An uncommon guide and an enjoyable countercultural and personal history.
A lucid, engaging “panoramic essay” about the artsy New York neighborhood now overrun by upscale shops and bohemian wannabes.
New York’s SoHo, not to be confused with London’s similarly-named Soho neighborhood, is an acronym for South of Houston (pronounced HOW-stun) Street, a major east-west thoroughfare in lower Manhattan. The area’s first incarnation in the 1840s was as a fashionable shopping district, an identity to which it has recently returned; many of its ubiquitous cast-iron facades date from that period. A SoHo pioneer, Kostelanetz offers cogent and humorous observations on its famous and not-so-famous denizens, from composer Philip Glass to real-estate speculator and “founder” George Maciunas. He goes on to outline the melange of conditions that serendipitously engendered and then fostered this community of artists beginning in the early 1960s, when it was still an industrial slum “clogged with trucks and truckers.” The author recounts his own parallel history from uptown academic to downtown hipster, providing insights into the fortuitous circumstances that led to SoHo’s astonishing revival completely outside the more contrived large-scale efforts of urban renewal advocates. Kostelanetz offers several reasons for the neighborhood’s successful gentrification by artists, art-lovers, and the first gallery owners, among them the quantity of cheap commercial space, city tax abatements, and the relaxation of building codes that permitted artists to live legally in lofts. Beyond these sociological and economic underpinnings, however, he provides an array of anecdotes that convey the true flavor of SoHo during that era, from a course in freight-elevator etiquette to a description of mining Dumpsters for furniture and art supplies. By the 1990s, newcomers outnumbered veterans, and the artists and writers of SoHo, Kostelanetz among them, dispersed into the urban landscape.
An uncommon guide and an enjoyable countercultural and personal history.Pub Date: June 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-415-96572-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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