Lawrence Holzworth

THE LAST OF THE BOHEMIANS

These stories are based on actual events.

The names have been changed.

THE ARTIST GHETTO

When I first moved to the city, I stayed with an old friend of mine in a small studio apartment he was subletting on the upper east side. It didn't take me long to figure out that downtown was where the artists were.

After a few months, I found a share downtown with a fellow who was an accountant by day and a drummer by night. He had a long, narrow apartment, commonly called a railroad apartment and he rented me one of the center rooms. The room was small, had a loft bed and doubled as a corridor, but the rent was cheap enough that I could also afford to rent a studio to do my artwork so I set out looking for one.

In the grocery store nearby, there was a bulletin board on which I saw a small notice advertising studios for artists to rent. I called the phone number on the notice and made an appointment to see the studios. They were located in a small building two blocks east of my new home on the far side of a park. The building was quite dilapidated. It was pre-war, probably pre-civil war. It was leaning like the tower of Pisa toward the vacant lot on the north. The plaster façade was peeling off the brick and there was ivy growing up the north wall that had crept over to the front.

I had been told by the fellow on the phone that the doorbell didn't work so I pounded loudly on the door. After a short while, a handsome thirty something white man with black hair opened the door with some difficulty as it caught on the floor. He was of medium height and I guessed by his mannerisms that he was probably of the gay persuasion.

"Hello, I'm Lawrence," I introduced myself.

"I'm Adrian," he said. "Nice to meet you. Please come in."

I stepped through the front door into a small vestibule and then through another door. Adrian closed the doors behind me and then called my attention to the lock on the second door.

"This door has a police lock," he said. It consisted of two long bars hinged in the center of the door which extended horizontally to either side of the door where they would slide through catches on the door frame when you pulled out and turned the knob on the center hinge.

"We always close and lock this door," he said, "Once, thieves broke into the building from the back. They had to leave the television set they were trying to steal because they couldn't figure out how to open the police lock. They had to go out the way they came in and couldn't climb over the wall with the TV."

He led me up the first flight of stairs. They leaned with the building but were still attached to the wall and rumbled as we ascended. The wooden railing was missing a few vertical supports but was fairly solid. We reached the second floor landing and made an about face, crossing the landing to the next staircase.

"The studios are on the fourth floor," he informed me. "You have twenty four hour access but they are for working only, no living."

"That good for me," I said. "I have a place to live. How about music?" I asked.

"Music is okay," he replied. We began to climb the staircase to the third floor. It was not as solidly anchored as the first. In fact, it had been pulled loose from its original mount on the wall by the settling of the building and was more like a suspension bridge.

"There was a church next door that burned down several years ago," he explained, "and this building settled a bit, leaning to the north side. The two upper staircases shifted down, but we've been using them for years with no problem."

I could see where the staircase had originally been attached to the wall by the indentation there. It had dropped by about an inch. Climbing this stair was noisier than the one below. It rattled, and the railing was a little bit shaky, but it held.

The third and final staircase was a repeat of the second one and we went up without incident. There was a doorway at the top facing the stair. He said, "This is a common bathroom you would be sharing with my roommate and I," indicating the door. To the left was another door through which we entered the studio.

"There are two studios for rent," he said, "This is the smaller one."

It was about fourteen foot square and had a large window facing east, looking out the back and leading to a fire escape. From the window, I could see two courtyards separated by a wall and then a tenement building which was a couple of stories taller. The room had its own entrance to the bath. From the bathroom door to the window there was a long narrow cabinet, about four feet high with sliding doors opening to an inside shelf.

Against the far wall, there were two large wooden cabinets with a long, wide, flat piece of wood laid over them creating a table. Next to it, close to the corner, was the exposed brick of a chimney from which the mortar was slowly flaking away.

An additional floor of grey plywood had been laid down to make the floor level. There was a door leading to another room through which we walked into the other studio.

"And this is the larger studio," he said. "This door can be locked, there is a separate entrance."

The room was L-shaped and about twenty four feet long by fourteen wide at one end and twenty at the bottom end of the 'L' which was at the front of the building. It had three windows overlooking the park and a small window looking north over the vacant lot. This room was empty except for two low dressers, again with the wooden table top. There were some large canvasses leaning against the wall.

"These will stay here," he said, "They belong to an old roommate who moved away," The floor in this room hadn't been leveled. It sloped like a ship leaning with the wind. The windows were like parallelograms.

He told me the rent he wanted for each. I chose the smaller studio and gave him a deposit to seal the deal. "The house is heated electrically," he told me. "Each month I'll estimate your share of the electric bill and leave a note on the dresser at the top of the stairs. You can put your money there and also the rent." Delighted with the arrangement, I shook his hand and took my leave, four keys in my hand, two for each of the front doors.

The next day, I was on my way to the art supply store for canvass, brushes, and paints, which I carted back to my new studio in the old building. I had a bunch of crayon drawings of expressionistic faces, some of which were to prophetically resemble people I had yet to meet and I wanted to make large paintings from them. They were to be my first series of paintings completed in the city.
 

One day, the two gay fellows who were the sole occupants of the house where I had my studio decided to leave. When they were making their plans to move on, Adrian asked me if I would like to meet the landlord and pick up the lease. I was delighted and agreed to meet him. He was an older man, maybe sixty, a lawyer who had bought the building many years before to live in with his family.

They had not felt comfortable in the neighborhood so they moved out of the city and rented the building to Adrian who was a student at the time. I was to be the lawyer's second tenant and he agreed to give me the same lease as he had given Adrian. The rent was very reasonable. It included the entire building except the empty storefront. The house was heated electrically and the electric bill in the winter would sometimes approach the amount of the rent itself. I didn't know that at the time but it was still a good deal. I would get two housemates to help me pay for the place and the landlord would go back to his house in the country.

I wouldn't see him again until he sold the building out from under me many years later.