$275 a month: A History of Artists Living on East Second Street
Facing a nearly bankrupt city, abandoned buildings, and a flourishing drug trade, NYC’s East Village in the 1980s became an unexpected focal point for a generation of artists who collectively changed the landscape of art in America.
One apartment building, located on East Second Street, was transformed by a group of such artists, who used it as a site to work, live, and collaborate. Looking back on this time and how things have changed since, those artists—Carl George, Peter Cramer, and Jack Waters—reflect on embracing opportunities, cheap rent, and the impact of the 1980s on the lives of artists.
Visual AIDS
Can you introduce yourselves?
Carl George
I’m an artist, filmmaker, and curator now living in California, but for 35 years, I lived in New York in a building on East Second Street. It became a kind of commune situation.
Peter Cramer
I’ve been a resident of New York City since 1978. I came to study dance, got involved with people who were running nightclubs, and eventually met Jack [Waters]. I’ve been here ever since, making art, films, dances, multimedia installations, and co-founding a community garden.
Jack Waters
Right now, I’m speaking to you from Allied Productions, our nonprofit’s project space and archival room on Eighth Street in the East Village. I live very close by on Second Street with Peter, who is my partner, in the same building where Carl also once lived. Carl found our place, and we are also next door to the Le Petit Versailles community garden that Peter and I have run for 30 years.
VA
How did you come to live on Second Street?
CG
I moved to NYC in November of 1980, when it was a very different city. Back then, apartments in the East Village were readily available, inexpensive, and not really difficult to find. That meant a lot of artists were moving there. In the 1980s, Greenwich Village was just as expensive as it is now, given inflation, but the East Village was cheap. It can be hard to picture now, but a lot of the buildings were decrepit and kind of bombed out.
Not long before, in the late 1970s, New York City almost filed one of the largest urban bankruptcy claims in history. When I moved to town, the city had just barely averted having to do that. The East Village was representative of what is left over when the capitalist system isn’t working anymore. The neighborhood had a lot of abandoned buildings that had been damaged by arson, empty lots, and a very active drug scene. At the same time, there were families living in the neighborhood who had been there for generations. There would be entire buildings abandoned, with one family still living in it.
As a result, it was attractive to young artists because there was nowhere else in Manhattan that anyone could afford, so you could find apartments and workspaces in this area. Before I moved to the East Village, I lived on 12th Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village, and then left for Europe for a few months. When I got back, I spoke to my friend, the artist Richard Armijo, and he recommended I speak to his landlord, who was an incredibly strange man.
This landlord would tell me that he didn’t have anything available, but I persisted. I’d go down to the deconsecrated and abandoned synagogue on Eldridge Street where, every morning, this landlord sat in his parked truck eating bialys with his one-armed brother. I would knock on his truck window and say, “I need an apartment.” He’d yell, “I ‘ain’t got any apartments. Go away.” One day, he finally admitted that he had something and took me to a building on East Second Street, which at the time had no front door.
It was a five-story tenement building. We walked up two flights of stairs, and I discovered that, other than three families living there, the building was completely vacant—except for a man on the top floor who, with his girlfriend, were very big heroin dealers and, which I later learned, caused the building to be filled with drug users and constant activity.
The landlord unlocked the padlock and folding gate to open the apartment door, and as he did this, pigeons flew out of the open kitchen windows, which had no glass. There were probably three inches of pigeon shit on the floor of the kitchen. I said, “I’ll take it.”
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Kitchen of Carl George’s apartment , East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1988. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
Kitchen of Carl George’s apartment , East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1988. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
Bedroom, studio/office, living room of Carl George’s apartment , East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1988. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
(from left) Peter Cramer, Jack Waters, Valerie Caris with artwork by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the kitchen of Carl George’s apartment on East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1986. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist.
VA
How much was the rent?
CG
$275 a month. But I lived there for the first six months without heat or hot water, and for more than a year without a lease. I begged the landlord every day to do something about it, but he just wouldn’t. That led me to think that if I could get other friends to live in the building, maybe we could form a tenants’ co-op or something. I didn’t even know what to call it then. I knew that Kembra Pfahler and Samoa [Moriki] needed an apartment, so I convinced the landlord to rent to them. Then, about a year later, Jack and Peter, who were living in the basement of ABC No Rio at the time, moved in. That made it three apartments of artists.
JW
We all had to gut and renovate each of the units.
CG
Oh yeah. They had been abandoned for decades, really.
We ended up forming a tenants’ union, even though we didn’t know what we were doing. Instead, all of us asked around to learn how to do it. We got together, started having meetings, and said, “We’re going to stop paying rent.” We went to MFY Legal Services [now Mobilization for Justice] on Avenue A and spoke to a lawyer there, Ted Zeichner, who very kindly took our case. He suggested that we withhold rent until essential services were provided and that we take the landlord to New York City landlord-tenant court, which we did. After that, we painted white bed sheets to say “rent strike!!” in bright-red lettering and hung them out of our windows facing Houston Street—a main thoroughfare in lower Manhattan—which infuriated the landlord.
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East 2nd St interior, c. 1984. Photo by East 2nd Street Tenants Association. Courtesy Jack Waters. -
East 2nd St interior, c. 1984. Photo by East 2nd Street Tenants Association. Courtesy Jack Waters.
Next, we took the landlord to housing court, which started the process wherein city inspectors came to the building. They found hundreds of violations, which put the landlord in trouble with the city and made [him] liable for heavy fines. Our case went on for years because the landlord wouldn’t abide by the law and, many times, didn’t show up for court dates. He was ordered to make repairs, which he just wouldn’t do. We kept going to court every few months while continuing to live under those circumstances, although heat and hot water were immediately restored because they were considered life-threatening and liable for fines of $250 a day, every day. We realized that securing a place to live and work involved educating ourselves, organizing, and political action. It was us growing up.
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South facade of East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1990. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
North facade of East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1988. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
North facade of East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1992. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist.
JW
By the time Peter and I moved in, there was still no front door or heat, hot water was sporadic, if at all, and there was still the drug-dealing tenant on the top floor. I remember walking into the building and trying to narrow myself as much as possible when going up the stairwell because of all the people shooting up.
My biggest fear wasn’t that I was going to be attacked or robbed, because it was pretty clear that nobody really cared about you if you didn’t have anything to do with the heroin trade; it was that I would accidentally back into someone’s needle. At the time, some users would draw blood from their veins and then squirt onto the walls. The building’s staircase walls were literally dripping with blood.
CG
Our building was not in any way extraordinary when it came to drugs, really awful and sometimes dangerous slumlords, threats of arson, or other things like that. But still, we were focused on making artwork.
VA
How did you all start collaborating together?
PC
Jack and I met as dancers working for a downtown dance company. Jack organized a dancer strike, which led to everyone quitting. We had started a performance collective called POOL (Performance On One Leg), so we kept making work together and performing in outdoor spaces like Federal Plaza, Soho galleries, as well as clubs throughout the East Village, like Limbo Lounge, the Pyramid Nightclub, and Danceteria.
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EROTIC PSYCHE (Bradley Eros and Aline Mayer), Kembra Pfahler, Samoa, Peter Francis (neé Cramer), Christa Gamper, Jack Waters, Nancy Girl, Julius Kline, Raiken Leaves, Philly, Adrien Saich, Michael Carter, and Brad Taylor perform as part of POOL at The Pool, September, 1983. Photo by Toyo Tsuchia. Courtesy of the artist. -
(from left) Peter Francis (Née Peter Cramer), Brian Taylor, Jack Waters, Joan Karlan, Susan C Brown in a POOL at the Pyramid Club flier, 1982. Courtesy of Jack Waters.
Through the Ward Nasse Gallery, we met Maggie Reilly, who introduced us to Arleen Schloss, who had her own space—A’s Salon on Broome Street—that was a highly regarded space for Fluxus artists, intermedia poetry, and music. Arleen, George Moore, and Michael Keene collaborated on opening a place on Jane Street in the West Village called Club Armageddon. It was in the ballroom of the Jane West Hotel, and they turned it into an art club and performance space. It was like a three-ring circus, where there would be a gospel choir one night, followed by hip-hop musicians like Grandmaster Flash, with us on the same bill. A crazed sort of variety show.
Meanwhile, through mutual friends, we started meeting members of Colab [Collaborative Projects], including Kiki Smith, Ann Messner, Alan Moore, Becky Howland, and Bobby G [Robert Goldman].
CG
Colab, as they were called, had done a show where they went into a building in Times Square and put up a guerrilla art exhibition called The Times Square Show. They ended up being evicted by the city. Earlier that year they had done the same kind of exhibition in an abandoned building downtown. They called that exhibition The Real Estate Show, and the artwork addressed gentrification in NYC.
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Peter Cramer and Jack Waters, Insider Abc No Rio Newsletter, Fall 1988. Photo by Ricardo Horatio Nelson. Courtesy Jack Waters. -
Peter Cramer, ABC No Rio Benefit Auction Poster, 1991. Courtesy of the artist. -
George Towne and Elise Doodles, NoRio Benefit Poster (NEA Defunding), 1991. Photo by Peter Cramer. Courtesy Jack Waters. -
Carlita Henneng, Poster for The Shape Of Things To Come, 1986. Courtesy Jack Waters.
They got a lot of press and the city ended up renting them a space, for a nominal fee, on Rivington Street, which became ABC No Rio. Years earlier the city of New York had evicted hundreds of poor Latino, Black, and Eastern European Jewish families from the entire southeastern strip of Delancey Street—many, many blocks of tenement buildings. The city didn’t want more bad press or attention.
The Rivington Street space was an empty storefront with broken windows and a toilet that constantly flooded. Colab put a show up there, which I saw and loved. Soon after, Brad Taylor and I decided to speak to them.
They didn’t have a formal group, meetings, or hierarchy. Instead, they would get together and talk once in a while. We managed to connect with them and said that we would like to do a show in their storefront space. They were like, O.K., whatever.
We ended up doing a seven-day, 24-hour-a-day show from April 1 to 7, 1983, called Seven Days of Creation. It ended up including 200 artists, most of whom had just moved into the East Village. Many didn’t know each other, but we all did by the end of the 7 days. Every 24-hour period was a different thing: music, theater, poetry, performance, with much overlapping. We slept there on two huge futons.
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Poet and writer Eve Teitelbaum with sculpture by artist Kjell Erik Killi Olsen as part of Seven Days of Creation, ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington St., NYC, c. 1983. Courtesy of Carl George. -
(left) Performance artist Samoa Moriki with Uncle Felipe, Tanya Ransom and Frederick Nunley in Seven Days of Creation, ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington St., NYC, c. 1983. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
Flyer for Seven Days of Creation at ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington St., NYC, c. 1983. Courtesy Peter Cramer.
JW
We would give the curatorial domain to a different artist or group for each day of the show. The artists could do whatever they wanted.
CG
We met a lot of the artists at the Pyramid Club, which had just started up. It was all new. Everything was new. Nothing had been established. We were all just meeting each other and went on to form long-term collaborative work relationships with most of these artists.
PC
Seven Days of Creation was a galvanizing event because so many artists from different aspects of our creative and social lives—clubs, underground gallery scenes, dance—all came together.
VA
You mentioned that your rent was $275 a month—what did it take to make that at the time?
CG
It was very doable. Honestly, you could work a freelance job one week each month and pay all your bills for that month. Some people were waiting tables, others drove a taxi, and others were gallery assistants a few days a week or month. The federal minimum wage back then was $3.35. Now, 40 years later, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Shocking, really.
Take that idea and then put it into real estate terms. Nobody can live in New York City right now. No young kid, unless they have rich parents or they’re going to NYU on a grant or a loan, can do it. Now, everybody has to work all the time, which leaves no time for making art, creating, and collaborating. Everyone is exhausted and beaten down from working their corporate jobs.
Everything was happening all at once. Performance art was having a kind of resurgence after being fairly dormant since the 1960s and early 1970s. People like Kembra Pfahler, Gordon Kurtti, Jack, Peter, Brian Taylor and Christa Gamper of POOL, Stelarc, The Kipper Kids, Edgar Oliver, Valerie Caris, Aline Mare, Jane Sherry, and Bradley Eros of Erotic Psyche, and Karen Finley were all making and presenting brilliant performance work at the time. Karen Finley was a huge presence, and her work was astounding.
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Covers of East Village Eye, c. 1980s. Courtesy Peter Cramer. -
Poster for The Ultimately Civil Project, 1985. Courtesy Peter Cramer.
Second Street is still Kembra Pfahler’s home base. She has lived in the building since 1983. Kembra is still hugely active with her band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and they are always getting dressed in her apartment and marching out of the building in full be-wigged, chromatic splendor onto Second Street, heading to a gig.
Then, when the East Village arts scene exploded, all of a sudden, we were hearing about apartments going for $700 a month. It was unbelievable. It was shocking. Soon after, the commercial East Village art scene imploded; what was left were ridiculously high rents. That commercial art world had done the damage, and then they were gone. They no longer existed. The East Village had been transformed in many terrible ways, especially with inflated rents and property values, and there was no turning back.
PC
Looking at 1983 alone, so much happened: ABC No Rio, Fashion Moda, Armageddon Club, Danceteria, the Brooklyn Army Terminal Show, and Arleen Schloss’s Salon des Refusés.
CG
We didn’t really think of or care about making money. The East Village and Lower East Side were filled with artist studios, nonprofit organizations such as La Mama and Danspace Project, and building squats like PS 122, Bullet Space and Umbrella House, providing sweat equity–collaborative living and studio space for artists, following European punk anarchist models as part of the movement in England, Germany, and Switzerland.
JW
All these artists did intersect. At the time, we were operating on the marginal margin. We were marginalized by the margins because these other galleries were there to make money.
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(from left) Jack Waters, Carl George, and Gordon Kurtti in the kitchen of Carl George’s apartment on East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1984. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
(from left) Peter Cramer, Stefani Mar, Carl George, and Gordon Kurtti on the rooftop of Gordon Kurttti’s apartment building, East 3nd Street, NYC, c. 1986. Courtesy of the artist. -
(from left) Gordon Kurtti, Carl George, Peter Cramer, Stefani Mar, Jack Waters, on the rooftop of Gordon Kurttti’s apartment building, East 3nd Street, NYC, c. 1986. Courtesy of the artist. -
(counter-clockwise from bottom right) Glen Belvario, Kembra Pfahler, Carl George, Stephen Tashjian aka Tabboo!, Mark Phred aka Hapi Phace, Philly Abe (as Mrs. Claws) in center with white Mohawk, others unidentified gathered for “Beggar’s Banquet” Christmas party in Carl George’s apartment, East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1987. Photo by Peter Cramer. Courtesy Carl George.
CG
Our work together always continued. We were always busy. We moved into filmmaking, which was primarily my thing. I loved the idea of film. Peter took up film, Jack took up film, and Kembra made films. We all acted in each other’s films. We filmed in each other’s apartments. The building has always been a hub of activity.
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Editing desk in Carl George’s apartment , East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1984. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
Editing desk in Carl George’s apartment , East 2nd Street, NYC, c. 1984. Photo by Carl George. Courtesy of the artist. -
Gordon Kurtti in Carl George’s Super-8 film La Belle Fleur, 1984. Courtesy of the artist. -
Poster for Naked Eye Cinmea Benefit, 1986. Courtesy Peter Cramer.
VA
With all this reuse of buildings and spaces as well as performing in public, were artists using the city as a kind of material or a gallery?
PC
Absolutely. One of the first things that happened to us when we started at ABC No Rio was that the Colab artists had been commissioned to do a project for Creative Time. [Editor’s note: still in operation, Creative Time is the largest nongovernmental U.S. arts nonprofit dedicated to public art.]
Before Battery Park was built, it was a landfill from the excavation site of the World Trade Towers. Creative Time was given access to that site, and [it] created a program called Art on the Beach that brought together visual artists, architects, and writers to collaborate on public art projects. Richard Flood, Ian Bader, and Tom Otterness of Colab were invited, but when they could not do their second public event, we, as POOL, stepped in to take their place.
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Adrien Stitch, Philly, Richard Hofmann, Unknown, and Nancy Girl in Form And Meaning by Jack Waters, 1981. Photo by Hector R Gonzalez. Courtesy of Jack Waters. -
Jack Waters (Foreground) and Peter Cramer (Prone Figure) in Cats Paw by Peter Cramer, 1981. Photo by Hector R Gonzalez. Courtesy of Jack Waters.
JW
Groups like Colab were making particular points about all these abandoned buildings in the city—how artists had the energy and the interest to activate them. That this could be expanded if the city would give artists money to create important social centers. At the time, most of the artists were doing pop-up exhibitions because they couldn’t count on the spaces being available to them in the long term.
VA
How does your approach to these pop-up exhibitions and DIY art spaces relate to long-term projects like making a home in a building and Le Petit Versailles community garden?
PC
That started to shift in the 1990s, when we basically had control of the entire building because the landlord’s plan was to allow it to just deteriorate. That is what happened with a lot of the other buildings in the area. We stayed, fought, and settled there. He was very reluctant to rent to anyone else.
JW
The reason the garden exists is because we moved onto Second Street. When we started running the garden in the early 1990s, it was a development from ABC No Rio. The garden was first a nexus for queer artists and activism during the RNC [Republican National Convention] as part of the community around MIX NYC. [Editor’s note: MIX NYC, founded as the New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival in 1987, is a nonprofit organization based in New York City dedicated to queer experimental film.]
VA
Outside of gentrification and commercial forces, were there other factors that changed the arts communities in the East Village and Second Street?
CG
When AIDS suddenly exploded in 1983, and for the next 15 years, it consumed our lives.
JW
As well as the entire East Village art scene.
CG
It decimated us. It killed so many brilliant artists at a very young age, and it affected us all in innumerable ways, very deeply and personally. In response, we made art around and about AIDS, and we organized. Peter and I organized an exhibition in 1985 called HEAL: Health Education AIDS Liaison. It was another big spectacular event that involved 150 artists, including Cookie Mueller, Bill T. Jones, Greer Lankton’s sculptural works, and so many more. It was about alternative or holistic treatments for AIDS when other treatments simply didn’t exist. There was nothing. There was AZT, which was poisonous and didn’t work. We thought, why not do a show around holistic medicine and practices and other ways to think?
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HEAL Public Notice, 1988. Courtesy Peter Cramer. -
Poster for HEAL Benefit Weekend, 1988. Courtesy Peter Cramer.
PC
Around this time we were introduced to this activity called the Archive Project. There was another endeavor happening, called the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. Both projects were about teaching artists how to manage their artwork and help to preserve it so that it doesn’t get thrown into the dumpster, which is what happened to a lot of people. Eventually, the Archive Project became part of Visual AIDS.
JW
It is sometimes very tempting to overlook the effect AIDS had on our work and our lives. It basically killed art and creativity as it was at the time. This refocused a lot of artistic energies on helping and caring for friends, as well as ushering and shepherding artwork that becomes endangered. For me, that shift became wrapped up in my engagement with Visual AIDS in the late 1980s through the 1990s, and into the current day.
CG
I was involved with the PWA Health Group, which was the first drug-buying group in the United States. I volunteered there for a couple of years, and then I got really involved with ACT UP. At that time, I wasn’t even an American: I didn’t have American citizenship yet. I had to be careful about being arrested because I would’ve been deported. I was living here illegally at the time. I didn’t become a citizen until the early 1990s, but I did what I could in organizing and illegally importing drugs being tested for efficacy in other industrialized nations—Germany, Israel, Japan—into the United States. I guess I’d still be in a federal prison if I had been caught, all things considered. We did what we had to do.
AIDS affected our lives very directly. Several of our close friends were immediately affected by it and died. You were diagnosed and died. That’s all there was to it. Very few people survived.
It was circling all around us, and it affected everything we did, but we kept going. We kept creating. We addressed it in ways that we felt were important and that were political—through film performance and direct action. Ways that would open eyes and hearts. That would get things done. We did what we could, and we were trying to survive ourselves. It was an incredibly frightening time.
JW
Not to mention people who were part of our community, like David Wojnarowicz and Keith Haring. One of the things that this conversation makes me think of is how all this is interconnected. The physical proximities, creative crossovers, living spaces, as well as spaces for presenting work and building community all happen together. You can’t look at one part without considering it all.
VA
What is it like in the building now?
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Jack Waters stands in front of East 2nd street wall with work by Kembra Pfahler (above doorframe), Ingo Giezendanner AKA GRRRR (underpainting), Swoon, and unknown taggers, 2006. Courtesy Jack Waters -
Detail of East 2nd street wall with work by Ingo Giezendanner AKA GRRRR (underpainting), Swoon, and unknown taggers, 2006. Photo by Jack Waters. Courtesy Jack Waters -
East 2nd street wall with work by Ingo Giezendanner AKA GRRRR (underpainting), Swoon, and unknown taggers, 2006. Photo by Jack Waters. Courtesy Jack Waters -
Detail of east 2nd street wall with work by Kembra Pfahler (above doorframe), Ingo Giezendanner AKA GRRRR (underpainting), Swoon, and unknown taggers, 2006. Photo by Jack Waters. Courtesy Jack Waters
PC
About five years ago, the buildings on East Second Street were sold. One was completely renovated. Our building was half empty at the time, so they renovated all those apartments, including a [installing] brand-new stairwell.
Today, our apartment still has its slanted floors, and the newcomers have a completely renovated, brand-new apartment. We don’t engage with the new renters particularly, and they don’t engage with us. We have an okay relationship with the owner, and everything is pretty much settled in that regard.
The garden is slated for major renovations that will begin in the fall of 2025. We continue to do public programming before that interruption begins. We’re also looking into how to shift our programming to other community gardens in the area if they are open to it. Jack has initiated more of an association with the gardens in the neighborhood, as we’ve done some very successful previous projects at Green Oasis Garden.
But we can’t stop the city from changing. No one can. It’s just [recognizing] how those changes affect people living in their neighborhoods and how to minimize the impact so they can retain their distinct livability.
CG
From the beginning, I always thought that we had entered the East Village, being very conscious of and respectful of the communities that were already there. We got to know all our neighbors up and down the block, mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, older Jewish, and Eastern European. We watched their children grow up. We knew the kids and are now friends with them as adults. It was their neighborhood first, and respecting that was always important to us.▪︎
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