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There’s an 1880s Queen Anne–style building on the Bowery in New York that has a certain air of mysticism about it. Where the energy is immediate and powerful, toeing the line between then and now. It’s sure to make it into the history books one day—if not for the Romanesque Revival–style architecture or for withstanding the neighborhood’s reinvention from skid row to a trendy boulevard of boutique hotels and cocktail bars, then for its role as a creative compound for a band of artists, poets, and writers whose work helped shape the latter half of the 20th century.
Clad in red brick with forest green window trim and graffiti covering the windows on the first floor, the building has been home to poet, artist, and activist John Giorno for over half a century. He keeps three apartments spread across various floors there, living, working, and entertaining with his husband, artist Ugo Rondinone, when they’re not staying uptown at Ugo’s church or out east at their Mattituck escape.
“Everything in my life happens by accident,” says Giorno one morning this summer, folded into an armchair in his third-floor loft. “It was 1962 and I had just come back from seven months in Morocco, and a friend living upstairs [artist, filmmaker, and author Wynn Chamberlain] was using this as a storage place, and then he didn’t need it anymore. So I said, ‘Well, can I rent it for a month?’” Giorno recalls with a laugh. “And that month became my life.”
The painting that hangs to the right of the fireplace in the third-floor loft features Giorno’s four-times-great-grandfather, who was born in 1771 in a town in southern Italy.
Built in 1884 at the request of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the palazzo-style structure was the home of New York’s first YMCA until it was closed down in 1932 due to low membership. Some years later, American abstract painter John Opper was the first artist to set up a studio in the building, attracted to the abundance of natural light, open space, and cheap rent. He was soon followed by Mark Rothko, James Brooks, and Wynn Chamberlain. Over the following years, countless creatives and titans of the downtown scene would pass through the space; it’s on the building’s top floor where Andy Warhol filmed one of his seminal films, Sleep, featuring Giorno fast asleep for five hours, and where Wynn Chamberlain gave a now famous 27th-birthday party for John. Billed as a “Pop birthday party for a young poet,” the affair was attended by some 80 people, including the likes of Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Liechtenstein, Frank O’Hara, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Frank Stella, and John Ashbery. They would all go on to define their genres, but at the time they were just young artists on the cusp of fame. “It was an unusual moment in 1963; many things have happened here, you can imagine,” muses Giorno.
His third-floor loft, where he spends the most time, is bright and airy, with two enormous picture windows that frame the space. There’s a small jungle of trees and an eclectic mix of secondhand furniture—a majority of it came from the attic of his childhood home on Long Island—arranged unintentionally, though it’s clear the room has been put together by someone with an artist’s eye. It’s a tableau of his parents’s home, as he calls it. Mismatched Victorian armchairs, sourced for various rooms around their house, gather in front of the grand fireplace, which is decorated with chalk figures Giorno re-draws each year, and oriental rugs from his mother gather underfoot.
Thank you
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/inside-john-giornos-eclectic-storied-loft-on-the-bowery
Clad in red brick with forest green window trim and graffiti covering the windows on the first floor, the building has been home to poet, artist, and activist John Giorno for over half a century. He keeps three apartments spread across various floors there, living, working, and entertaining with his husband, artist Ugo Rondinone, when they’re not staying uptown at Ugo’s church or out east at their Mattituck escape.
“Everything in my life happens by accident,” says Giorno one morning this summer, folded into an armchair in his third-floor loft. “It was 1962 and I had just come back from seven months in Morocco, and a friend living upstairs [artist, filmmaker, and author Wynn Chamberlain] was using this as a storage place, and then he didn’t need it anymore. So I said, ‘Well, can I rent it for a month?’” Giorno recalls with a laugh. “And that month became my life.”
The painting that hangs to the right of the fireplace in the third-floor loft features Giorno’s four-times-great-grandfather, who was born in 1771 in a town in southern Italy.
Built in 1884 at the request of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the palazzo-style structure was the home of New York’s first YMCA until it was closed down in 1932 due to low membership. Some years later, American abstract painter John Opper was the first artist to set up a studio in the building, attracted to the abundance of natural light, open space, and cheap rent. He was soon followed by Mark Rothko, James Brooks, and Wynn Chamberlain. Over the following years, countless creatives and titans of the downtown scene would pass through the space; it’s on the building’s top floor where Andy Warhol filmed one of his seminal films, Sleep, featuring Giorno fast asleep for five hours, and where Wynn Chamberlain gave a now famous 27th-birthday party for John. Billed as a “Pop birthday party for a young poet,” the affair was attended by some 80 people, including the likes of Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Liechtenstein, Frank O’Hara, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Frank Stella, and John Ashbery. They would all go on to define their genres, but at the time they were just young artists on the cusp of fame. “It was an unusual moment in 1963; many things have happened here, you can imagine,” muses Giorno.
His third-floor loft, where he spends the most time, is bright and airy, with two enormous picture windows that frame the space. There’s a small jungle of trees and an eclectic mix of secondhand furniture—a majority of it came from the attic of his childhood home on Long Island—arranged unintentionally, though it’s clear the room has been put together by someone with an artist’s eye. It’s a tableau of his parents’s home, as he calls it. Mismatched Victorian armchairs, sourced for various rooms around their house, gather in front of the grand fireplace, which is decorated with chalk figures Giorno re-draws each year, and oriental rugs from his mother gather underfoot.
Thank you
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/inside-john-giornos-eclectic-storied-loft-on-the-bowery