Living Against the Rules: SoHo Lofts and 101 Spring Street
Kenny Wong
Artists often excel at breaking the rules. In 1960s SoHo, this became vital to making a place in New York City for their life and work. In the process, they profoundly changed the rules of urban development and shaped the architecture we desire today.
Changing the Rules: SoHo Lofts and 101 Spring Street
Artists’ lofts were a unique vehicle of urban revitalization in mid-1960s New York City. The illegal residential conversions of industrial lofts in the South Houston Industrial Area, or SoHo, brought the disused building type back into urban and economic life through artists seeking an affordable place to live and work. These pioneering artists recaptured the latent use value of industrial lofts as they took advantage of low rents and ample space to informally and illegally occupy them as homes and studios. Through their organizing and cultural clout, they were able to bend the rules of the city to make a place for themselves. Yet by considering the political economy of living lofts, it can be seen that a unique conjuncture of social, cultural and economic factors is what allowed this shift in use, borne out of scrappy necessity, to be successful. The history of Donald Judd’s studio and residence at 101 Spring Street provides a focal point to illustrate the unfolding dynamics that shaped this neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Many cities have since pursued strategies of revitalization through the arts and mixed-use housing—seeking to harness their own “SoHo effect”—but it is arguable that SoHo’s particular version of success may ultimately be one that both cities and artists would be wise to avoid. Ironically, their creative success in adapting ways of living in the city changed the game of urban development, and the rapid increase in exchange value of SoHo real estate that followed would in turn displace many artists as the neighborhood grew beyond what anyone could imagine.!
101 Spring Street
In November 1968, Donald Judd purchased 101 Spring Street
(Fig.1)
.Fresh from staging a successful solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Judd bought the 1870 manufacturing loft with a cast-iron facade at the northeast corner of Spring and Mercer Streets for $68,000. As many other artists of the time also found, the old industrial buildings south of Houston Street were spacious and—most importantly—affordable. Buildings were in various states of disrepair, some lacking hot water and heating, but they provided the room for artists to live and produce large-scale artwork. Subversively, they all flouted legal restrictions on the use of industrially-zoned properties for their residence and livelihood. Judd’s particular loft contained 8,500 square feet across five large open floors and two levels of basement on a 75’ by 25’ lot. The qualities of this space were unmatched by anything conventionally residential. Most of SoHo’s cast-iron buildings were built in the 19th century when the area emerged as a warehouse and dry-goods commercial district. Uninterrupted interiors for storage were coupled with large expanses of glazing on the facade for natural lighting. At 101 Spring Street, 7,000 square feet of facade was comprised of 40 window bays. The cast-iron structure allowed such a thin envelope that the composition can be considered a predecessor of the modern glass curtain wall. Like the art he produced, Judd valued the raw quality of 101 Spring Street for its directness of expression. In his plainspoken language, Judd writes of the studio in 1989:
"I thought the building should be repaired and basically not changed. It is a 19th century building. It was pretty certain that each floor had been open, since there were no signs of original walls, which determined that each floor should have one purpose: sleeping, eating, working."
Despite the fact that living lofts were mixing living and working at the urban scale, at the architectural scale 101 Spring Street kept divisions in the use of space intact. From the first floor up to the fifth, each floor’s use was respectively dedicated to meeting, eating, working, socializing, and sleeping
(Figures 2, 3, 4)
.Judd’s minor alterations to the interior surfaces accentuated this approach to differentiation. On the third floor, there is no base board and a gap between the floor and walls forces a reading of the floor as a separate plane. On the fourth floor, both floor and ceiling are clad in the same oak material. Finally, on the fifth floor the high baseboard is made of the same oak as the floorboards, creating a reading of the floor as a recessed plane. Across them all, artworks by Judd and others were installed permanently to be viewed as their authors intended. These highly specific interventions work together to resist the homogenization of space within the large, industrial building. Yet outside of its walls, the dynamics of the changing city were conspiring to flattening lofts into abstracted, exchangeable space as real estate.
What Goes Where: Deindustrializing New York
In the early- to mid-1960s, New York City was in a time of economic transition and grappling with deindustrialization. Part of SoHo was surveyed by the City Club of New York in 1962 which condemned the neighborhood as urban blight. In a sharply titled 11-page report, The Wastelands of New York City, its author found the area ripe for immediate redevelopment and concluded it “should be regarded as a commercial slum and a better use should be found for the land it occupies” (Robbins 1962, 11). New York City’s planners had already foreshadowed these sentiments and set the city upon a path of renewal marked by major changes in land use. They had begun revisions to the city’s zoning laws in 1958 and completed them in 1961. In them, heavy industry was strictly ruled out of Manhattan, light manufacturing was constrained to its waterfronts, and the bulk of the island was cleared of industry through reassignments to commercial zoning (Zukin [1982] 2014, 41). While existing operations would be grandfathered in, the attrition over time would fulfill two longstanding interests for the New York upper class: to profit economically from the upgrading of real estate, and to socially rid Manhattan of industrial workers—a largely immigrant group (Zukin [1982] 2014, 37-38). The city actively helped to shepherd in the postmodern economy that was developing through growth in the service sectors. The finance, insurance, and real estate, or “FIRE”, industries were transforming the landscape through glass and steel office space to the amount of 3 million square feet a year between 1956 and 1965, bringing in white-collar jobs, and creating the pressure for their encroachment into SoHo (Shannon 2009, 160).
Despite the alignment of zoning laws and moneyed interests, there was a crucial uncertainty in the future of the neighborhood due to the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) proposed by Robert Moses. The expressway was to cut straight through the neighborhood along Kenmare and Broome Streets. It made no sense to landlords and developers to seek any improvements when faced with the possibility of the government razing the land for this massive piece of infrastructure, which kept loft prices and rents low, and discouraged them from lobbying for redevelopment into other uses as the Wastelands report had done (Petrus 2003, 62). In this political and economic fermata, artists were able to colonize the spaces left behind by the decline of urban industrialization and economic investment.
Space for Life and Work
Judd and his wife Julie Finch Judd, were important figures in the neighborhood’s 1968 mobilization against the expressway. The political group Artists Against the Expressway (AAE), which rallied artists, dealers, and patrons to oppose the project, listed 101 Spring Street as its administrative office on official letterhead (Wasserman 2015, 161). They and other opponents were victorious when Mayor Lindsay officially withdrew his support for the project in 1969. With this existential threat neutralized, SoHo artists moved to work towards greater security of tenure. The spread of artists into commercial loft spaces had also taken place in other neighborhoods besides SoHo, and a broad coalition formed the Artists’ Tenant Association (ATA) to advocate for their rights to residential occupancy. Judd himself had moved to 101 Spring Street from another loft near Gramercy Park at 53 East 19th Street. In 1961, the ATA gained the right for artists to reside in commercial spaces by striking and keeping their work out of the galleries and museums. The city conceded that residential use would be legalized for “certified” artists, recognizing their cultural capital and value in maintaining the city as a center for the arts (Petrus 2003, 64). It established the Artist in Residence (AIR) Program that created a panel to certify artists and allowed them to occupy commercial areas only if they were used for both living and working. Fire safety improvements and building inspections were required as part of the approval process, and occupancy would be communicated through AIR signs on the building. This precedent was followed by action at the state level in 1964 with Amendment 7-B to the Multiple Dwelling Law, which allowed artists to rent manufacturing and commercial space for combined live-work use and set similar code requirements (Zukin [1982] 2014, 52-53). However, these revisions created a bureaucratic approach that granted individual entitlements, and most artists in SoHo still occupied manufacturing and commercial properties illegally. Estimates at the early 1960s ranged from 5,000 to 7,000 artists in the area (Zukin [1982] 2014, 6). The expressway situation and the low building prices prevented the spending required for the process of artist certifications and building inspections. The SoHo Artists Association (SAA) recruited members from the AAE to make the case for legalization through the zoning code to allow residential use of manufacturing and commercial buildings (Petrus 2003, 68-69). Through this advocacy and negotiations with the city, the South Houston Industrial Area officially became “SoHo” with the rezoning and creation of an artist’s district in 1971
(Figure 5)
.In this zone of exception, artists’ residential use of manufacturing and commercial space was legalized and previous conversions were grandfathered in under the new resolution.
Loft Living as Lifestyle
Even though the market in living lofts proved itself to be extremely lucrative, the unconventional nature of the urban live-work studio would not have succeeded without concurrent changes in cultural perceptions. While the use value for social reproduction in the space of lofts provided a basis for their exchange value in the economy, that value was not guaranteed by any means. The cheap rent for lofts prior to the demise of the Lower Manhattan Expressway demonstrated this reality. However, when SoHo artists chose to use the media as a way to make their claims to loft space, in spite of “agonized” reservations about what it might lead to, they simultaneously guaranteed their success and demise (Zukin [1982] 2014, 117).