DreamHouse is Real
DreamHouse is Real
275 Church Street contained multitudes, including LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela, Otis Fuentes, and my nascent and growing family.
The best apartment, nay, the best domicile I ever lived in was on the fourth floor of 275 Church Street, New York, NY 10013. Eleven years I paid rent there, what a chump! If I’d known I was going to be there so long I would have bought someplace. Instead of getting a hearty handshake and thank you from my landlord I’d have sold out for a large chunk of cash. Oh well.
I shared an entire life of my dog Otis in that drafty, profoundly out-of-plumb space. Built a bedroom in the middle as I moved my new wife Liz in. Then brought both of our beautiful babies back from the hospital to that creaky loft. We tread a new groove in the perimeter trying to soothe Sophia’s colic. Lucinda made her own groove around the coffee table learning to walk unaided. I created some of my favorite photographs there too. That parallel of work being intertwined with the personal echoes my work as a photographer. When looking at these photographs and the shoots required to produce them it is impossible not to look at young me. Not only did “things change,” as they always do of course, but I changed. A decade is a long time, especially in New York, and I marvel at the changes I went through while living there. Pretty much (though not entirely) all the scintillating events recounted in this book took place while I was living on the fourth floor of 275 Church. No accounting of the time would be complete without including her as a character in the performance of our lives.
Fourth floor: three long flights in a weird dark hallway, wondering if you should really be there. Bane of messengers, I once heard one exclaim as he puffed his way into the door to be greeted by a bright, bustling operation, “Man! This looks like a video set!” Indeed it does my man, couldn't agree more. Those three long flights of stairs (my dad counted them one time but I stuffed my fingers in my ears because I really didn’t want to know) served the role of the fog in Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness or the mighty Himalayas in Shangri La, when you got up that three long flights of stairs you were changed, man. Out of breath, sure, but sometimes you thought your heart was going to pound out of your chest. Expectant Liz, and subsequently expectant Liz plus one kid in a stroller trod that long uphill climb on many an occasion. I think if not for Otis I would have avoided going out for days on end. But then those stairs, that very bane of an otherwise excellent living space, or rather, lack thereof, is the reason I promptly gained fifteen pounds upon packing up and moving to the suburbs.
We enjoyed hilarious encounters with our neighbor, the avant-garde musician Lamonte Young. He and his wife Marian Zazeela created a DreamHouse on the third floor. Lamonte dressed to achieve a sort of zen biker affect, but it was kind of jarring because he was a quiet little dude with a man bun who happened to be wearing leather boots and jacket. I had met people “into” purple before, but Marian really took it to the next level. Of course her entire wardrobe was purple, but she also indulged in wild flights of bright purple eyeliner and even occasionally lipstick (which really just made her look cold). And literally all of her artistic work involved projections of purple hued light. They were the sweetest people and the best neighbors. Among other oddities, they lived on a twenty five hour day, which meant you never knew if they were going to be sleeping or waking, as they crept in and out of normal time on a monthly cycle. Lamonte was up to some truly kooky stuff, particularly in the sixties. He had done experiments involving wiring plants up to synthesizers to let them “play” music. Lots of micro-tonal variations on traditional music. Later, LaMonte and Marian both explored Indian Raga culture, going to so far as to have a guru, Pandit Pran Nah who would come to the States for performances and touring.
My darkroom, built into a former closet, leaked so much light it was only usable at night. Many a surreal evening was spent in there, quite but not entirely dark, tinkling tones of running water, often listening to odd or unusual music late at night on John Shaffer’s New Sounds show on WNYC. One particular late evening printing session, I was concentrating on my work, not really paying attention to the radio. But then the music began to slowly penetrate my consciousness. Weird, jagged, oddly familiar rock and roll. Must have been some band I’d shot or something. The longer it went on, and it went on a while, the more familiar yet bizarre it got. How could I not know what this was? John Shaffer played all sorts of genres, pulling music from all over the world. How could this sound so familiar but unknown? I was getting kind of freaked out when Shaffer came back on the mic and announced what we’d been listening to. It was Lamonte and one of his bands. The reason it was familiar is I had literally listened to them recording that very same record downstairs, in the DreamHouse. How could I not have remembered? But also, what a fun building I lived in!
One day both Lamonte and Marian stuck their heads out as I was coming back upstairs from a walk with Otis. They were both beaming, clearly excited as all get out by something. They gestured us inside (they kept no pets, but they loved big knuckle-headed Otis and he them), and back into their bed chamber. “Look,” they exclaimed virtually together, “we had a miracle!” I looked closer to see what they were on about. One of their incense cones had burned in a perfect spiral. Miracles are where you find them. I joined them in their joy and went about my day feeling just a little more miraculous and resolved to try to harvest some of that joyful exuberance in my own life. I was gratified to be able to extract the rambunctious Otis without knocking the miracle itself into dust.
That was back before Mariah Carey moved in next door and Beyonce and Jay Z had not yet discovered the charms of Tribeca. It seemed like I was always just running into interesting people, often having met them by photographing them. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, Iggy Pop, Dee Lite (names TK), Bob Mould, Robert Quine. They all seemed to live around there, we’d run into them at the post office or bodega. Lamonte and Marian and later the DreamHouse made our little building a sort of nexus of groovy energy.
Once in Los Angeles, I was photographing the trumpet player Jon Hassell and mentioned I lived upstairs from Lamonte and Marian. “You live at 275 Church Street? Get out of town!” without missing a beat. Instant credibility through the wonders of real estate.
I, later we (Liz, then Sophia followed by Lucy), occupied the Fourth Floor. Third was the sound and light environment, then Lamonte and Marian lived and worked on the Second. The First floor contained a revolving cast of newsstands, bagel shops, and non-descript fronts for something or other. We were always friendly with them as we had a common enemy (the landlord) and they would take our packages.
The Dream House sound and light environment consisted of a mostly open loft, containing several automobile sized sub-woofers, a few unobtrusive tweeters, and some spiral shapes hung in purple spotlights so as to slowly rotate and create changing shadows and shapes on the walls. The sound is sort of a hum, which moves and changes as you walk around the space. You don’t so much hear it as feel it in your bones. Lamonte and Marian lived child and pet free. So I was surprised one day during the construction of the environment on the third floor when they suggested we see how Otis felt about the installation. I had been kind of eyeing the giant-ass subwoofers a little suspiciously myself, wondering how they might impact my lifestyle. It hadn’t even occurred to me that a canine might react differently to the odd goings-on downstairs. To their credit, it had occurred to them. So we all dutifully traipsed to the Third Floor, turned on the ginormous MacIntosh amps and let Otis do what he did best: run around and sniff. He of course sensed that he was the center of attention, but coudn’t really put together just what we wanted him to do. He ran around snuffling for a while, seemingly oblivious to the sound and light going on around him, then settled at my feet looking for a reward for all his hard work. Which was forthcoming, along with the Otis Seal of Approval and the multi decade Dia Foundation support, Dream House was allowed to open to the public. We could always hear when it was running, but it was never intrusive and indeed sometimes seemed oddly comforting. It was very sweet and solicitous and emblematic of both Lamonte and Marian as neighbors. They are both serious artists, each in their own right, do not let this lighthearted retelling of their quirks do anything to diminish that. I remember them as profoundly excellent neighbors. They ended up moving upstairs to the Fourth Floor when we vacated the premises in September 2001, leaving the Second as their workspace. When last I checked, the Dream House was still going, seemingly remaining popular with European students and art music nerds of all stripes.
It was a sad day indeed when I left for the last time. I spent the last night there by myself, sleeping on a mat on the floor, the way I’d arrived. Eleven years, a dog’s life, marriage, two kids, a portfolio full of photographs, a lot transpired in that drafty loft, and I am grateful for her more than a decade of shelter. Thank you 275 Church, hard for a building to be a friend but if anyone could pull it off, it is you.