House in Flux in SoHo

From Dave Brigham:

This plaque is located outside a Guess store at 538 Broadway in New York City's SoHo district, marking the former location of a Fluxhouse artist cooperative live-work space. These are the kinds of things I make photos of while all around me people are window-shopping, taking selfies in front of a Brandy Melville store and generally not taking photos of things like this.

If, like me before October 13, 2024, you have no idea what a Fluxhouse is, let me tell you all about it...in the words of web sites that know what they're talking about. I made this photo because I was somewhat familiar with the Fluxus art movement. What did I know about it? Well, that the musician Beck's grandfather, Al Hansen was a member of the movement.

"Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers, and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement," according to this article from London's Tate galleries. "Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage."

"Drawn together by their disenchantment with the elitist attitudes that they perceived in the art world at the time, they looked to the Futurists and Dadaists for inspiration, especially focusing on the performance aspects of these movements," per this article from The Art Story. "The two most dominant forces, however, were Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, who championed the use of everyday objects and the element of chance in art, both of which became fundamental to Fluxus practices. Whilst Cage was part of the Fluxus movement, Duchamp was never directly involved."

"From 1966 to 1975, George Maciunas realized the social objectives of Fluxus towards a pragmatic and non-elitist conception of art in his work as an urban planner in the Fluxhouse Cooperatives," according to the George Maciunas Foundation web site. Over that decade, he livened the SoHo and Lower East Side neighborhoods by creating Fluxhouse cooperatives in 17 buildings.

This is the fifth in a series of short posts about my trip to New York City last fall. Links to the others are below:

March 1, 2025, "Hoofin' It to the Bowery Ballroom"

February 22, 2025, "Shoot Your Shot at Amsterdam Billiards"

February 15, 2025, "Webster Hall Was Right Across from My Hotel"

February 8, 2025, "The Carl Fischer"

Hoofin' It to the Bowery Ballroom

From Dave Brigham:

This is the fourth short post about my trip to New York City in October (the first one is here; the second one is here; the third one is here). You can't throw a rock in the Big Apple without hitting a famous restaurant, park, store, art gallery, person, movie setting or nightclub. As I was walking through the Bowery in Lower Manhattan, I stumbled across an example of the latter.

The Bowery Ballroom opened on Delancey Street in 1998, in a building that's nearly 100 years old. It is considered one of the best music clubs in the country, per Wikipedia. As with Webster Hall that was featured in my second NYC post, I'd heard of this place but haven't been there.

I became more interested in this well-known spot after looking up and seeing "TREE-MARK SHOES" chiseled into the facade.

Wikipedia says this store never opened, because its planned debut came just before the Wall Street crash of 1929. "It stood vacant until the end of World War II, when it housed a series of shops." Ephemeral New York, however, says Tree-Mark moved in after the big war and was there for the next 30 years.

Whatever.

When I think of the Bowery, which over decades of decline became shorthand for down-and-out, I think of the Bowery Boys, probably thanks to my Dad mentioning the fictional New York City characters from a series of movies made from 1946 to 1958. The Boys were successors to the East Side Kids, who were an imitation of the Dead End Kids.

Got all that?

Here's a sample of the Boys in action: