ABSTRACT
O nly when I discovered a building whose floors wereconcrete, and whose spaces were both quiet and warm around the clock, did I relocate to SoHo from the East Village. In 1974, Amy Taubin, then an actress, more recently a film critic, whom I’d known since high school, told me about a co-op into which she had just moved. On Wooster Street, just south of Houston Street, it housed factories that were closing. George Maciunas had purchased the entire building under the witty corporate title of the Good Deal Realty Corp. The space they had in mind for me, the back portion of a former jewelry factory, was used by Richard Foreman earlier that year for one of his theatrical productions, leaving behind good karma. Another positive factor was close proximity to various subways, in contrast, say, to the far East Village or certain sections of Brooklyn, which requires a hefty hike or a bus ride to the nearest subway station. As this loft had smaller windows that looked out not upon a
street but a West Broadway garage roof, mine cost less than others in the building. After purchasing 1,850 square feet for roughly $6.00 per square foot, I spent nearly as much on a renovation of this fairly “raw space.” My design included several partitions that ran from floor to ceiling, creating spaces behind closed doors that would elsewhere be called “rooms.” The monthly maintenance was $160 per month, which was slightly less than I’d been paying for rent in the East Village. By the beginning of October, just three months after I purchased and commissioned a renovation, a new love and I had moved in. Immediately above us was a pajama factory that stayed for several years, its Sephardic owners employing an Italian-American foreman and Portuguese immigrant seamstresses; on the top floor was a manufacturer of living-room drapes. On the sixth floor was a hat factory that, along with the drapesmen, soon moved out.
