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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.