SoHo: A View from 1978

This essay offers a horrified and—now—nostalgic look at SoHo’s early days. It was published in New York Affairs, a journal that, as far as I know, is no longer published. Not sure that the section headings, which were added by the editors, make much sense, but I’ve left them in place in the interest of historical accuracy.

Alex Katz, Soho Morning, 1987. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

SOHO: DISNEYLAND FOR THE AESTHETE?

At the outbreak of World War II, Paris had been Western Civilization’s capital of the visual arts for nearly a century. During that period, New York either followed Parisian trends in a provincial manner or was out of touch entirely. Its status at the outset of the twentieth century was equal to Moscow’s and far below that of such second-tier European art centers as Munich and Barcelona. New York stayed provincial until the late 1940s, when it became clear that the German occupation had left Paris unable to support a major art scene. In ways still not fully analyzed by historians, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and others shifted painting’s frontier to New York. Parisians were relegated to the ranks of the provincials.

Each of these New Yorkers had been developing his or her art for two decades or more. Remaking modernist painting in an American mode, some began to see themselves as aesthetic equivalents of nineteenth ­century explorers of the New World wilderness. These pioneer myths were grandiose but useful in the face of almost total indifference to their innovations. The Museum of Modern Art persisted throughout the 1940s and early 1950s in seeing itself as a missionary bringing Parisian values to America. Galleries and collectors followed suit, just as they had done ever since the Modern opened its doors in the late 1920s. And the larger public found de Kooning’s violently smeared images, Pollock’s drips, Newman’s vast fields of color unintelligible. If it was to survive with its sense of purpose intact, this first generation of the New York School needed to inflate its self-image with ever loftier statements of purpose.

By the end of the 1950s, that inflation seemed justified, as the Modern joined the rest of the New York art establishment in recognizing the first-generation achievement. The nature of that achievement is a topic for art criticism. What I’d like to stress here is the power a myth acquires when its prophetic thrust hits its mark. De Kooning, Rothko, and the others came to see themselves—and to be seen—as a band of giants leading American art to a new future. That their work often expressed extremes of doubt and anxiety, that its imagery sometimes verged on chaos, only reinforced its impact in a difficult period for American culture.

Lonely critical voices that had been approving from the outset grew stronger. Hostile critics were converted and soon the New York School had attracted the most convincing critical support of all: a second and a third generation of artistic progeny. Setting up studios and co-operative galleries on and around East Tenth Street, they converted that neighborhood into the site of a hotbed of post-de Kooning Action Painting. Tenth Street became New York’s first new art scene since Greenwich Village fell prey, a decade earlier, to tourists and, on side streets, to brownstone and Federal-style gentility.

By the end of the 1950s, members of the New York School had joined art department faculties across the country. Following the lead of the Modern, other New York museums had begun to provide support. The gallery establishment responded in the same spirit. New galleries appeared, and this activity inspired the birth of a new generation of collectors. Thus, when aspiring painters and sculptors graduated from art school and set out for the big city, primed to take their places in the myth-laden history of post-war American art, they found a scene expanding and well able to absorb them.

The expansion continued through the 1960s, fueled by economic boom and audacious formal innovation. Pop Art, Minimalism, and color-field painting all drew enthusiastic backing from museums, and this support had a ripple effect. New galleries, new collectors, new critics, even new art magazines appeared. The general media began to pay respectful attention, art departments enlarged their influence in university humanities divisions, and—in a notable reversal of geo-­cultural roles—Europe recognized New York’s leading position in the visual arts. From de Kooning’s women to Andy Warhol’s cool, casually silk-screened Liz Taylors and Marilyn Monroes, the full range of New York imagery was finding emulators abroad. In the States, national and local governments made tentative moves toward aligning themselves with the spreading art world. Before the 1960s were over, corporations were doing the same.

By then, the Tenth Street Scene had faded. The Lower East Side wasn’t congenial to the expanding, career-oriented younger wing of the New York scene. A new art neighborhood was needed. South of Houston Street, north of Canal, there is a zone of loft buildings. Many of their original occupants, light manufacturers, were moving out as the space and facilities offered by these nineteenth-century buildings grew obsolete. Those who left tended not to be replaced. Landlords were willing to rent their outmoded lofts to artists, who found them ample in size and cheap.    

Twenty blocks south of Houston—SoHo. There had always been a few artists in the neighborhood. By the mid-1960s they were arriving in increasing numbers. Manufacturers, warehouses, and scrap dealers still occupy some SoHo lofts, but their non-residential presence generates no friction. Loft living has traditionally been illegal, and in certain Manhattan neighborhoods it still is. In 1971, SoHo artists persuaded the city government to permit full-time occupancy in their lofts. The art-world invasion of the area now had legal sanction.

Galleries began to set up shop. Artists’ bars and restaurants followed. No longer feeling fugitive, painters and sculptors, filmmakers and video artists, dancers and post-dance performance artists flocked to the area. After years of high­ speed stylistic transmutation, the legacy of the mythical first generation of the New York School was still alive and resonant. SoHo felt like the place where its heirs could enjoy that legacy in security, even comfort. There was a sense of history fulfilled.

Merging Past and Future

The culture benefits from the downtown art world’s comfort, for SoHo’s cast-iron loft buildings are the remnants of one of nineteenth-century Manhattan’s most energetic periods of commercial expansion, from 1860 to 1890. With the area’s transformation into an art-zone, SoHo was declared a landmark neighborhood; it is now against the law to alter the facades of its buildings. Mass-produced cast-iron elements could be ordered by the gross from catalogs; and, walking down West Broadway, the neighborhood’s main stem, or crosstown on Spring or Prince Streets, you learn to see where a draughtsman recombined well-worn decorative forms under the pressure of office deadlines. Surprisingly, the commercial pressures driving SoHo’s architecture often inspired elegance. And there are instances where cast-iron Corinthian columns combine with tall, energetically arched windows to push elegance in the direction of grandeur.

No one questions that SoHo, with its cobble-stoned streets, is an architectural treasure of national importance. Where else in Manhattan (or in Brooklyn, on the New Jersey waterfront, or anywhere else on the East Coast) can you feel the scale, sense the flavor, of Walt Whitman’s New York? One answer: in TriBeCa, the loft neighborhood just south of SoHo. Naturally, the artists who have moved into TriBeCa’s comparatively cheap lofts are currently debating the advantages and disadvantages of SoHoization.

The New York School’s first-generation giants lived in fear of fire inspectors and suspicious landlords. That fear symbolized their relationship to the culture in general, meaning that the tradition SoHo inherited is one of insecurity, of displacement, of spiritual (and sometimes actual) homelessness. SoHo’s officially protected status as an art-zone has already affected its art. As the image of the artist’s living loft gains popularity, loft dwellers come to see themselves as the inventors of a new, improved style of urban existence.

Behind SoHo’s carefully preserved facades, you find cavernous, white-painted, light-filled rooms, many bisected by a stately row of interior columns. A medium-sized loft has 2,500 square feet of floor space. A large one has 5,000 square feet, a sizeable fraction of a football field. Living space can be separated from workspace or blended with it; either way, SoHo artists—who are their own plumbers, carpenters, and electricians—have had to innovate. The results are of interest beyond the art world. By way of design and architecture magazines (and, more recently, New York Magazine and Esquire), SoHo’s new interior styles and new immensity of interior scale are becoming familiar to a large general audience. Innovative details of loft life have been adapted to ordinary apartment interiors and are showing up frequently in multiple-dwelling renovations. The image of the loft-dweller has, in fact, expanded the range of domestic possibility in America.

SoHo’s streets and facades recall an era when urban space was at a more intimate scale than that of most contemporary cities. On the other hand, the cavernous white expanses of SoHo lofts suggest ways of expanding the scale of city interiors. Thus appropriation by the art world has given SoHo’s architecture an influence that goes in two directions, toward the Whitmanesque past and a heavily designed future.

The Greening of SoHo

Day to day, SoHo is less a national treasure than a lively place to pursue art—as an artist, a dealer, a collector, a critic, or an interested bystander. From the late 1960s to the present, the influx of artists and galleries has continued. Everyone from first-generation veterans to Pop-Art stars to brand-new products of out-of-town art departments have set up lofts in the area. You see the full range of art mediums: painting and sculpture, video and film, and on to the most tenuously redefined forms of dance, theater, and ensemble music. There are blue-chip galleries and museum-like institutions headed by ex-curators from uptown. There are deliberately shabby “alternate spaces” supported by funds of city and/or state and/or national provenance. There are feminist galleries, arts-and-crafts galleries, self-proclaimed revolutionary galleries, and galleries beyond the reach of any label.

To back up this proliferation of front-line art activity, SoHo offers painters’ supply shops, frame shops, and health food stores. There are antique stores where you can buy Mission-style oak bookcases or chrome-and-mirror Jean-Harlow-Deco dressing tables. To complement the health food stores, there are specialty food shops where the goat cheese is as overripe as its counterpart at the fanciest Greenwich Village food boutique. Liquor stores often cultivate a casual raffishness—but not in SoHo. As I write this, an extremely slick and over-designed “wine and spirits” store is about to open on West Broadway. Cluttered grocery stores and bodegas hang on to remind you that SoHo was a working-class neighborhood before it got that name, and that—underneath the art glamor—it still is a working-class neighborhood. The Mercedes-Benz of a powerhouse collector is likely to have to inch its way through SoHo streets blocked by semi-trucks jack-knifed up to battered loading docks. By 4:45 the workday is over, the blue-collar citizens disappear, and art-world citizens head for the bars.

Art worlds—whether on the Left Bank of Paris, South of the Slot (San Francisco’s Mission Street), or in downtown Manhattan—are populated by people who have alienated themselves from mainstream culture. Some do it quietly, even secretly. They are the loft-hermits who stay in close contact with a small circle of kindred spirits, limiting public appearances to the minimum required for survival. This isolation signifies seriousness in some cases, in others, not. In any case, such SoHo residents as these do not need any social scene whatsoever. But for those who act out their alienation in public, the wide range of the neighborhood’s bars and restaurants is a series of elaborately styled stage sets.

SoHo’s public styles start with raunchy, downtown versions of whatever is currently hot on the Upper East Side and end in whacky, Harpo-esque parodies of solidarity-with-the-proletariat outfits. Along the way are the buckskin and denim Far-West look; the silk print and satin thrift-shop vamp look; the shawl and wire rim glasses of the school-marm look; the “Geronimo!” look, layers and layers of floppy paratrooper surplus; the ski bum look, transformed in spring to the tennis bum look; and more. Much, much more. SoHo is, among other things, a costume party. The variety of its costumes signals the vitality of its rejuvenation.

By making SoHo the site of so much elaborately deployed energy—aesthetic, economic, social—the art world has rescued the area from a slow slide into oblivion. The flamboyance of the bar scene makes this energy immediately visible to the outsider, but a more convincing index may be real estate values. Rents have gone so high in the last five years that some of the neighborhood’s first art-settlers have been priced out of the lofts they converted. A few recent art department grads have found their true vocation as real­ estate operators, buying buildings and co-oping them for artist-tenants. All this explains the development of TriBeCa and the drift of artists to the smallish lofts of the West Twenties—Chelsea—where de Kooning and a very few others invented loft living in the years before the Second World War. SoHo lofts where you might expect to find artists are often occupied by would-be-hip young professionals who want to be near all the perking cultural excitement.

SoHo is Exhibit A in the argument that art is one of New York’s major industries. Newcomers and veterans alike sometimes find the area uncongenial simply because so many have so confidently defined it as the home of innovative New York art-energy. Serious artists have no use for the kind of image that the culture-at-large imposes on this section of the city. Still, the image sticks, thanks to the politics of zoning and public funding, to the media, and to city politics in general. Mayor Ed Koch began courting artists as a high-profile minority at least three seasons back. Most importantly, SoHo’s image sticks because it’s correct. And it is the art world which, for all its grumbling about stereotypes, ensures that correctness. Broadway for theater, Madison Avenue for smart shops, SoHo for art. TriBeCa fears being SoHo-ized, but it is a pleasurable emotion—like the starlet’s fear that full-fledged stardom will bring powerful temptations.

Wherever they live and work, New York artists must assess themselves in light of what is happening in SoHo. The assessment may lead to a complete rejection of SoHo’s most aggressively paraded styles and values, its history, and its future. Yet SoHo provides the standard of judgement. The cooly hyperactive image of this image-making neighborhood is fundamental to the public’s notion of New York art.

A Theme Park

SoHo’s relentlessly evolving styles—artistic, personal, entrepreneurial—offer a spectacle in which some insiders find it absolutely necessary to participate. For an increasing number of outsiders, SoHo is becoming a spectacle of choice: a tourist attraction. The SoHo scene is constantly hyped by newspapers, magazines, and on television, chiefly through PBS and cable outlets, but frequently on the major New York stations too. A big play in the city’s “arts and leisure” guides can jam the opening of an art star’s latest show. If the star is full magnitude, only about forty percent of the crowd will be SoHo-ites and other art-world regulars. The rest will be members of the culture-at-large.

Media interest and public response give further signs of the neighborhood’s rejuvenation. The stronger the signs, the more insistent the question they put to the entire New York art world, uptown as well as down. The first-generation giants were estranged from the public. If the artists of SoHo are the objects of a media-fed curiosity, can they really be the heirs of the New York School’s mythic past? SoHo’s tourist crowds tum into mobs on pleasant afternoons in spring. How likely is it that their presence has no further effect?

It is certainly a friendly presence. No matter how bewildered or fatigued, SoHo’s tourists hardly ever let their aggressive willingness to be amused turn hostile. The neighborhood’s galleries tend to cluster—three, four, even five to a building. Having attended a hyped show, a tourist—or family of tourists—is likely to drift a floor above or a floor below to other shows. As they move from one gallery building to the next, visitors are confronted with all manner of street personages. Now and then a string quartet shows up, settles down and intently grinds out its repertoire, which is completely at odds with the modernist tradition on which SoHo has built its self-image. Just past the musicians may be a crazy with a soapbox (or loading-dock) spiel that requires nothing more than an audience—an art audience, a baseball audience, a Penn Station audience. It doesn’t matter to the crazy. All he knows about SoHo and its modernist heritage is that on nice days the neighborhood can be relied on to present him with large, leisurely crowds.

Every Saturday afternoon last fall, I saw an Emmett Kelly-style clown at work on West Broadway. He would direct sly, snide honks of his horn at the jammed-up traffic, leading tourists to wonder if he was art or not. Definitely intended as art were the sidewalk versions of dance and theater works that had been presented in galleries and public lofts earlier in the season. Or the season before. Or five seasons ago. Right after the tourists finished wondering if the clown was art, these spectacles of democratized modernism would lead them to wonder if artists are really clowns. But the outsiders’ perplexity never gives them much pause. SoHo offers too much in the way of “fun boutiques,” “interesting restaurants,” and “unusual night spots” to rase any questions about value in art—and it is not the purpose of a tourist attraction to raise questions, anyway. A tourist attraction is supposed to provide entertainment. For a culturally aspiring segment of the population, that is what SoHo does.

Tourists and media-hype have so distressed some SoHo artists that the only bearable solution was to move away. Others manage to ignore the crowds, which are heavy only on Saturdays. Lofts are big places. It’s not hard to hide out one day a week. You can always work. For the neighborhood’s genuine heirs to New York School seriousness, the attention that SoHo gets in bigger and bigger doses every season is an equivalent to the indifference endured by the first generation. Whether serious art is hyped or ignored, one thing is always clear: its values are at odds with those of the public. This alienation of art is never absolute, of course. The most radical modernist innovations are eventually assimilated by the culture-at-large, but only by the most tortuous and untraceable paths.

For example, there is no doubt that the proto-modernist, Romantic concern with self-expression felt two hundred years ago only by a very few poets, painters, and novelists is fundamental to our present-day notion of the personality. But we can only speculate about the ways that concern developed. The vast influence of modern painting’s drive toward abstraction is still largely uncharted, though the goal had been reached by 1910. At any rate, genuine innovation in art is by its nature a series of risks invented and met in ways that permit the innovators only a difficult, tenuous allegiance to the values that prevail in their own periods. Hence the myth laden image of the modernist hero sustained by the understanding of a few contemporaries and a belief in a future reward. Tourists, no matter how tolerant, have no place in the vicinity of such images. And yet SoHo’s tourists are so well-primed, so fully cued by culture-hype, that many of them can give a stereotyped account of the innovator’s isolated ordeal off the top of their heads. I’ve heard them do it when explaining why this or that artist is their current favorite. But this doesn’t explain SoHo’s fascination with the outsiders it attracts.

Not every SoHo-ite hides out on Saturday afternoons. Some of the hippest are out there performing, along with the Emmett Kelly rip-off and the string quartet and the sidewalk theater people. The hip role, of course, is that of the “serious, innovative artist” put upon by untutored, no-style hordes. SoHo-ites who would not be caught dead playing this role on Saturday for the tourists will often spend the rest of the week playing it for one another. Complaints about SoHo’s popularity, its commercialization, its growing domesticity, are staples of local art talk. The tourists thus exert substantial pressures on the lives—and imaginations—of a large segment of SoHo’s permanent population.

Style, Hype, and Trivialization

Certain SoHo-ites, like certain Upper East Siders, are functions of their addresses. They define themselves with the help of SoHo’s clear boundaries, its designation as a landmark neighborhood, its endlessly publicized reputation as the white­ hot center of New York’s art scene. Since the hype ensures the presence of tourists, it is clear that—despite ritual laments—the true SoHo-ite takes on added stature in his own eyes to the extent that he is the focus of outsiders’ attention. Thus, while the neighborhood’s art-zone label doesn’t have much to do with serious art, it does touch on the public side of the innovative artist myth. The inhabitant of SoHo is officially encouraged to re-enact the traditional conflict between bourgeois and bohemian, establishment and avant-garde, cultural stability and the culture’s destabilizing forces.

Despite changes in style over the last two hundred years, that conflict is still fundamental to our world. In the past, the artist’s challenges to the culture-at-large took place on the establishment’s home ground, according to establishment rules. Now that latter-day aspirants to the new are trooping to Sotto to be entertained, to spot trends, to sense the shape of the future, true SoHo-ites feel that a shift in the balance of cultural power has taken place. The establishment vs. avant-garde conflict seems to be taking place on their home ground, according to their rules. So, underneath it all, they are happy to see the dazed bourgeois stragglers—the tourists—crowding their sidewalks, just as the tourists are happy to have found such a fun place to spend a Saturday afternoon.

What keeps this from being a completely empty play of public images is that, as tourist crowds have increased, a new, consumer-style generation of collectors has come along. They are usually not heavy spenders. Their loyalties to their favorite artists are often shallow. They tend to drop art as quickly as they pick it up. But, as they cultivate the role of “serious, committed collectors,” they provide essential momentum to SoHo’s present direction.

Genuinely innovative art challenges the culture, requiring it to readjust its values before it can accept the new—before the avant-garde prodigal can return to the bourgeois fold. The trouble with true SoHo­ites is that their innovator’s image—displayed in person as well as in their art—offers no real challenge even to the most banal aspects of our consumer culture. This suggests why tourists flock to SoHo and why they are getting to feel so much at home there.

None of this affects the serious collector. Nor does it affect serious artists who stays in SoHo because they like their lofts, because they see no art-zone without the same disadvantages, because it doesn’t matter where they are—their art reflects sensibilities keyed to interior concerns and thereby insulated from hype. But SoHo is not defined by serious artists. It is defined by those artists and dealers, collectors, curators, and critics who rely for a sense of themselves on the neighborhood’s image in the culture-at-large. As that image gets more effectively defined, SoHo transforms itself into an aesthetic Disneyland, a theme park based on the history of the modernist struggle.

This is what officially sanctioned, media-certified SoHo has made of the first-generation legacy. The energy of the neighborhood preserves its buildings, enhances its real estate values, and provides New York’s tourist industry with a fresh attraction. And it provides a place for the graduates of fine-arts programs throughout the country. But these benefits entail the trivialization of cultural values. The clarity with which SoHo defines itself will subject the area, in future seasons, to even more intensely focused attention from agents of trivia, which include government funding offices, hoping to extend their bureaucratic reach; private corporations, hoping to launder their images by associating them with new art; a public that treats art as entertainment; collectors who treat it as fashion; dealers, curators, and critics who do the same. The list of trivializers could be extended, but let’s stop with its most important member: the true SoHo-ite, the artist who is working to bring a stylish shallowness to the heritage of the New York School’s first generation.