One Hot Street In Soho

“However, no place in America was ever a rich as one block in SoHo during 1970 to 1990 or so—Wooster Street between Houston and Prince Streets.”

In the history of New York City culture, there have been fertile locations, sometimes a single building or a pair of buildings, other times a single street, in which several major people happened to reside at a certain time. 51 W. 10th Street was such a building in the late 19th century; so were the Strunsky apartments opposite the southwest corner of Washington Square in the 1930s. Around 1950, perhaps half of the most prominent African-Americans in New York City resided at either 409 or 555 Edgecombe Avenue high in north Harlem’s Sugar Hill. Several famous Columbia professors resided on southern Claremont Avenue, one block west of Broadway, in the decades after World War II.

However, no place in America was ever a rich as one block in SoHo during 1970 to 1990 or so—Wooster Street between Houston and Prince Streets. Since I resided there for most of those years, I can testify that the notion of its exemplary status never occurred to us then. Indeed, it didn’t occur to me when I wrote my 2003 book of The Rise and Fall of Artists’ SoHo. Sometime later, my coop partner at 141 Wooster, Larry Qualls, put the idea in my head. Looking back, I realize we were too busy to recognize its exceptionality at the time.

Among the people residing here then (and some still) were the theater artists Richard Foreman, Kate Mannheim, and Hanne Tierney; the visual artists Lynda Benglis, James Seawright, Frank Roth, Judith Henry, Tony King, Susanna Tanger, Shirley Smith, Christopher & Susan Wilmarth, Michelle Stuart, Joyce Kozloff and her husband Max; videographers Charlotta Schoolman and Jaime Davidovich, choreographer Mimi Garrard, the architect Richard Olcott, the graphic designer Michael Grossman, and the visual poet Jonathan Price.

One neighborhood celebrity was Rene Modica, who from his Wooster Street storefront painted his motto “I Am The Best Artist” in various SoHo locations. The artists’ restaurant known only as FOOD occupied a Prince Street corner from 1971 for several years. The periodical Lacanian Ink was founded and published on this block; October was partially edited there. Both still survive.

One peculiarity of my building was the number of critics, mostly of film: Annette Michelson, Amy Taubin, Daryl Chin, Daile Kaplan, and Qualls. Next door lived Edit de Ak and Walter Robinson when they produced the magazine Art-Rite. Michael Snow’s classic film Wavelength (1973) was made in our building. On this northernmost block of Wooster Street George Waterman amassed his incomparable collection of books about modern art, and, incidentally, I became a media artist in addition to writing books of poetry, fiction, experimental prose, and cultural criticism. Within the hothouse that was Artists’ SoHo, ours was perhaps the hottest street of all.