New York SoHo's "Illegal Residents" and More Than Half a Century of Fighting for the Right to Housing

"Housing is a right, not a commodity." But the artists who once made it here have gradually left.

Today "loft" means a decorating style that mixes work and living space, a way of life fashionable among the young. But half a century ago, the loft's "inventors" were living illegally in the factories and warehouses of SoHo, in New York's Lower Manhattan.

For those artists, living there meant the heat going off every day after five in the afternoon, and surprise inspections by the police and the fire department. Next door were empty warehouses piled with scrap cloth and discarded chemicals nobody could name.

Starting in the 1960s, they fought for the legal right to live there.

SoHo is 26 blocks in Lower Manhattan; the name is short for "South of Houston Street." Today this cluster of cast-iron buildings is a crowded tourist destination known for its galleries and luxury boutiques. But at night in the 1960s and 70s it was close to a ghost town.

The Japanese-American artist Yukie Ohta was born here, on the fifth floor of an industrial building. The family workshops that once filled SoHo had been failing one by one; in the 1950s and 60s much of that light industry moved to cities in Asia. It was in those years that Yukie's father moved from Japan to the United States. He never finished high school in Japan, but in New York he became the student of a married couple who were artists. "It's hard to imagine what my father would have done in Japan. But America in those years pulled in countless people like him."

In 2015 Yukie started an oral-history project on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, tracing the history of the SoHo community. "Say SoHo now and people think first of its gloss and its air of art — the galleries of the past, the luxury boutiques of today. Its history seems to fit into a sentence or two: industry declined, artists found the place, rents were cheap, and the big rooms happened to suit making art. But how this community came into being out of nothing — that part, it seems to me, nobody has ever told."

"In the Sixties, SoHo Wasn't Yet SoHo"

Chuck Close was one of SoHo's earliest tenants. What the photorealist painter found when he moved in in 1967 were rats running loose in the streets, trucks, garbage trucks, and heaps of scrap cloth along the curb.

Yukie remembers that even the utilities kept office hours: every day at five in the afternoon, when the factories closed, the heat went off across the whole district. "In the sixties, SoHo wasn't yet SoHo," Yukie told QDaily. "We used coal stoves back then. The coal men would dump a pile of coal on the street corner, but you had to carry it up to the fifth floor yourself."

The garbage trucks kept office hours too. They took away the waste from light industry and the craft workshops, but there was no collection for ordinary household trash. The industrial district had no schools, no clinics, no grocery stores. The few restaurants were workers' canteens, open only in the daytime.

"Nobody then would have put SoHo lofts and the word 'fashionable' in the same sentence." The middle class's ideal address was the near suburbs, not this filthy district that went dark every night. The buildings with cast-iron façades came close to being torn down to make room for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, but a historic-preservation campaign fought the plan and it was shelved. Not until 1973 did the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission place the cast-iron district under protection.

The first conversions were done by individuals. Artists rented the factory floors and improvised: taping plastic sheeting over the windows against the cold, or putting up partitions inside to mark off functions — studio, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom.

As more people moved in, with little infrastructure and few resources, they formed a close community in which everyone knew everyone — the "utopian" phase many artists' communities pass through at the start. Yukie remembers that the "currency" in circulation then wasn't money; people traded time and participation. They set up a community daycare, and the parents took turns looking after the children.

Not until 1971 did the neighborhood get its first proper restaurant, FOOD, run by three artists who had taken over a former factory canteen. Inside FOOD you could still see hand-painted decorations in Spanish: most of SoHo's original workers had come from Spanish-speaking countries such as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

But all of it was "illegal." Loft landlords had no right to rent buildings zoned for industry or business to artists as studios or homes. Another of Yukie's childhood "renovation jobs" was covering the windows so that nobody could look in from the street. In her oral-history project, many people described having to hide their household things in a hurry whenever the police or the fire department turned up unannounced.

Sharon Zukin, a professor at the City University of New York, has studied the history of loft living in SoHo. She calls this illegal status a vicious circle: artists could not get a bank mortgage to buy a loft, and loft landlords could not get loans or repair funds either, so they had no reason to turn the factory floors into places fit to live in.

A.I.R. (the Artists Tenants Association): Telling Firefighters Which Factory Floor an Artist Lived On

In 1961 a group called the Artists Tenants Association was founded in New York. It began demanding that the city's public agencies recognize a legal right to live in these buildings, and that the law hold rent increases to a reasonable level — which, the group argued, would help make New York an emerging art market.

"Housing is a right, not a commodity," Sharon Zukin told QDaily. That was the ground the artists stood on in the sixties when they fought for the right to live legally, and it was part of the rebellious spirit of the whole decade. "In a developer's logic, housing is a consumer good: if you don't have enough buying power, you can't afford it and you settle for less. But the right to housing asks who has the right to live in a place, and whether people who have lived there a long time have the right not to be evicted."

The tenants association's first action was a "strike." They brought in the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many well-known artists, pulled their work out of New York's museums, galleries and other institutions, and declared that it would stay out "until this city recognizes the legality of our living and working spaces."

That run of actions produced the "A.I.R." program of 1961: Robert Wagner, then New York's mayor, allowed artists to live in industrial buildings. A.I.R. was a placard, and it stood for "Artist in Residence Status." Artists could apply to the city, and each industrial building could house up to two artists' households, provided it had an emergency exit and a rebuilt sewer connection.

The A.I.R. placard hung outside the building's door and marked the exact spot where the artist lived, so that in a fire the firefighters could tell at once whether anyone inside needed rescuing, instead of taking the building for an empty factory.

But before SoHo's artists could even apply, New York halted all A.I.R. applications in 1963.

The following spring the tenants association organized another round of protest: more than 80 of New York's top galleries announced they would close, and artists marched outside City Hall. That led to an amendment to the New York State Multiple Dwellings Law allowing "qualified artists" to use these industrial spaces to work or to live in. But the real provision was not added until 1982 — what people came to call the Loft Law.

SoHo's artists also formed an organization of their own. The SoHo Artists Association (SAA), founded in 1969, set out to improve living conditions in SoHo, win legal status for loft living, and keep SoHo rents within what artists could pay.

SAA also tried to fill the gaps in public services. The New York police reckoned that crime in SoHo — murder, rape, burglary — was climbing steadily, and SAA tried various ways of reminding residents to protect themselves while lobbying the city to put in streetlights and alarms. It also succeeded in getting garbage collection brought in.

In 1970 SAA held the SoHo Art Festival, opening artists' studios to the public for the first time in the hope of winning public support. The Village Voice covered it, writing that "climbing the stairs into the lofts, you can breathe an excitement moving between the artists' living rooms, parlors and studios — nothing like the deadness of the rest of the city. This is a young community being born."

Who Counted as a "Qualified" Artist, Allowed to Stay?

In 1969 New York City's planning department ran a survey across several districts, SoHo among them. It found that factory floors larger than 5,000 square feet (about 465 square meters) were still in light-industrial use, while spaces under 5,000 square feet had mostly become storage or been filled with junk. Most artists, the survey said, lived in these smaller spaces, and their presence did not get in the way of the blue-collar workers.

On the strength of that survey, New York City's Board of Estimate approved a measure in 1971 letting "qualified" artists move into SoHo's industrial buildings — most of the spaces were smaller than 3,600 square feet (about 335 square meters) — and drafted a plan under which other districts could follow SoHo's example and convert spaces that had been unusable and uninhabitable.

A review committee of 20 people vetted the applications; half were well-known artists, half worked in art-related fields. Yukie found a 1971 news report that set out in detail what an artist had to submit:

• A brief account of the art you make
• What kind of space does this work require?
• Your education, professional training, exhibitions or performances held, and any criticism or awards from your peers
• If the three items above do not represent you well, you may supply other relevant material, such as a portfolio, or invite a committee member to visit your studio and assess it
• Two letters of recommendation

The Loft Law and "the Bloomberg Exclusions"

The Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants Association, founded in 1978, demanded that landlords meet their obligations and make lofts safe to use. It won the backing of well-known artists including Andy Warhol, and the Hollywood actress Meryl Streep added her name too.

In the 1980s, members of the association went up to Albany, the state capital, to lobby legislators there. To explain what this half-work, half-living hybrid space in an industrial district actually was, the artists brought presentation documents, sculptures and "small performances." The architect Arthur Atlas was one of them; in an interview he recalled that the officials had no idea what a loft was and did not seem to care much, but were "very interested" in the small performances.

The lobbying finally brought Article 7 of the New York State Multiple Dwelling Law into force in 1982. The article set out what kinds of space could be rented to artists as work and living space, and guaranteed that such interim occupancy was legal. People simply called it the Loft Law.

A landlord found to have illegally rented out a building that did not meet the rules, without an occupancy permit, could neither evict the tenants nor go on collecting rent. That also meant, of course, that the tenants had chosen for themselves to live in places that were illegal and even dangerous to life.

Under the Loft Law, the landlords of these industrial and commercial buildings had to renovate — putting in the required heating, hot water, fire equipment and emergency exits — and obtain a Certificate of Occupancy before they could rent. Long-term tenants whose applications went through could not be evicted, and rent increases were held to a relatively steady rate.

Even this year, though, SoHo's residents are still fighting for the right to live there legally. In 2010 Michael Bloomberg, then the city's mayor, amended the Loft Law, adding conditions on which lofts could apply — windows facing the outer street, a basement — and a deadline: after June 15, 2017, neither the law nor its board would accept new applications. The press called Bloomberg's additions "the Bloomberg Exclusions."

The Cave was one of the art spaces they caught. Founded in 1996 by the Japanese artist Shige Moriya, it has all its windows facing an interior street, so it fails Bloomberg's added conditions. Fewer and fewer art spaces are left in SoHo now.

Loft: How Did It Get Sold as a Way of Life?

Even before the Loft Law passed in 1982, property developers had smelled the money behind lofts. Sharon Zukin says that by the mid-1970s, before the government had fully recognized the right to live in one, real estate agents were already working this new market. "They called it the Gold Coast of lofts."

In the 1950s the near suburbs were the ideal way of life for an American middle-class family: pastoral scenery, a safe distance from the decaying industrial districts downtown, work kept apart from family life, a commute by car.

A 1970 article in Life magazine, Living Big in a Loft, reported that "behind these filthy building façades lurks an artists' 'colony' ... Besides the 16-foot (about 4.88-meter) ceilings, you can also feel a sense of community here."

A few months later New York magazine looked at a group of artists living in SoHo: "They have built modern kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, all of it a single wall away from their studios. When night falls, SoHo's workers have to go home. They don't. They have been home all along."

"Those big photographs, the interior decoration, the high spaces and the light all created the air of a good family life — the same 'atmosphere' the old suburban ideal once had," writes Sharon Zukin, who studied how this way of life was "manufactured" in her book Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change.

Listings for rent and for sale at the time reached again and again for the same phrases: "open-plan space," "high ceilings," "large windows," "live among artists," "industrial style." The pricier options might add "a roof garden" or "the only glass elevator in Lower Manhattan" ...

In 1979 Sharon Zukin bought a loft herself. "Yes, I have to admit it: we were new loft residents too, and it was people like us who 'drove out' the artists." Over the decades since, some of her old neighbors have left the district — factory owners and artists who could not carry the high rents, and artists who sold their property and found space elsewhere. Her new neighbors include two lawyers and an accountant. "Gentrification here is complete. The galleries are long gone. SoHo today is an upscale neighborhood."

SoHo's social and economic development brought commercial prosperity. Not long after the artists won their legal status and the Loft Law passed, galleries began moving out of the district; most went to Chelsea, where the rents were more reasonable.

SoHo's art spaces were taken over, little by little, by a new set of tenants: luxury boutiques, restaurants, bars, nightclubs. The district became a new landmark of nightlife, and with it came an irritating amount of noise; the SoHo Alliance tried to get a liquor ban. The alliance's work has since shifted to the ordinary business of community life, rather than serving artists as it did early on — its other concerns include the traffic jams and the shortage of parking caused by the crowds of street vendors on weekends.

"You could say all this satisfies people's idea of art and their appetite for it. It's a narrow thing: art and historic preservation thinned down to their most commercial side — a consumption of 'atmosphere' and 'taste,'" Sharon Zukin says. "Preserving SoHo's cast-iron buildings isn't hard. Preserving the original residents is close to impossible. That is the failing of historic-preservation movements everywhere in the world, China included."

Cover image: Wikimedia Commons