Yesterday Tamar, Damian and I went on a Big Onion Tour of Soho and Nolita. An Onion Tour peels the layers off the city I knew intimately for twenty-five years. A city that was home from one end to the other. To see Soho, once my home, from the eyes and mind of a young sociology graduate student was interesting.
Halfway through the tour, Tamar asked me if I learned anything new. I did. I learned about the cast-iron buildings, how they made them to look like stone, how they used cast iron because it was inexpensive and easy to erect. I learned about the early commerce and the brothels connected with commerce. And the fancy department stores that lined Broadway many years ago. But Tamar and I filled him in on what it really was like to be an artist family living in what was once a warehouse district and is now the expensive chi-chi neighborhood that has expelled the very people who made it appealing for residence. Yet I wouldn’t be in Nova Scotia now if it hadn’t been for that gentrification.
I never thought I would leave Manhattan. I first moved to 28th and 7th Avenue in 1960, from being a student at Yale School of Fine Arts, to a loft then owned by Alex Katz. He was teaching at Yale and sublet his loft to a couple of students (a friend and me) for the summer while he and his family went to Maine. (He had painted “No Soap, Radio” on the cast iron bathtub with claw feet that graced the kitchen and that slogan has become a favorite of mine when I don’t know what else to say.) From there I moved to 11th and Avenue C, and then to Chambers and Greenwich, and then to Washington, D.C. (for a year) where Tamar was born.
We (I was married at the time) moved (in 1962) when Tamar was six months old to Church and Franklin (now an area called Tribeca—these little names picked by realtors, we were told by our guide, to make the areas seem more seductive). It was a neighborhood unfamiliar with strollers and many times we had to avoid the freight trucks crowding the streets. It was scary. It was lonely. There were probably about one building per block occupied with artists, some well-known, some not so, but mostly all working in their living spaces. At that time we paid a $900 fixture fee (for the fixtures that the previous tenant had put in to make it living-studio quarters and our rent was $80 a month. We had to hide the bed by day in case inspectors came but I couldn’t hide the crib. It was in the middle of my studio. The poet Diane Waldman and the sculptor Robert Morris lived below us. That loft was a third-floor walkup, close to China Town and we often had sticky buns for meals. Wild rabbit was also easily available and inexpensive. Not considered a delicacy then. I made rabbit stew often.
From there we moved to the seventh floor of an elevator building on 11th between University and Broadway. When we moved in, there was nothing. Just some broken toilet fixtures. We plastered and painted and divided the room into kitchen area, living area, bedroom for Tamar, and studio for me. We left there when Tamar was around three. I longed for a place where there was a grocery store nearby and someone took out the garbage (in lofts in those days there was no garbage pickup—we had to covertly take the bags out at night and hope not to be caught dumping trash into public baskets) and brought the mail to our door. So we went to a large apartment on the Upper West Side, an area where many other artists lived and worked.
When I left my marriage, I moved with my two children, two cats, two fish tanks, and many art supplies to a sublet on 13th between First and A (a loft which had been the studio space of Claus Oldenburg and some of the sewing supplies were still there). We lived below the artist, Larry Rivers. There was no insulation between the floors, just bare wood planks that were both ceiling to us and floor to him. He’d come in at 4 am with friends. It sounded like a herd of cowboys walking on top of us. So I would get back at him by playing children’s records in the morning.
After a year there, we moved to a newly coop building at Spring and Mercer. Another sublet (from the owner), but I had to put in all the fixtures. Once again, it was a bare loft with just a toilet and sink. First I had built a kitchen and two bedrooms for the children. Eventually another one for me. Although I didn’t have great studio space there (it was only 1800 square feet, the size of my current house, but not well laid out for living and working) and it was dark, we enjoyed living there. Some of my favorite friends still live in that building. When the owner decided to sell, I took my fixture fee and moved with three cats, a dog, two children, no fish tanks and lots of art supplies to Broome and Greene.
That loft was already fixed up somewhat. I put in a couple more bedrooms and a better kitchen. It was 3000 square feet, top floor with skylights and divided into two studio spaces. I rented out one of them. It had a little elevator that serviced only our loft, the top floor. It was operated by pulleys (we pulled; it moved) and held no more than three people and a dog at one time. When the building became coop after a couple of years, we had to have the little elevator upgraded to be according to code. In the process there was an electrical fire. Because the building had originally been factories, there was a sprinkler system and so it was discharged and the building was saved. I stood on the other side of Broome Street with my dog Miranda and watched the firemen put out the fire. It was a very strange feeling.
Back in the early seventies, when lofts were first becoming popular residences, it was possible to buy a coop space, probably around 2500 square feet, for about $6000. They now sell in the millions. I was able to buy my loft for very little which is how I eventually was able to leave the City and move to Nova Scotia. I was always enchanted by the lines in the movie My Dinner with Andre when his friend Wally says (more or less): “Have you ever met a New Yorker who didn’t say they want to leave but don’t? New York is a concentration camp of the mind. It’s impossible to leave.”
But I did. Not a move that was planned for long. It just happened. And That is Another Story for Another Time.