Artist-made junk art emerged from the rubble and refuse of industrial SoHo streets

Evidence

Deeper underground, Jack Smith had begun staging Saturday midnight performances (and later slide shows) at his duplex loft on the corner of Grand and Greene Streets, the Plaster Foundation of Atlantis, named for the pile of debris left on the floor after Smith knocked down half of the ceiling that separated his two floors. Evolving as it incorporated all manner of junk found on the streets of still industrial SoHo, this rubble heap surrounded a lagoon-like contraption complete with a plastic tubing waterfall the artist fashioned from an inflatable child’s wading pool. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1568

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the trees/gentrification piece only weakly, but the cheap-rent junk-material condition of making art from street debris is a concrete datapoint for the reader’s gentrification-origin thesis.
• QUESTION: The conditions claim: Smith’s plaster/junk palace was possible because SoHo was still industrial and cheap — worth tracking how rent levels enabled the material itself.