Cranky, Creative, and Controversial: Recalling artists' collectives of the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Bob Thompson, "Announcement for opening at Delancey Street Museum," 1959
"When I arrived in New York City after college, I moved into a tiny, one-bedroom apartment at Seventeenth Street and Third Avenue. It had a fire escape that was perfect for the burglar who climbed up it a few months later. Since I worked at Esquire then, uptown on Madison Avenue, I described my new home to friends as a cozy, downtown abode, walking distance from Greenwich Village. It took me several years and several moves to discover that downtown was an elusive word, whose meaning depended on whom you talked to, and where you lived. My home on Seventeenth Street was followed by one on Pearl Street with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and followed later by a loft in a Centennial building in SoHo, where three massive front windows gave me a view of the cast-iron buildings across the street. ..."
Guernica
Illegal Living

2017 January: Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965