Downtown rents pulled the avant-garde’s center of gravity south

Evidence

As 1967 ended, Andy Warhol lost his lease at East Forty-Seventh Street and moved the Factory downtown to Sixteenth Street, across Union Square from its de facto commissary, Max’s Kansas City. Maciunas continued to colonize SoHo. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1131

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete data point for the claim that cheap midtown rents still beat downtown — now reversing as SoHo becomes the cheap alternative. Connects to the book’s core thesis about material conditions producing avant-gardes and to reader’s gentrification test case.