Cheap rent of $100 a month enabled artist cooperatives to form in Lower Manhattan

Evidence

The rent for what New York Times reporter Grace Glueck called an “improbable” 8,000 square feet (including the basement) was, by one account, an even more improbable $100 per month. … The ten-member Park Place Group was evenly divided between sculptors and painters, although only one, Tamara Melcher, was female. Many, including Dean Fleming, Peter Forakis, Forrest Myers, Melcher, and Leo Valledor, came from the Bay Area; a number were graduates of the California School of Fine Arts. Fond of terms like space-warp, optic energy, and four-dimensional geometry, the transplanted Californians were relaxed regarding new technology and unafraid of retinal kicks. … Theirs was an inclusive counterculture. They read Scientific American, dug the futuristic architect Buckminster Fuller (inventor of the geodesic dome), and pondered media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Inspired by Ornette Coleman, another West Coast émigré, the artists expressed themselves through the marathon Free Jazz (or “no jazz jazz”) sessions held at their original home, 79 Park Place, a five-story loft building on the eastern edge of the condemned Washington Street Market. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 986

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s core argument: cheap rent as the material precondition for avant-garde density — test case against claims about why culture stagnates now.
• SEED: The $100/month 8,000-square-foot space is a concrete anchor for an article on how obsolete commercial districts subsidize avant-gardes.