessary gamble. Paula Cooper, the first gallery owner to try it, was watched and eventually followed by Establishment figures like Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, Ivan Karp and Andre Emmerich.

This flurry of activity is fine for the art-loving ladies who now pick their way in mink coats on guided benefit studio tours among the truck-clogged streets and echoing lofts of SoHo. But it has done little for the artists and the small industries that really need space there. Rumbles have been heard from the city planning commission.

Compromise Tenancy. Noting that SoHo was zoned for light manufacture, the CPC took the view that since no small business there can realistically afford the present rents, the artists were driving manufacturers out and thus endangering the jobs of at least 20,000 unskilled, predominantly black and Puerto Rican workers. Massive evictions of artists seemed sure to come, since they were all illegal tenants. A committee named the SoHo Artists’ Association was formed with a twofold aim: 1) to have artists officially reclassified as “light industry,” and 2) to persuade the CPC that artists need to live where they work. There was no real conflict over space, the SoHo Artists’ Association contended: most painters and sculptors live in lofts too small for industrial use, and these had been vacant when they moved in.

After much negotiation, the planning commission, prodded by Mayor John Lindsay, came to a compromise agreement last January. It legalized the residential use of about 1,000 lofts in SoHo, provided the lofts were less than 3,600 sq. ft. in area. “Simply legalizing artists’ tenancy in the area,” the commission felt, “would drive up rents and force industry out, with the consequent loss of jobs.” The CPC set up a certification committee to decide who is, and who is not, an artist. The committee has been the butt of much criticism, particularly from artists who are not involved with the SoHo Artists’ Association. Says Sculptor Don Judd, who owns an iron-front warehouse on Spring Street: “It is a threat, at least an insult, though possibly harmless since its operations seem unenforceable. Legalization won’t mean much. You can’t turn an area into an occupational ghetto. You can’t say who is and isn’t an artist. You can’t throw citizens out. And none of this does anything about the problem of rising rents.”

No Rip-Offs. If there is one constant theme when artists talk about SoHo, it is simply that they want to be left alone. It is one of the few remaining areas of Manhattan where there is a real symbiosis between groups and occupations. Everything that is needed to outfit a studio, do up a loft or make an electronic sculpture lies within a few blocks, among the tool-rental businesses of Greene Street, the lumberyards of Spring and Wooster, the hardware stores on West Broadway, and the bazaars of secondhand circuitry, gadgets and plastics that line Canal Street. It would be easy, and foolish, to sentimentalize SoHo into a kind of American Montparnasse, full of jolly creative gnomes secreting art and sharing the chili. The fact is that life there is, in general, considerably more agreeable than in Greenwich Village. Paradoxically, this is because SoHo is not officially residential. The very lack of amenities, like child-care centers, nursery schools and parks, has promoted a spirit of cooperation among its denizens, a spirit that began leaking from the Village long ago. The rate of street crime is very low—because, some artists maintain, the district overlaps into Little Italy, and the Mafia does not like petty rip-offs in its own backyard.

Privacy and Meatballs. But the main virtue is simply the extreme, and now imperiled privacy. When the warehouses close at 6 p.m. and the steel doors clang, the streets go dead. There are no decent restaurants between Houston and the trattorie of Grand Street, five blocks south; the only artists’ watering place is Fanelli’s, reputedly the oldest continuously operating bar in New York. It has been dispensing draft beer and meatballs to the warehouse workers since the 1870s. It shuts on the stroke of 9, leaving Prince Street (on Saturday nights) to the beery wassailing of the Daughters of Bilitis, a militant lesbian organization quartered in a loft near by. There are no boutiques, no sleazy head shops hustling Moroccan love beads made in Jersey City to tourists from Duluth, no taxis, no clubs. For the casual visitor, the most baffling thing about the loft district is that it does not have a “scene” at all; nothing apparently exists behind its nobly looming iron facades except art and cotton waste. But what disappoints the tourist delights the resident artist as he sits on his fire escape in the evening, five floors up, smoking grass and listening to Dylan. For SoHo is nothing like the traditional fantasy of bohemia. It is irreplaceable, one of the few areas of New York that is neither a slum nor a spectacle.