Walter Wadas: Employed by the Harvard University Art Museums; frequent contributor to Bay Windows (Boston gay weekly)
On the gay history trail, 99 Wooster Street is a signal address. That's where the "Gay Firehouse" of the Gay Activist Alliance fame stood. Founded during the months of fertile activism following the Stonewall Inn riot, GAA had located its headquarters in New York's SoHo in 1970.
About that time, SoHo was a kind of no-place, a trapezoidal oblivion on the map of lower Manhattan. Taking its name from its location as the area south of Houston — pronounced "How-ston" — Street, the acronym is nevertheless pronounced "So-Hoe" not "So-How." SoHo lies south of Greenwich Village proper — the West Village — as distinct from that thriving site of 1960s counter culture, the East Village — and north of Wall Street and the financial district. TriBeCa, when it came into existence later, claimed SoHo's southern portion below Canal Street. Despite having lower Broadway as its eastern boundary, SoHo had been a place without any preexisting, geographical cachet. Comprised of 34 blocks, longer on two parallel sides, shorter on the other two, traversed by a grid of streets often wide by lower Manhattan expectations, what SoHo has is surprising architectural uniformity. The buildings filling its blocks are very likely late nineteenth or early twentieth century structures, six stories in height, with cast iron facades. Previously busy with manufacturing or light industry, by the 1960s, these buildings were often all or in part neglected and disused. Characteristic for their wide-spaced beam construction, their interiors had open-floor plans unencumbered by interior dividing walls. Most had freight elevators. But shriven of their slogging trades, these buildings not only looked empty, they appeared useless. Robert Kostelanetz, the author of “SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony,” settled in SoHo in 1974. That was when he "discovered a building whose floors were concrete, and whose spaces were both quiet and warm around the clock." Some pioneers, perhaps, need more creature comforts than others; but Kostelanetz had begun, so he writes, to visit SoHo more often in the 1960s. A graduate student far uptown at Columbia University, Kostelanetz first "changed his cultural outlook from academic to bohemian" by moving downtown to the East Village in 1966. Earlier settlers had already been staking claim to and colonizing SoHo. Chiefly these were avant-garde artists, performers and conceptualizers who worked and thought in big and often unconventional ways. George Maciunas was purchasing buildings and turning them into "Fluxhouses." The Performing Garage opened and was putting on extravaganzas like Dionysius in 69, which in contradiction of its title premiered in 1968. Twyla Tharp inaugurated her dance company. Paula Cooper and Ivan Karp started their own art galleries. To this fecundity of creativity, Kostelanetz attends with zeal. The 1960s and 1970s are the decades of his "rise" of SoHo. As history, SoHo is raw, undigested and chunky with astute partisanship. Kostelanetz savored a smorgasbord of tangy and delectable people: from Phillip Glass to David Bowie to Sonic Youth, from Twyla Tharp to Cindy Sherman to Romare Bearden to Jonas Mekas to Robert Mapplethorpe. The cast of characters overflows his cornucopia. But SoHo is a "fall" as well as an ascendancy. By 1980, Kostelanetz laments an "abundance of shoppers" and by 1990 "the sidewalks … have become clogged with peddlers." When Prada, Cartier and Apple Computer move in, Kostelanetz is ready to move out, because, alas. the SoHo that Richard Kostelanetz loved is no mo'. As he was completing this book, Richard Kostelanetz sold his SoHo property—for a hefty profit — and moved to Rockaway Beach, Queens. He neglects to mention that the Gay Activists Alliance had vacated SoHo even earlier. In October 1976, arsonists firebombed the "Gay Firehouse" and GAA closed its doors forever shortly thereafter.commenting closed for this article