Word: soho
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...