Richard Kostelanetz
Additions to The Rise and Fall of Artists' SoHo
For the second edition of my SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony (Routledge, 2003), I prepared not only a revised master text currently on my hard disk, ideally to be used in a paperback reprint, but these notes for yet further additions.
The book’s title should have been The Rise and Fall of Artists’ SoHo, if only because no book beginning with the word SoHo has sold particularly well.
Photo Credit For The Picture Of Me: Mary-Jo Kline
When I married and moved to New York in 1924, I spent a great deal of time on Fifty-Seventh Street. There were very few galleries then—Knoedler, Valentine Dudensing, and perhaps half a dozen others. I felt it a gift to be able to walk in, without admission, stay as long as you liked and enjoy great pictures.
—Sidney Janis, in The Art Dealers (1984)
One of the crucial figures in establishing artists’ SoHo, Ivan Karp initially wanted to be a writer. He wrote criticism of art, dance, and movies for the Village Voice at its beginnings, in the mid-1950s. He published one novel, Doobie Doo, in 1965, while he was working uptown for the gallerist Leo Castelli, and he told me about drafting several more, one purportedly about a young woman we both admired. From time to time over the years I’ve known him, he’s asked me about finding publishers for these fiction manuscripts. In reply, I advised him to publish them himself, much as he established his own gallery in SoHo in 1969. Scarcely a shrinking violet, he could have sold them there as well, inscribing them on the spot. At selling other people’s art, Ivan Karp had more confidence.
Once splitting from Castelli in late 1968, after nearly a decade of close association, he considered opening his own gallery. “I thought about space and rents on Madison Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street and about how much money I would have to borrow,” Karp recalled in the mid-1980s, “I decided to open a gallery not in the traditional gallery districts but rather in some outpost of civilization. It occurred to me that many of my visits to artists’ studios within the previous two or three years had been downtown in what is now SoHo.” Ever gregarious, he established his new gallery not upstairs, as Castelli’s or most of the 57th Street galleries had been, but on the street level. Only an open door stood between new art and people on the street. Rather than a space the size of a brownstone floor of, say, 800 square feet, which was Castelli’s on East 77th Street, Karp had 7,000 square feet of a former warehouse on West Broadway. This had more exhibition space bigger than many provincial museums. Karp named his gallery not after himself, as Castelli had done, but OK Harris (which he regarded as “a classic American name possibly that of a riverboat gambler.”). Precisely in locating his front door directly on the street, Karp invited strangers to walk in, as indeed they did. Later SoHo gallerists followed his historically radical example. He didn’t even hire a security person, assuming “there was nothing to steal,” but after an intrusion a decade later, he acquired a pistol that he took daily to work, no doubt fulfilling the image of himself as OK Harris.
As Karp had discovered pop painters for Castelli, it is scarcely surprising that his first stars were hyper-realistic sculptors, Duane Hanson and John DeAndrea, whose tableaux of awesomely life-like human figures required for proper viewing large spaces closer to those in museums than uptown galleries. My favorite DeAndrea had a clothed man staring at two nude young women. Already familiar with such sculpture at OK Harris, you knew that the life-sized women were actually statues, their high verisimilitude notwithstanding; it took a few moments to recognize that the man, his back to you, was likewise a sculpture. Some of the painters shown in OK Harris at that time practiced a highly representational style in the tradition of Edward Hopper. Dubbed photo-realism, this kind of painting became the specialty of another, later SoHo dealer, Louis K. Meisel, who opened his gallery a few years later around the corner from Karp’s, literally on the same SoHo block, and later produced a fat coffee-table book on the subject.
Given the appeal of this work, not to mention credible nudes and street-level destination, Karp’s gallery quickly became a popular New York City attraction, bringing into shabby SoHo people who hadn’t been there before and wouldn’t have gone there otherwise. So popular did his West Broadway address become he could have feasibly charged admission of, say, a dollar apiece without losing his audience, but thankfully didn’t set a bad example in charging for his gift. By 1974, Karp had moved his gallery two blocks down the street to a much larger space that he purchased, rather than rented, this only a few steps up from the street. He also acquired for himself and his wife, an NYU sculptor/professor, a residential loft across from his premises. Karp made his gallery available for the SoHo Chamber Ensemble’s monthly concerts and for Paul Mazursky’s feature film about a housewife who ventures into SoHo, An Unmarried Woman (1978), in which Karp appears as “Herb Rowan.”
Eventually, reflecting another personal enthusiasm, he opened in space fronting on West Broadway a retail cigar store that would later run by his son. Even after other galleries moved away to West Chelsea, Karp (and Harris) stayed put, the surviving monument of a neighborhood success story that was partially his inspiration.
Rather than stealing established artists from other galleries, Karp made a point of showing people who hadn’t exhibited before, claiming at one point that 98% of his artists had their first solo exhibition at OK Harris. In a classic statement, he declared, “The glory of this profession lies in finding artists who have not previously shown and attempting to establish a career for them. To take an artist from total obscurity and help him or her to achieve a measure of fame is the creative and most gratifying aspect of art dealership.” This indeed he did, depending upon his essentially literary capacities as a story-teller and enthusiast. “I may tell the collector which of several works he or she has seen that I prefer. It is my nature to show my enthusiasm about particular works, but in the long run it’s they who have to make the cash commitment, which leads me to believe that it is the collector who makes the art world, rather than the critic or the art historian or the dealer.” If Castelli seemed to be a circumspect European, somewhat anxious about his status in New York City society, Karp was a straight-talking native whom certain collectors trusted frequently. I can recall more than one telling me how impressed they were by Karp’s presentations before they made a purchase.
Among the artists initially shown at Harris were Robert Cottingham, Marilyn Levine, Nancy Rubin, Shelby Lee Adams, Rob Lowe, Peter Saari, Tony King, and Don Celender. The last, a favorite of mine, is a Minnesota art history professor who has made exhibitions from responses to questionnaires that he submits to a circumscribed group of unwitting correspondents. These papers are then exhibited in eye-level rows in the third Harris space (counting back from the street) and sometimes reprinted in books. For my favorite, Museum Piece (1975), Celender asked museums around the world to send a photograph of “your loading dock, or receiving area.” While the photographs are trivial, the letters are not, each revealing in innocent details something about each institution. The humor of the whole exceeds the parts, as in all great comic art, which Karp the sometime literary gent appreciated more than most other gallerists.
In the fourth and smallest gallery Karp frequently presented photography exhibitions on the average of 10 per year. For many years, he presented more photography than any other venue in New York City. He told his employee Barry Neuman that he presented the exhibitions as a cultural service, not a commercial enterprise, like a painting exhibition. “He was often surprised when a photo had sold; he considered it a blessing. His subject matter was limited to three categories: industrial documentation, urban documentation, and straightforward photojournalism.”
Karp differed as well from other SoHo dealers in refusing to advertise. Upon this reluctance he blames the lack of reviews of his exhibitions, not only by the newspapers but the art magazines. “The New York Times’ critics cover the same galleries and artists season after season,” he once declared. “It’s considered a joke in fine art circles.” Actually, OK Harris was scarcely more fortunate with the Times than other SoHo galleries, whose exhibitions were generally ignored by its art critics until the 1980s. One truth long known about the Times is that innovative artistic developments are customarily recognized in sections other than the cultural pages. (I know because I contributed to the Times Magazine in the late 1960s extended profiles of avant-garde celebrities who were customarily ignored or dismissed by Times reviewers.)
I’ve heard it said that his admirable integrity could be troublesome—precisely in his refusal to court reviews, Karp limited the careers of his artists who sometimes had second shows but rarely third shows, Celender excepted. Rarely would his artists be purchased by museums where curators are necessarily more responsive to printed notices than independent collectors whom Karp, as noted before, made his principal arbiters.
Karp also differed from his colleagues, not only uptown but in SoHo, in making himself available to look at artists’ presentations at his desk, which he kept not in a room with a closed door but in an open back space that doubled as a storage/display area for gallery artists he wasn’t currently featuring. As long as he wasn’t heavily engaged, Karp looked at slides, pictures, and objects, accepting a scant few for future exhibitions in one of his four spaces. “I took it as my obligation as an exhibitor of contemporary art to receive every applicant,” he declared in the mid-1980s. “I still see as many as my energy allows, up to twenty-five a day. During school intersession, every instructor of painting or sculpture from every part of the country seems to turn up here with evidence of their production.” For giving such attention, Karp was beloved, his sharp tongue notwithstanding.
If the work shown to him was not for him, he was not adverse to recommending another dealer as more appropriate. With a new set of shows every month, he would serve more individual artists than any other gallery of its kind over more than thirty years. Though cumulative recounts are impossible retrospectively, I would estimate that more people entered O.K. Harris than any other gallery in private SoHo, if not all New York, which is another way of saying that he got more people to look at more new art than anyone else off the public trough. Precisely because of his visible generosity, he impressed many provincial professors who, grateful for any New York attention, were predisposed to invite Karp to lecture on their campuses. I know from my lecturing around the country that he often preceded me. (The other SoHo celebrity frequently visible on college campuses was Lucy R. Lippard, especially after she made feminism her calling card.) Without Karp, our IvanHoe (not Ivan’s ‘ho), Artists’ SoHo would have been different; indeed, recalling the area that was in 1968, I wonder if it would have happened at all.
SoHo had a way of making artists of people who thought they were doing other things. My neighbor on Wooster Street, George Waterman, a neatly dressed Harvard boy, spent decades amassing an immense library of books about modern art. Admiring his artfully packed shelves, I wondered more than once if he would he have done likewise residing anywhere other than SoHo?
SoHoites realized the ideal of living and working—of eating and sleeping, as well as making love—within the same place.
Richard Foreman intricately weaves not only lines but props, visual movements, sound effects, music; more recently, the last became the guide that gives the actors cues.
Re the guy who didn’t pay for dinner. A comparable example of earlier gaucherie happened sometime in the early 1970s, when a prominent Philadelphia collector invited a prominent SoHo sculptor and his choreographer girl friend for the weekend. Offered separate bedrooms, the couple insisted upon sleeping together before returning home to advise their colleagues that these boors were to be avoided, even if they collected good art. And indeed they were.
In an artists’ newspaper from Kansas City in 2003 was an advertisement for “26 Residential Lofts” with 11 to 13 ft ceilings, “exposed brick walls and concrete columns, huge oversized windows with fantastic views,” all echoing SoHo, but this “in the heart of Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District.” Two added dollops are “balconies and terraces,” which were rare in SoHo and “secured underground parking,” which never happened here.
Really new new people tended to be “fabulous young couples, wealthy singles, and ex-suburbanite empty-nesters,” according to New York Magazine. Only the last would be the same age as the remaining artists.
Re interior decorating: worked with odd measures, such as lofts 200 feet long by 25 wide, with entrances on both ends. A sort of “railroad flat” at roughly thrice the length, this was a kind of space almost uniquely SoHo. (The only place of this scale ever seen before was Claes Oldenburg’s in 1966, mentioned earlier.) No one ever though of residing within such dimensions before. With artist couples, one tendency was to put his studio on one end and hers (or his bis, as the French would say) on the other, with residential stuff in between, customarily benefiting from an airshaft. Thus, each could produce art and conduct her or his private business at a considerable distance from the other; and both could sleep in the middle at a healthy distance from the noisy street.
To end of Tosun Bayrak section, I could have added a paragraph on earlier “street events” conducted by John Perreault, Vito Acconci, Abe Lubelski, et al, establishing that the streets of SoHo could be a gallery for moves with artistic resonance.
p. 46 of Nathan Silver’s OLD NEW YORK has illustration of the mammoth Tabernacle from Biblo’s Garden at Broadway & Prince St. around 1845. p. 207 of the same book has a good photo of the cast-iron bldg on Grand and Broadway, now with the restaurant on the ground floor. p. 206 says that Robert Moses imagined a Lower Manhattan Expressway proceeding along Broome Street as early as 1941 and “with the mayor’s approval at last his in 1965 started to acquire property along the dream route of the ‘30s.”
CRI Records was also in SoHo. Others? The one that did Diamanda Galas?
Indicatively that Robert DeNiro, a child of Greenwich Village, whose parents were early residents of SoHo, should have located in New York film festival for the 21st Century not uptown or in midtown but in Tribeca. Where can I identify his mother, Virginia Admiral, as an important early developer?
Three months for a renovation in NYC was speedy. Building elsewhere in NYC later took more than two years before it could be occupied.
People visiting early SoHo didn’t quite believe what they saw—attractive new interiors behind shabby industrial exteriors. Once fancy stores came, the facades on the street became more elegant—work with that reversal development, perhaps in connection to the Rene Block quotes.
Don’t forget neighborhood law firms that had exhibitions of new art, to this day, as did a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank, which once filled its street-level windows with Nam June Paik’s video screens.
Only in SoHo do street musicians play J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites or do doo-wop groups perform unamplified, and collect money, which is to say that aspirations to high culture trickle down to the street.
Do I want to use “artify” a second time?
New York Observer reports a brothel briefly at 43 Crosby St. that ran for 18 months before raided in June 1992.
I always thought SoHo delightfully noncompetitive, in part because so few of us saw their economies appreciate highly (none in my building). Whereas painters working in a similar style might have measured themselves against each other, many of us did things so unique we had no genuine competitors.
In West Chelsea, there is little theater or music. Whereas SoHo was multiarts, Chelsea is almost exclusively visual art.
Where put SoHoZap, which sold alternative comics on lower Broadway; or Phil Leggiere’s store, which had literary stock.
A girl friend, competent about interior renovation, brought along a portable electric drill.
One of my coop partners, to supplement his four-figure income, took a mortgage on his loft living off the proceeds, figuring that once he died, it would be paid off when his loft was sold.
Where put as epigraph: I can’t help feeling about SoHo as I might about a woman. Forgive the metaphors and the odious comparison but there it is. I met and fell in love with her when I was sixteen. We had a mad and passionate affair for a few years until Lord Wolfenden ruined her by putting her on the straight and narrow.—Jeffrey Bernard, “Soho” [London], Punch (March 1985)
DIA Beacon museum became a memorial, or graveyard, for the kind of art that made in SoHo’s reputation in the 1970s. Though the de Menil parents collected an earlier generation, Phippa de Menil became SoHo’s most prominent collector.
In the successor neighborhoods to SoHo’s, few artists owned, which meant they were vulnerable to the machinations of landlords who purchased once a gallery or two were opened, which is to say once the neighborhood could be advertised as “the next SoHo.” Once prices go up, aspiring artists are discouraged, the success of SoHo creating preconditions for the rapid failure of its potential successors. As I wrote, the “next SoHo” will probably be an industrial neighborhood so declassé it would discourage potential landlords and real-estate flippers.
Remember that through the 1960s SoHo was so forbidding that visiting it could provoke anxiety, especially in outsiders; so could Dumbo in the early 1980s and Williamsburg in the late 1980s.
Another epigraph: Artists and poor students in the original Latin Quarter on the original Left Bank of the Seine have since time immemorial practiced compact housekeeping in attics, or at any rate on studios. People with the most independent ideas and the habit of expressing them will live in picturesque and uncommon studios.—Simeon Strunsky, No Mean City (1944)
Where to put? Up until a few years ago SoHo was an obscure district of lofts used chiefly for storage and light manufacturing. It wasn’t called SoHo then—it wasn’t called anything because no one ever went there except the people who made Christmas tree ornaments out of styrofoam and glitter or fabric trimmings out of highly colored stretch felt.—“Fran Lebowitz, SoHo: or Not at Home with Mr. Art” (1983)
From Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (Random House, 1951): New York has been a vital center from the beginning of the [nineteenth] century, but now it appeared to be incubating an American renaissance. Never before had the colony of artists included so many men of remarkable talent, and never before had the creative ferment been more vigorous. A spirit of revolt was in the air, against academic tradition, against prevailing standards of taste, even against the ancient American deference to Europe in matters of art. America had come of age, and a new day had dawned.
From Maxwell F. Marcuse, This Was New York (Lim Press, 1969), p. 82: One of the earliest of these Bohemians was Walt Whitman, who held forth at Pfaff’s celebrated cellar cafe on [653] Broadway just off Bleecker Street. Almost any afternoon or evening, hour on hour, would find this poet, who had been bold enough to inject the sex motif into some of his works to the consternation of millions who had been steeped in the period’s mid-Victorian prudery, pontificating on a wide variety of subjects while the genial host Charlie Pfaff hovered on the outer edges of the group of Whitmanians beaming ecstatically. . . . Unquestionably, Praff’s dingy, smoke-laden cellar-bistro marked the site of the birth of Bohemianism in America.
Nothing from SoHo appears in Architecture in New York (1969) by Wayne Andrews, normally a sophisticated writer.
Alan Suicide could be described as a precursor of “scatter art.”
In SOHO BUSINESS REFERENCE A TO Z ENTREPRENEUR, the epithet stands for Small office/Home office. Where put? Also that W. Broadway was called South Fifth Avenue, probably south of the Square.
Re odd jobs: Yasunao Tone taught “classical Japanese” on Saturdays in suburban Harrison to the children of prosperous Japanese executives who would otherwise not be able to return to school in Japan. Also edited a newspaper in Japanese published for Japanese residing in America.
Artists’ SoHo was hospitable for party-crashers. Alan Marlis remembers that from the 1971 or so they would meet at the restaurants Food or Fanelli’s on Prince Street and commandeer the public pay telephones. “ Nearly every artist having a one-man show had an after-party. It was held either in his loft, in a nearby restaurant or bar, or in a rented space. We checked the phone listing for his loft address if we didn't already know it. We sent ‘runners’ to the restaurant/bar to check on the free food and the offerings at the open bar. He would call into Fanelli's and we would know what to expect, whether it was too intimate, or dressy etc. Our bicyclist checked out the rental space and saw if it was a ‘soft’ door, that is, a man with a list who you just had to flash the card announcing the artist's show to get in. If he stuck to his list we'd send a sacrificial lamb to see if his name was on the list; and as the doorman looked, our guy would pick out several names—usually Schwartz and Shapiro—and call those names into us. Therefore, while sitting in Fanelli’s we got the loft address of the artists, the food and drink offerings at his restaurant/bar, and the names on his list for his rented space party. All we then had to do was go. Show up we did 100% of the time. There was no party held in a SoHo loft from 1970 to 1990 that didn’t have one of the brotherhood taste their cheese and drink their wine until 1991 when the galleries started moving out, unsuccessful artists retired, and the scene moved to Chelsea.” The surviving crashers, still visible in SoHo now and then, are remembered now mostly as faces rather than names.
The Loft Law protects artist tenants to this day.
Add about the skyline of water towers that once became the subject of a film for French television, most of them necessary because the city is responsible for sending water only six stories up.
The New Museum was “politically correct” to a degree otherwise unknown in SoHo, which remained immune from academic fashions, especially mind-restricting pieties. I was scarcely alone in regarding the New Museum’s opportunistic promotions as queasy.
Where do I want to put John Ashbery’s testimony from p. 259 of Robert Stern: “Getting to SoHo . . . is an ordeal. . . and the walk there through rubbish-strewn streets lined with dour warehouse buildings inside which the artists have staked out their glittering white lofts is not calculated to lift the spirits.”
From p. 295, Robert Stern’s 1900: Around the turn of the century, artists tired of paying one rent of their residence and then another for his studio for work and display were receptive to the building of studio apartments co-built by a landscape painter named Henry W. Ranger—the Cooperative Studio Building at 25 West 67th St. in 1901: “The design had an ingenious arrangement that kept costs down and maximized the use of space: two duplex apartments were located at the front or back of seven floors, and smaller, simplex apartments were located in a rear extension with slightly higher ceilings in the studios, so that while there were fourteen floors at the front there were only ten at the rear. Deed restrictions were negotiated for properties on Sixty-eighth Street, ensuring good light for the artists’ studios on the north side of the Cooperative Building. The southern part of the building was rented out, producing a twenty-three percent return on the artists’ investment.” And incidentally initiated a precedent for SoHo artists building for themselves what was otherwise unavailable and then renting out adjacent spaces.
Do I need to remind that SoHo both protected and inspired those rare people who organize their lives to spend most of their waking hours applying paint to canvas, words to paper, and sounds to the air, which can be understood as the aspiration of every hobbyist, I suppose. A haven, a refuge, for people who would rather spend most of their days working with paints, materials, musical notes, the expressive possibilities of their own bodies, surrounded by people who respected their passions. All you have in life is time (not money, contrary to myth), which SoHoites wanted to spend in the most profitable ways.
From the composer Daniel Goode: Ann and I both think the best thing for Soho is to become like the Village, old, venerated, over touristed, but nice on an early morning before the "eurotrash" arrives.
The current Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “Soho” doesn’t acknowledge New York’s SoHo, though it is acknowledged as “SoHo” in the entry on Greenwich Village. Wikipedia likewise mentions the latter in passing within a longer appreciation of London’s ‘hood.
Fanelli’s, according to my neighbor Shirley Smith, also became the de facto clubhouse of women artists during the 1970s.
Buildings in Tribeca tend to be at least 50 feet wide, while most of those in SoHo are only 25.
ALL WRONG ABOUT LOWER MANHATTAN
In the course of writing The Rise and Fall of Artists’ SoHo (Routledge), I read several earlier books about lofts and artists in lower Manhattan. The most embarrassing by far, in spite of some research worth crediting, was Sharon Zukin’s Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. The copy I have is a 1989 paperback reprint from Rutgers University Press that acknowledges only on its copyright page an earlier 1982 “cloth” edition from Johns Hopkins University Press. No dates appear in either of the book’s prefaces or in the “Postscript to the Paperback Edition.” The back cover says that Zukin teaches “urban sociology and urban political economy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.” More recently, I learned, she has become the Broeklundian Professor of Sociology.
In a book riddled with errors, ignorance, and misinterpretations, a principal recurring fault is drawing upon her own experience in a residential coop in the small loft area around East Tenth Street between University Place and Broadway to generalize about loft living in general, particularly in Artists’ SoHo, which is a larger, more famous neighborhood south of Houston Street. However, these were very different loft communities, not only in size but in legal limitations. Indicatively, nowhere did I find her acknowledging that a legal resident of SoHo proper needed to have city certification as an artist requiring loft space, thus preventing, certainly to 1980, non-artists from living there legally. One reason why such certification is not familiar to her might be that people residing in her Greenwich Village enclave, a different neighborhood, did not need it.
As early as page 5, Zukin declares, “Since the end of the nineteenth century, few working-class neighborhoods remained in the heart of Manhattan, so this work force no longer lived near their jobs.” However, the factories of SoHo, including one in my building, depended upon immigrant labor from the Lower East Side that into the 1970s came down Prince Street every morning on bus #12, returning in the evenings down Spring Street. I don’t know much about Zukin’s neighborhood but know enough to know she’s often wrong about mine.
Also on page 5, Zukin declares, “In the case of lofts, the social class distinctions between old (artist) residents and new (non-artist) residents are somewhat blurred.” Quite the contrary in SoHo, nothing but nothing divided SoHo coops more than the difference in income (often to the degree of several multiples) between artists and non-artists from the early 1980s into the present. Her generalization might be true about her middle Village enclave; but here, as elsewhere in her book, she reveals that she knows little about SoHo, in spite of pretending otherwise. On page 117 Zukin quotes several SoHo artists about how they successfully manipulated New York City politicians during the John Lindsay administration. Since the statements seemed incredible to me, I reread them, wishing she had named informants who, on reconsideration, seem conveniently unidentified.
More than once I found Zukin misunderstanding her own evidence. On page 88, she claims that Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis, both successful dealers in contemporary art, received their “art education” at the Rockefeller-controlled Museum of Modern Art. “Inspired by MoMA’s professionalism as well as its missionary zeal,” Zukin writes, “they brought some quality of the museum to the art gallery. ‘What [Janis] did was of enormous importance,’ Castelli has said. “He really taught me that a gallery should be run like a museum—he had that kind of rigor.’” Hold on, you say, isn’t Castelli saying explicitly that it was Janis, not MoMA, that taught Castelli, eliminating the Rockefellers from influencing SoHo’s most prominent art gallery. Factual errors abound, as the arts critic Peter Frank is “Peter France” on page 95 and on page 170 the 155 Wooster Street Association is identified as “a newly formed artists’ housing co-op,” rather than, as it was, a partnership among Paula Cooper, whose gallery occupied the ground floor; the photography curator Weston Naef; and the artist/professor James Seawright, who collectively rented space within most of their building. Given errors discovered so far, I find it hard to believe, as Zukin says, “By 1987 only 12 of the 1,000 or so loft buildings in full or partial residential use have obtained a Certificate of Occupancy,” because I remember several SoHo coops, including my own, that had obtained a C. of O. well before 1987.
The most outrageous single paragraph that prompted this critique appears on page 184 where Zukin attempts to account for the origins of Washington Square Village, the extended apartment complex between West Third and Bleecker Streets, Mercer and West Broadway. “Significantly, the most vulnerable land for the university’s expansion lay to the south, in the manufacturing loft district and adjacent tenements occupied by working-class families of Italian origin that was known as the South Village.” The minor problem here is that the epithet South Village referred, then as now, to the enclave west of West Broadway, which was and still is quite different from the larger loft district to the east of West Broadway. Bear this distinction in mind as you read on.
Zukin continues, “In the late 1950s, the chairmanship of the university’s board of trustees passed to Laurence Tisch, a member of the family dynasties of builders in New York City and a graduate of NYU Law School.” This prompted me to check Laurence Tisch’s biography. His Bachelor of Science degree comes from NYU and his M.A. in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh. No lawyer is he. His principal position has been chief executive of a hotel corporation that is also a successful investment company. Tisch becomes an NYU trustee in 1966 and chairman of the board of trustees from 1978 to 1990, which is about the time Zukin is writing, but not “the late 1950s,” two decades before, when she thinks him active.
She continues: “Tisch quietly assembled the several square blocks from Washington Square Park to Houston Street, between LaGuardia Place and Broadway, and then, at no apparent profit, turned the properties over the NYU. During the next few years, the university built two high-density housing projects on the site for faculty and staff.” In fact, the developer of Washington Square Village was named Paul Tishman (1900-1996), the key element of his surname spelled differently. It was the Tishman, not the Tisch, who built Washington Square Village, along with much else around New York City. I can remember that when WSV first opened for rentals in the early 1960s it was called “Tishman’s Tenements,” and recall as well the architectural historian P. Reyner Banham telling me perhaps two decades later that, when he was invited to be a visiting professor at NYU, he was shown floor plans of Washington Square Village, where he was invited to live, that were stamped with the Tishman name. Having won the contract to build urban renewal housing on the site, he overbuilt, which is to say constructed too many floors for the available space. The only solution was to transfer title to his buildings to a community function. NYU was conveniently available. Whether Tishman intentionally defaulted is a question still remembered, as he was indeed an NYU trustee at the time. Zukin’s confusing two German-Jewish family names might be excusable in, say, professor McReedy’s midwestern professor’s lecture to undergraduates, but not in a book by a CUNY professor who purportedly lives nearby. To paraphrase Groucho, when the Tisches were mistaken for the Tishmans, that’s how visions of conspiracies were born.
Foot already in her mouth, Zukin bites off yet more. “Whether or not Tisch remained a silent owner of properties contiguous to the university, it is important that even at a time when demand for manufacturing lofts was high, NYU’s expansion reduced the amount of loft space that was available.” Aside from the unsubstantiated innuendo about NYU being beholden to a hidden puppeteer (incorrectly named), this passage undermines Zukin’s documentation earlier in Loft Living of the lack of commercial demand for loft space in the 1960s, accounting for why SoHo landlords at that time gladly rented or sold to artists. Why does she condemn NYU-Tisch for reducing the supply of something for which she elsewhere defines a declining demand? Academic oneupsmanship notwithstanding, critical coherence is not among Zukin’s acquired skills.
Not done yet with her riot of misunderstanding, Zukin concludes this single paragraph, “Moreover, by physically integrating Greenwich Village with the loft district south of Houston Street, the university made that space accessible to a different class of users.” However, the high-rises constructed north of Houston Street were so visibly different from the buildings south of Houston and its populace yet more different that not integration but a great cultural gulf was created on that east-west thoroughfare. No matter whether “that space” refers to north or south of Houston—her language is unclear—the result has been radically different cultural entities. Street smarts are not among this sociologist’s sensitivities. Though much in Loft Living has footnotes, none appear in this paragraph, making it hard to blame Zukin’s misinformation on anyone else.
So many errors by a scholar with a Ph.D. isn’t easy; what is more surprising that these mistakes should appear in a book from a university press, which supposedly has academic advisors vetting manuscripts, only to be reprinted, visibly uncorrected, by a second university press. Not easy at all.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVEW
Some years ago I loved a woman who worked in sophisticated finance, municipal bond insurance to be exact. To demonstrate my respect for her day job, I would from time to time recommend an article I’d seen in the New York Times Sunday Business section. “It’s not for me,” she would declare, dismissing the paper without bothering to look. Huh, I asked? The only financial professionals who read the biz section, she insisted, are those who deal with the unsophisticated public, say who have retail customers, such as stockbrokers.
I realized that I always had the same feeling toward the NY TimesBook Review, as well as the Arts section—they weren’t for me as a books and arts professional, but for people who go into stores filled with the latest produce from commercial publishers or see new movies and Broadway plays, such as, needless to say, my sometime girl friend, a Vassar alumna, who did read the books and arts sections of the Sunday Times respectfully. Bless her.
As a cultural historian authoring books meant to survive for decades, I have necessarily avoided the NYTBR for the simple reason that I couldn’t afford to fall for momentary fads—not for a minute. For someone working as I do, this channel offers disinformation. Since anyone writing arts or literary history based primarily upon cultural produce featured in the Sunday Times would look like a dunce, avoiding the paper has been for me a perquisite for mental hygiene. (Nonetheless, for the record, I should note that I have written for the Times Book Review since 1963, also contributing from time to time to several other Sunday sections: Arts & Leisure, Travel, The Magazine, Sophisticated Traveler, The City, and Real Estate. No “outsider” am I.)
Besides, since only a few of my many books published over forty years were ever reviewed in the Times Book Review, never favorably, I could perversely boast that I earned individual entries in Encyclopedia Britannica and the Merriam Webster Dictionary of American Writers, among other enviably selective directories, without ever receiving a positive notice in the Times, so irrelevant had it apparently become to the highest cultural arbiters, truly cultural professionals, who may not read the NYTBR either, Incidentally, none of my books has ever been reviewed by the daily Times reviewers, who swim in a cultural ditch, or in the highly peculiar New York Review of Books, which the elite arbiters, smart about guidance necessarily, probably ignore as well.
Some years ago, I broached the concept of the idiot-identifier, which is my epithet for a cultural icon so suspect that I (and others) tend to think of his/her/its admirers as cultural idiots, other claims to “intelligence” notwithstanding. John Kenneth Galbraith has always served that function, at least for me; Alan Dershowitz for others; Susan Sontag for me and others. Likewise, I tend to think that people who look only to the NYTBR for literary advice are incorrigibly dim.
With these prejudices in mind, you can imagine how surprised I was to find a new book of mine reviewed in the NYTBR for the first time in perhaps two decades, not in any of the full reviews, which in the issue of June 29, 2003, were devoted to memoirs by Sandra Day O’Connor and Hilary Clinton, Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Henry Ford, novels by Javier Marias and Fay Weldon, and the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, among other titles no doubt featured in the chain bookstores. It is by the contrast between omissions and inclusions that a medium like the NYTBR gets the “reputation” it deserves.
No, my book gets only a single paragraph under the headline “Books in Brief” (incidentally giving EB’s editors good reason to ignore a medium that slights writers honored in its pages). Someone named Glyn Vincent summarizes with fair accuracy the contents of my book, SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony (Routledge). Thanks. Nonetheless, what was bothersome were the remarks about me. “A hermetic student of downtown culture, Kostelanetz would seem SoHo’s perfect idiosyncratic historian.” Though his the epithet “hermetic” might have passed ignorant eyes unnoticed, it offended me (and initially prompted this critique), as it means “protected from outside influences,” “with an airtight closure.” That is hardly appropriate for someone who is elsewhere described in Vincent’s review as living in the center of a cultural hothouse, whose book relates interactions with his neighbors. Obscure writing is sometimes called “hermetic,” meaning something that only the author can understand. Though I’ve done putatively hermetic texts as poetry or numerical art, my narrative history of SoHo must be thoroughly clear, given the accuracy of Vincent’s summary, disproving his point implicitly. Thus, his inept adjective reflects lapses not only in the writing but in the NYTBR editing.
Elsewhere within his few hundred words, Mr. (Ms.?) Vincent characterizes my book as “minefield of non sequiturs, dyslexic syntax and arrested thoughts.” What the hell, I hear you saying, is “dyslexic syntax”? The crucial adjective refers to “abnormal difficulty in reading and spelling,” though, most would agree, someone whose book describes a personal library with over 15,000 volumes would not have difficulties reading—reading-obsessed, perhaps; but reading-challenged, no. Dyslexia is more commonly used to describe a predisposition to interchange letters or numbers within a row. My hunch is that DS is Vincent’s response to uncommon sentences for which I’d admit a taste (e.g., “so irrelevant had it apparently become to the highest cultural arbiters”), risking what might be distinguished to sophisticated people but problematic for illiterates.
Those subscribing to the Google search engine would be surprised to discover that all but a few of the 93 entries on “Glyn Vincent” acknowledge only a book he’d published recently on the artist Albert Blakelock. Why nothing else? What is the truth behind this odd fact of a writer with such a limited Google inventory? After pondering possibilities, may I suggest that GV might be a beginner, which seems unlikely, or a limited-use pseudonym for someone else? If so, for whom? Jayson Blair?
Vincent’s killer is his concluding sentence, which must be quoted in its entirety: “More troubling than the book’s lack of narrative cohesion—perhaps appropriate in describing the avant-garde scene—is the absence of any persuasive perspective.” Huh? Doesn’t the book subtitle broadcast my “perspective”? Don’t most of the episodes in the book illustrate my subtitle? If anything, my book could be criticized for too much “persuasive perspective,” but that isn’t what Vinnie says or what was printed by his editors at the NYTBR, who are apparently sloppy as well at checking a critical declaration against its source. In my experience, under-editing of details customarily reflects laziness about larger problems (and vice versa).
In my SoHo memoir, I noted in passing that the development of New York City’s most distinguished art neighborhood received more appreciation in the Home and Real Estate sections of the local NY Times, rather than its cultural pages, which has for decades tended to ignore SoHo. As excerpts from my new book appeared in both Sunday Real Estate and Sunday City sections, all would agree that the NYT responses to my own book would prove this unfamiliar truth of mine as still true, too true, the Times once again demonstrating as a newspaper of cultural record it is definitely, if not self-consciously, unreliable. Why this truth should still be true is still a mystery to me, no doubt raising questions familiar in the wake of Jayson Blair about subversion within the Times itself. Rest assured that no one was bribed to prove my paranoid hypothesis true.
For those colleagues who think objecting to a problematic review of one’s book in the NYTBR is inadvisable, may I recall that I first did so three decades ago, responding to L.J. Davis. My antagonist and I met soon afterwards, befriended one another, and a dozen years later almost bought some Boerum Hill real estate together. I still count him a friend, who is among our best investigative business journalists, a dope though he may have once been as a literary book reviewer. No question about it—my critical response then was certainly worth doing.
Finally, may I conclude that my claim to top-drawer recognitions without a favorable NYTBR review remains pristine? Yippie, I’m still a virgin. Doubting if my boast is unique, I publish it in part to give others an opportunity to make a similar claim.
Need I mention that an earlier version of this critique was submitted to the NYTBR, whose editor asked to see a “letter” from me. Once it was sent, I never heard from him again, no doubt implicitly demonstrating another truth of mine. Lying I don’t do, opportune though fibbing be.