My Salad Days in a NYC Rent Stabilized Loft
Life at 85 South Street with Cindy Sherman and Kathy Bigelow as neighbors
SOUTH STREET
November, 1978, I got lucky and found a loft at South Street which would be my rent-stabilized home for the next 30 years. It allowed me to live in a low-income lifestyle as a freelance photo journalist, traveling across the US for my book, We the Homeless; Portraits of America’s Displaced People; living almost a year with the cliff-dwelling Dogon in Mali on a Fulbright for my next book, “Dogon; Africa’s People of the Cliff”; photographing for three months on a UNICEF assignment documenting the effect of apartheid on the children of Southern Africa and more.
But I could only take these meaningful but low paying assignments because of my cheap rent. I was lucky. I felt no need to flee NYC for greener and more affordable pastures, even when the “Money Men”- hedge funders, bankers and leveraged buy-out pros - took over the City. Hurray for rent stabilization.
My third-floor loft faced the East River with a view that was partially obstructed by the Eastside Drive. Since it had only four front windows it grew progressively darker the deeper back one ventured. My bookshelves sagged with books I bought at the nearby Strand Bookstore. A former tobacco warehouse from the days of tall ships, the loft reeked of days long gone, with heavy pine beams and brick walls. I could look across to a sliver of the East River from my windows. I held great parties there.
South Street was rough and tumble those days. My loft was just a few blocks down the street from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Fulton Fish Market. After working in my studio all day I would sometimes join friends at Carmine’s, a local Mafia dive on Front Street frequented by fish market vendors.
Neighbor Cindy Sherman and “Untitled Film Stills”
The photographer Cindy Sherman lived down the hall from me and “worked at 85 South Street in New York City, where she created many of her early "Untitled Film Stills". This period was also when Robert Longo, another Pictures Generation artist, lived there and developed his "Men in the Cities" series.” ( Art Forum) We often passed in the hallway but Cindy hardly ever spoke to me or any other of her neighbors. Robert Longo would whiz past me wordlessly in our shared hallway while avoiding eye contact. His hair was greased back in an Elvis-like pompadour. He wore dark shades and was surrounded by his entourage.
Both were busy becoming famous.
Kathy Bigelow, who later became a Hollywood director, was then enrolled in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent-study program. She sometimes crashed on the floor of a a loft above Cindy Sherman our South Street building. We often chatted in the lobby or while sharing our building’s rickety old freight elevator. She was personable and lovely. “I remember walking all over Manhattan in my little Levi’s jacket and my jeans and cowboy boots, so excited, so happy to be there and, I suddenly realized, so cold. I went into a hardware store because I could no longer feel my legs,” she later told Time Magazine.
In 2008 Kathy became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director for directing the war drama The Hurt Locker. “Tribeca, SoHo — those concepts didn’t really exist in the early 1970s,” she says…”It was a great community that formed. We were constantly communicating to one another about what we were making and trying to challenge one another. In film you don’t find that. Like, I never see other directors.”
I found the loft by hanging out at a news-stand on Wednesday morning when The Village Voice first hit the streets. After thumbing through the classified section, and high-tailing it to South Street I scooped up my rental, pushing a deposit in my landlord’s hand. I got lucky. By then there were only two units left in the building.
In those early years most of us were involved with the arts one way or another. Mayor Koch’s support for stabilization laws for artists also helped us. ( Koch’s best legacy is perhaps the “pooper-scooper” law, which required people to pick up their dogs’ excrement. ) As the years progressed, we organized as tenants and thanks to organizational and leadership abilities of Meri Lobel, the head of our tenants association, we held meetings as we debated strategy to become rent stabilized. We hired Carol Ule, a brilliant and loyal lawyer, from Hartman, Rose, Ule and Ratner. We we were always late paying her. But she gave us a cut rate and listened patiently during our often long and meandering meetings.
Thanks to the new loft law, the initial residents of 85 South, including myself, now had affordable rents and were able to pursue artistic endeavors without having the challenge of paying a high rent. If I hadn’t had that affordable rent all those years, who knows, I might have become a titan of industry. LOL.
Early on, one bone-chilling Fall day, the fire department raided our building citing safety violations and kicked us out. The electricity and heat were turned off for a couple of weeks while our landlord put in sprinklers. We all snuck back and drew black curtains across our windows at night.
Our landlord was long-winded and wore a toupee that often hung crooked. He enjoyed a love-hate relationship with most of us. One day he was serving us wine and cheese on our building’s roof and the next he might try to evict someone. He liked hearing the stories of our adventures, watching the neighbor’s kids grow up, and was probably proud of supporting the arts. But his building was a financial disaster due to almost half of his tenants being rent stabilized.
I couldn’t blame him.
Take a look at this CNN slideshow on historic NYC lofts. My loft would have fit right right in.
I felt blessed living in this neighborhood where I walked past fish heads lying in puddles on the street on days the Fulton Fish Market was open. This is where the poet Hart Crane once lived and wrote his ode to the Brooklyn Bridge, my cathedral. I often stepped out late afternoon to the pier across the street to watch the light wrap around the bridge cables while walking Willy, a Cairn Terrier a neighbor had given me. It was so romantic. I even walked the cables of the bridge while taking photos for my show at The South Street Seaport, “Bridging New York” . The thick iron cables swayed as I placed my feet one in front of the other, grabbing with my knuckles whitening as I clutched onto the aging and wobbly twisted iron handrails.
I sometimes gave pot luck brunches on Sundays to which nobody every RSVP’ed. But then maybe 50 people arrived all at once. Often I ended up with eight dishes of tabouli that guests had brought. It was cheap.
I bartered my photo services for a membership in the New York Sailing Club at the Battery and became its “Photographer Emeritus”. This I was able to hop onto one of the Club’s J-24 sailboats to sail around the harbor or watch and photograph yacht races from the Club’s party barge, that was anchored in the lee of the Statue of Liberty, replete with a disco ball and bar,
Our building had good vibes. It was a community.
But all that changed after 911 when the World Trade Center collapsed just a few blocks away. On the second day after, I cooked in my South Street firehouse, Engine 4, Ladder 15 and flipped hamburgers and hot dogs the next night at the “Pit” at Ground Zero. My beloved firemen had lost 15 colleagues. For a while after 911, they would invite me to the firehouse to eat dinner and would honk their horn at me when they saw me passing on the street. During the six months following 911 the smell of decaying bodies wafted along South Street and through my loft’s leaky windows when the wind blew right.
Soon after, a new tenant, moved in above me and I could hear almost everything. One late night, he allegedly killed a neighbor while drunk while meeting another neighbor on the street. It’s said that my upstairs neighbor argued with Sean, a nice young man living with his sister in our building. Sean had just returned from work at a restaurant and was walking his dog. The alleged murderer’s dog was an aggressive Rottweiler who often lunged at Sean’s dog. That night they probably had words and my upstairs neighbor allegedly shoved Sean into a steam hole where Sean scalded to death.
That did it for me. The time had come. The arts were on the decline. Soho had been taken hostage by high end eateries and clothing stores. Many of my friends had already fled. Other than those lucky ones such as myself, rents were too high for artists to survive.
I decided it was time to move on. After living for 36 years at South Street, I ultimately took a buyout from the landlord and left NYC. I left behind an 1,800 square feet loft for which I was only paying $640/month. Carol Ule, my lawyer, who negotiated the buyout, warned that most artists taking a buyout ended up as nomads for at least seven years, trying out new places to live.
She was right.
But I’ve had a lot of wonderful adventures since leaving New York.