SoHo lofts were decayed commercial spaces repurposed into art venues

Evidence

Writing in Artforum, the painter–film critic Manny Farber, a near-neighbor living on Warren Street, would call Wavelength “a pure tough forty-five-minutes that may become the Birth of a Nation in Underground films” as well as “a straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1119

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s gentrification-origin question: the loft’s prior commercial tenants failed before artists moved in — the artists moved into bankrupt manufacturing space, then later displaced others. — connects to: Olympic regeneration replaced London’s wild liminal spaces with commercialized dead zones — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 467