A CHANGING MANHATTAN—AFTER 1968.

A CHANGING MANHATTAN—AFTER 1968. I think that when I came to New York I assumed that Manhattan and Greenwich Village had been unchanged from the thirties. For example, I was able to eat at Horn & Hardart Automats and Schrafft’s restaurants. There were few new buildings in the Village, but I was aware of some important changes in other parts of the city. I bought a book by Ada Louise Huxtable about classic New York architecture, published in 1964, and went around looking for the buildings. Most of them had been torn down for skyscrapers in the intervening 5 years. One evening, I walked home to the Village from Wall Street through what was to become Soho. Nobody seemed to live in the area. Benjamin Schwartz says that it was the rapid decline of small industries in New York that was occurring in those years that made it possible for artists to find Soho lofts to live in. Architects were just beginning to take on the challenges of converting large commercial spaces for residential use. When we got married in 1973, a large cast iron department store near Tenth and Broadway was in the process of being one of the first conversions. I suggested that that should be our first apartment. In the event, it was not ready until six months or so after our wedding, but Mary Jane has always said it would have been impossible anyway because she was not going to make 16 foot long draperies for the windows.