Artists’ presence in SoHo triggered the real estate price surge that displaced them

Evidence

SoHo was saved. Although the city shut down the Cinematheque in August, Dionysus in ’69, which had received an enthusiastic review from the New York Times in June, put SoHo on the theatrical map. Cabs were no longer afraid to go there. By then Paula Cooper opened SoHo’s first gallery three flights up in a former shelving factory at 96 Prince. Cooper, who started her gallery with 1,400 from the sale of a di Suvero and a 3,000 bank loan, had to renovate a space so raw “you’d get splinters if you touched the floor.” Still, she had two enormous rooms of 5,000 square feet each for $300 a month. Her first show was a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Less than two years later, Grace Glueck warned that, rather than an achieved utopia, SoHo was a “last resort” for New York arts. Two months after that the Times ran a story headlined COSTS FOR SOHO LOFTS ARE RISING DRASTICALLY. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1983

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly serves the core thesis: artists as unwitting advance guard of gentrification. This is the origin of the turf-war material — the ‘$300/month for 5,000 sq ft’ then ‘costs rising drastically’ sequence is the purest gentrification-origin data point in the chapter.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s shelf claims about why culture stagnates now — the density of invention was literally conditional on absurdly cheap big space, which is the exact material condition that later vanished. — connects to: Artists unknowingly trigger gentrification that displaces poor racialized residents — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 462