Once it was Greenwich Village. Then it was Chelsea, Coenties Slip and the Bowery. Now the place to be, if you are a young New York artist with nowhere to go but up, is the city’s newest bohemia: a dingy, littered area of 19th century factory buildings called SoHo (because it is south of Houston Street). Before the ’60s, few outsiders braved SoHo’s trash and traffic except architecture buffs, who admired the area’s Italianate cast-iron facades. But for some 2,000 to 3,000 artists today, the neighborhood has become a last refuge from the high rents, cramped spaces and commercial pressures uptown.
Last weekend almost 100 SoHo artists opened their studios to the public in a festival designed to muster recognition and support. The party was somewhat subdued out of sympathy for the antiwar demonstrations in Washington. Some artists left town to join the protesters; others hung out black crape along with festive streamers; and Dancer Yvonne Rainer led a solemn death march through the streets. Nevertheless, thousands of visitors trudged up and down endless flights of stairs to see paintings, sprayed-water “street sculptures,” light shows and dramatic performances that ranged from the inspired to the inane. Above all, they saw evidence of the hard work and ingenuity that have transformed 40 blocks of bleak, empty spaces into home, work space and playground all in one.
Splintery Stairs. SoHo’s smaller lofts (2,100 to 2,500 sq. ft.) are just right for artists doing large-scale works in new industrial materials. And the continuing presence of workmen and small manufacturers encourages a rewarding combination of art and industry. Says Jewelry Maker Gale Picard: “The machinist across the street comes over to give us advice. The neighborhood carpenters and mechanics are all very helpful in working out artistic problems.”
Galleries first came to SoHo two years ago when Paula Cooper opened her cosy aerie up three flights of creaky, splintery stairs. More recent arrivals include Max Hutchinson, a peripatetic Australian; Reese Palley, an Atlantic City Boardwalk porcelain salesman; and smooth-talking, Brooklyn-born Ivan Karp. Uptown dealer Richard Feigen maintains a downtown branch in SoHo, and two more uptown power houses—Castelli and Emmerich—recently announced plans to open outlets in the neighborhood.
Dealers come to SoHo for the same reasons artists do: modest rents and immodest space. But not all SoHo artists welcome them. “They’re going after the market and going in for the whole promotional thing,” says one. Others fear that galleries will touch off a cancerous growth of boutiques, coffee bars and hot-dog stands, turning SoHo into a honky-tonk tourist trap.
Another more pressing danger is eviction or demolition, or both. SoHo lofts are not zoned for residential use, but as long as health and safety standards are observed, the city tends to look the other way. Manhattan’s inflated land values, however, make this last frontier of bohemia increasingly attractive to housing developers. If a rezoned SoHo, like Greenwich Village, starts sprouting high-rent, high-rise apartment buildings named for Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Cézanne, the artists who pioneered it will be the first ones forced to leave.
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