Old Second Avenue Courthouse. Now it houses the Anthology Film Archives. “In 1979… under the guidance of the architects Raimund Abraham and Kevin Bone, and at a cost of $1,450,000, the building was adapted to house two motion picture theaters, a reference library, a film preservation department, offices, and a gallery.

But in 1970 when I first moved to NYC, it was being used to warehouse movie equipment by a company I was working for. My boss at the time said he was paying the city $100/month rent. In lieu of giving me a living wage they let me squat in the room intended for the matron of the women prisoners. It overlooked the alley, between the buildings visible in the photo above, that was then full of rotting garbage and furiously breeding mosquitoes.

I had electricity for a small space heater and a hot plate and running cold water suitable for sponge-bathing etc. I broke through my bedroom wall to get into one of the locked jail cells, and thus had an additional room for storage of my meager possessions. I also had the rest of the building to play in, and I used the basement to film an 8 mm stop motion film. The basement was filled with bizarre fiberglass life molds of naked men and women, left over from some sort of art commune that formerly occupied the space. I observed the partial solar eclipse of March 7, 1970 from that roof. The sky dimmed considerably, but from my vantage no one else seemed to notice.

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Filed under: Architecture, East Village, Photos by gamma