by Adam Gopnik
Eventually, of course, that day came for Dick and me. It had to. The last trip he ever took—to San Francisco, to shoot people engaged in the 2004 presidential campaign, we shared. Although he was in first class and I was in coach—he still came back, as the flight attendants fluttered worriedly around like pigeons in a pigeon coop, to sit on the edge of my seat and show me the boards of his new spread, white-haired now but leaning over with the same avid eagerness as he had shown twenty years before. Never for one moment was I disillusioned by him—but over time I gained a sharper sense of the sources of the illusion. When we are befriended by magicians, they are not the less impressive when we know the way the tricks work. That gaffed deck that Sky Masterson’s father feared is all the more interesting when you know how it squirts cider.
So I came to understand that Dick’s capacity to charm was inseparable from his need to dominate and control—as, of course, my capacity to be charmed was inseparable from my need to have stories to tell, people to inhabit my life who could become characters within my writing. Even at the height of our friendship, when he asked me to write an essay for the catalogue of his museum exhibition, “characterize” him is what I did: I portrayed him as he was, an amazing original presence, walking the length of Fifth Avenue with an unnamed friend, me, full of schemes and strategies and plans. But by showing him so, I owned him a little, as, by choosing us, he owned a part of me.
He took it, I see now, in good spirit, but he was wounded by it, too. Wounded that it was his presence as much as his portraits that I chose to write about, and though I would have sworn on stacks of Bibles—or, in our case, on stacks of paperback Kafka and Billecart-Salmon champagne cartons, our equivalent—that it was meant as pure admiration, unalloyed love, I also see now that, as in any moment when we write about another, there was a power contest in it, too. I was asserting myself as a writer who could control his portrait, as he asserted himself as an aristocrat who could make mine. The moon keeps the boats swamped, but also creates the tides that let them voyage. You’re grateful to the tide for pushing you a little farther from the safe, familiar shore, even when you know, in the end, that the voyage out is one you’ll have to make under your own sail.
For the time being, back then, many things that had been building up and seemed unresolvable seemed to have been resolved by his company that summer: the need for a Blue Room, an inner space, with the wish for entry into the world; the possibility that the glamour of fashion lay in seeing past its frauds and making that discovery exuberant; the desire for worldliness and absolute commitment to work. Through his example, it began to seem possible to have a bigger room that kept the blueness. Contradictions were life, and life was leaping over them. Things were strange and beautiful. Their being strange didn’t make them less beautiful. The “poetry” of love we’d made so far wasn’t adequate to the plurality of life yet to be found. It seemed like enough wisdom to leave the Blue Room with.
8
SoHo, 1983
It remains the strangest and luckiest thing that has ever happened to us. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Martha spotted an ad in the real-estate pages of the Times: “Snny lft. lndmrk bldg. Reasonbl, No fxtr fee, No agnt.” On Tuesday, she went to take a look, mostly out of mordant curiosity about exactly where and what the catch was.
She called me later that morning at my little cubicle at GQ. It was lovely, she said, and for some reason the owner was inclined to rent it to Martha if she could meet her husband. Could I race downtown to be, well, seen? Mrs. Franz—as I’ll call her—who owned the building and lived there, was a landlady out of My Sister Eileen, a charming middle-aged woman with a heavy Middle European accent. What she showed us was just as described: a spacious, sunny loft in a landmark cast-iron building. The rent was very reasonable, and was “stabilized.” There was no fixture fee and no broker. Mrs. Franz invited us into her apartment for coffee and sweet rolls, and after asking us some weirdly unpointed questions (not “How long have you worked for your present employer?” but “Who is your favorite composer?”), she brought out a lease. We signed it, and then she double-kissed us and we kissed her back.
The staggeringly reasonable monthly rent I recall to this day. It was $832 for fifteen hundred square feet. Facing a red-brick wall, the loft didn’t have a view, but a well of light between buildings filled the place every day. There were three cast-iron Corinthian columns holding up a tin ceiling above a honey-colored hardwood floor.
To say that this was an unusual event in the history of Manhattan apartment hunting is not to begin to capture its improbability. No one found an apartment in the Times, and if you did, you didn’t get it, somebody’s friend or broker having raced in ahead of you. For a couple of months after we moved in, we walked around jumpy, waiting for the other shoe to drop—would Martha be impregnated by the Devil? If the deal had been offered, I think we would have thought it over, and then raised little Beelzebub happily enough, in exchange for the space—but it never was. One of our friends said that we must have won some kind of contest that the landlords of New York cynically allow one couple to win every few years, just so that people will stay in the game.
Overnight, really, we went from the condition of clerkship, crowded like Cratchits into our basement room, out into a real world with space and huge windows, and not just any real world—the world of art making and selling that until then we had been remotely witnessing and longing to inhabit. Nobody could figure it out, least of all us. We would have been just as likely, and, in a way, as lucky, to have ended up on the Upper West Side, or in Chelsea, neighborhoods we would have taken in a second for even a bit more space and light. It wasn’t fate that brought us to SoHo at its height as an art world village. It was just chance. But it had the look of purpose, and I suppose chance that has the look of purpose is exactly what we mean by fate.
The SoHo we moved to in 1983 was still a village, a village of art. The cobblestone streets and cast-iron buildings and loading docks were all lined with galleries. There were art supply dealers there, too, some witting, some not—there was still a working lumberyard on Spring Street, Pearl Paint on Canal, bulk sellers of plastic, metal, and discontinued hardware on Canal Street as well. The sense of art in process, being made—canvases arriving, and sculpture being anchored—was still evident. There were also old-fashioned, nineteenth-century-style businesses in SoHo. The ground floor of our building was occupied by a ship chandler’s, a supply depot for ships. The sides of most cast-iron buildings were palimpsests of advertising for the original function, which was still legible. The side of ours read CHOCOLATE COVERED CANDY.
For the people who had settled SoHo a decade earlier, in the early seventies, the real SoHo was already deep into its decline—even unrecognizable. The very first SoHo, where a few brave art dealers, in flight from the impossible rents on Fifty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue, had set up shop was for them gone—and the artists that had followed there, who had lived without hot water or kitchens, pirating electricity, had either left or else acquired all those comforts. Clothing boutiques, a newsstand, two bookstores, and a few restaurants and other appurtenances of a normal New York neighborhood were beginning to settle in place, with more arriving every month. The people who had settled SoHo in 1969 claimed not to be able to recognize it in 1980. They were already writing stories about its ruin, even as they sublet their lofts to the new arrivals, making money while they mourned.
But to less discerning—or more spoiled, or perhaps simply less snobbish—eyes it was still intact. There was only one convenience grocery store, De Roma’s on West Broadway. Dean & DeLuca, the prototype of all chic and specially sourced modern “gourmet” grocers—had opened up in 1977 in its first dark premises on Prince Street. I say “opened,” but it kept gallery hours, with a gallery’s sobriety, trafficking in beauty and expensiveness that couldn’t be thought of as in any way convenient. Still, there were many more art galleries than there were shops. You could buy a Stella sheet-metal piece more easily tha
n a six-pack of beer. And it was still largely artists who inhabited the beautiful lofts with their cast-iron columns. At night, one could see the original settlers, the art-making giants of the previous generation, striding the streets—Donald Judd and Carl Andre and Frank Stella and Chuck Close. They still made objects, but the art world had been dominated by what was called conceptual art the whole decade before—poetic-philosophical ideas, in theory unsellable, enacted by the artist and then memorialized in photographs or in little diagrammatic papers pinned to the gallery wall. And a few odd conceptual projects still went on: a man and a woman chained together for a year walked the streets, suggesting how eccentric and luxuriant a culture must be that could support such things.
In the early 1980s, SoHo the village remained even more isolated than any other in the city, neatly bound by geographic limits. Whereas most New York neighborhoods are nebulous hypotheses, leaking out and over their borders, lapping the shores of the next neighborhood one decade and then receding the next, SoHo had boundaries as fixed as a walled medieval city. It was bordered on the north and south by two double-wide streets. The northern border was Houston Street—pronounced “How,” not “Hew,” a thing that I had learned, to my pain—creating an effective moat between SoHo and the Washington Square Village a little farther north. On the south, SoHo ended neatly at Canal Street, helping to retain some of the significance of its name. Originally an actual canal, it still sealed off the southern end of the district as confidently as any waterway. And then Broadway to the east, and Sixth Avenue to the west, closed the frame. Nowadays, the crosstown boundaries have become leakier—by the end of the eighties, they were already changing—so that a loft east of Broadway can be sold as SoHo prime. But in our day, the four lines of Canal, Houston, Broadway, and Sixth still enclosed the village—which remained, however absurdly, the beating heart of the Western art world, and the current inheritor of the entire Western art-making tradition. Of course, great art was made and sold elsewhere—but the life of new art was concentrated here, its buying and selling, reviewing and arguing, fêting and eating and drinking. Europeans came to test themselves against the locals, as American artists had once gone to Paris or Rome to go ten rounds with the big guys over there.
I see now that, whereas the Blue Room times were private above all, with their public meanings borrowed from Bloomingdale’s or Mr. Frick, the time that we experienced afterward in SoHo was not, and so must be written from three points of view at once. There is an eagle’s, or, rather, pigeon’s, eye view of the village and its inhabitants and their practices; a philosophical-theological view of what they believed about art and why they believed it and whether, or how much, they really did; and then a micro-view of how one shared consciousness—one couple—actually got settled and painted walls and paid rent and bought unexpected cheeses and fought off mice and rats and mosquitoes in one of the warrens between Houston and Canal. All three, entangled, are my tale.
It is a curiosity of the history of art since the Renaissance that it has proceeded distinctly from capital to capital—from Florence to Bologna to Rome to Paris and then at last to New York—with an art district in each city, so that its history can be told village by village as much as epoch by epoch. There has always been one big art town and one hot art district within it. The muse of painting—if there had been one, the Greeks leaving her name out of the lists as superintending a form too artisanal for divine intervention—needing only a man or woman with a marker and a flat surface to make marks on, is the one whose devotees are most in need of sociability. Painters clump in groups. For visual artists, talking nights succeed making days—perhaps because, the competitive, I-can-do-anything-better-than-you-can aspect of visual art making is basic to its existence: images only make sense in sequence, with each gesture an answer to a previous one, the cool irony of Warhol articulate only after the unmediated angst of Pollock. These effects bloom best in close quarters. Poets can write in isolation; painters rarely can, because their art depends on outdoing or outpacing other painters. (They can find themselves in isolation, like Cézanne and Van Gogh after Paris, but they first have to lose themselves in company.)
Artists talk openly, excitedly, about their art, with each other and sometimes even with critics, because talking doesn’t compete with their real work. This makes the history of art since the Renaissance an antipodal history of lonesome studios and bustling clubs, empty garrets and cafés at night, making and arguing in close-order drill. The talking shops of SoHo were its little restaurants. Bob and Kenn’s Broome Street Bar had a kitchen so small that they couldn’t even make French fries, just burgers and chips—the burgers seem wonderful in retrospect; could they have been so good?—but it hummed on a Friday night. The oldest SoHo places—Fanelli’s and the Ear Inn—were still in place, and then there was Food on Prince Street, the best of the places that combined earnest Whole Earth Catalog health food with cafeteria service, a rich genre of eating places at the time, now vanished. What all of them had in common was that local clubbiness, and then, in the new places especially, an odd democratic spirit. What Bohemian villages always have in common is a certain camaraderie between the served and the servers. You can read the original Scenes from Bohemian Life and see the pattern, with the waiters and the waited-upon part of the same social class. In SoHo, too, the people who served were like the people who bought, out-of-work actors serving food to aspiring painters.
In another way, SoHo was unique among all the many Bohemias that the muse has visited since the Renaissance, and perhaps its ethic, which was above all one of virtuous labor rather than dissolute appetite, was attached to this fact: its architecture, though hidden away from view for almost a century, was inherently spacious and beautiful. This might not have been immediately apparent, grimy and rodent-infested as it was. And “dangerous”: the residual fear of crime had in SoHo left a complicated sequence of locks on every door. To visit a friend, you took a service elevator and encountered a big moving lock, a Champion lock with a three-dimensional key, levers and gears and bolts more appropriate to a medieval keep than an artist’s studio. It operated on brushed aluminum doors that would wheeze and heave and open.
But inside the spaces were beautiful—even when the lofts were chopped and jury-rigged and remade, as they were (since no one ever gives up a downtown home any more than anyone leaves an uptown walk-up). Here was a second bed suspended above a first bed, and a child’s bedroom built, like Tarzan’s tree house, in midair; all these still had a charm, a breadth, even a perverse kind of superior hominess, inasmuch as they broke out of the usual New York apartment tyranny of narrow snaking corridors and small air-shaft rooms. Already in the seventies, a parody version of the New York Times “Home” section showed how to convert an apartment into a loft. It was a joke, but also, like all good jokes, a social observation: a loft, even broken into improvised living quarters, had an enviable kind of originality and openness that the tenement studios and garrets of Bohemias past, in Paris and New York alike, had never quite achieved.
SoHo was also “picturesque” in a way that no previous Bohemian quarter in New York had quite been. The West Village has red-brick charm, but mostly in the older or, in its Bohemian phase in the late fifties and sixties, more thoroughly middle-class blocks. The folksinger Dave Van Ronk’s descriptions of Greenwich Village life—when the folk clubs blossomed and Van Ronk stole from Reverend Ed Davis and Dylan stole from Van Ronk and everyone else—emphasize the tenements, the rickety stairs, the five-floor walk-ups, the tiny showers, the miserable-in-February bleakness.
SoHo was decisively un-green: there wasn’t a park within walking distance, aside from the bleak green areas around Washington Square Village. But the streets were cobbled and coherent, and the cast-iron façades that filled block after block a genuine architectural marvel. Mostly built in the three decades after the Civil War, when New York was booming with Whitmanesque energy, the façades were cast in modular pieces that could be picked right out of a catalogue. The
narrow wedding-cake fronts laid over the brick buildings imitated the forms and orders of classical architecture. There were cast-iron catalogue pediments and pyramids and windows framed by the classical columns, Corinthian and Ionic and the rest. Neon signs—aside from the few on old saloons grandfathered in—were prohibited, so the names of stores were indicated by billowing banners.
Two elements made those cast-iron façades of SoHo distinctly beautiful. One was that, needing to be repainted often to keep the rust away, they were colored—in soft blues, greens, reds, yellows—where conventional neoclassical architecture sought mostly pristine white. Not bright, for the most part, though occasionally some cheerful remodeler would paint an entire façade bright pink or acid green; still, the ivories and creams and blues and battleship grays gave the blocks a subtler play of all-over tones than New York streets, with their browns and white and occasional reds, usually possess. It even gave the blocks something of the color chemistry of a Roman street, those burnt and aged ochers and muted greens, seeming mellowed and aged. And, then, illuminated sidewalks still decorated the pavement below: these were long rows of small round translucent lenses laid in metal matrices into the cement, designed back before there was electricity to illuminate the basements of the small manufacturing businesses the buildings had been designed for. Useless now, enough of them persisted to give the streets at your feet a look of a virtuous nineteenth-century effort at efficiency and technological innovation.
The zoning and housing laws that had made SoHo a village of art were complicated. The name “SoHo” was a compression of “South of Houston,” with a mordant pun on the London neighborhood buried in it. By the time we left, it was simply Soho, a neighborhood as old as time, as fixed as nature. As the story gets told, the neighborhood of cast-iron warehouses and small factories was saved, in the early sixties, from the grim hand of Robert Moses’s expressway making by the doughty resistance of Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist. The entire neighborhood was saved only because it was to be torn down—and then, when everyone woke up and saw that there would be no downtown expressway bisecting Manhattan, destroying the old useless warehouse district, no one knew what to do with it.
