SoHo Nostalgia

Chuck Close

(1967)

"I paid $150 a month for a raw loft on Greene Street, and all my friends who were already living here laughed, thinking it was outrageous to pay that much. The loft had no heat. I painted for an entire year with gloves on and just my trigger finger sticking out to the button on the airbrush. Literally, the coffee would freeze in its mug; the toilet would freeze overnight. We slept under a pile of blankets. Soho was rats and rags and garbage trucks: There were occasional wars between one Mafia-owned waste-management company and another during which one would burn the other's trucks. There might have been twenty artists-or people of any kind-living between Houston and Canal; you could have shot a cannon down Greene Street and never hit anybody. But we all lived within a few blocks of each other: Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Phil Glass. We were in someone's loft every night, either listening to a composer like Steve Reich or watching dancers like Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown...After work we'd go over to this cafeteria in what is now the Odeon, and we'd sit around and dream up ideas on the back of napkins." [New York Magazine, April 20, 2009]

We all know who else sketches on the backs of napkins for their grand ideas....
Anyhow, name dropping withstanding, SoHo in the 1960s pre-gentrification was quite the fascinating petri dish of culture. And then, Banana Republic happened.