821 Sixth Avenue See, actually I'm doing a book about this building itself . . . out the window and within the building, because it's quite a weird, interesting story. --W. Eugene Smith, recorded on his loft tapes, ca. 1960 Eight twenty-one Sixth Avenue, a nondescript five-floor loft walkup, was built in 1853 for commercial purposes by someone named George E. Hencken. Today, the narrow building is slightly wider than the length of the parking space in front of it. Its bricks are painted gray and layered with decades of accumulated scum and grime. High-rise condo towers, which have sprouted since the neighborhood was rezoned residential in the late 1990s, loom over the building. In a matter of time 821 Sixth Avenue will be sold and demolished to make way for more condos. Meanwhile, the Chinese-American owners, the Chang family, import and sell wigs there, very successfully. They bought the building in 2002 from Bernie's Discount Center, which sold televisions, microwave ovens, air conditioners, and other appliances in the space for four decades. It is an unprepossessing place, bearing no clues of the crossroads of jazz, art, and postwar urban- American lore that it used to be. The Chang family never heard about it. For ten years, beginning in 1954, jazz musicians by the hundreds climbed the creaky, mildewed wooden stairs for sessions--both impromptu and formal--in the middle of the night. Many of the biggest names in jazz hung their hats there, for at least a few hours, if not for several years. Thelonious Monk and Hall Overton rehearsed the music for Monk's legendary big-band concerts at Town Hall in 1959, at Lincoln Center in 1963, and at Carnegie Hall in 1964. Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Teddy Charles honed the sound heard on the record Blue Moods there. The place drew such prime players as Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Giuffre, Roy Haynes, Sonny Clark, Stan Getz, Jim Hall, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley, who formed ad hoc ensembles that often included veteran stars like Buck Clayton, Vic Dickenson, and Pee Wee Russell. Ornette Coleman went there to play the beat-up, idiosyncratic Steinway B piano on the fifth floor by himself. Alice Coltrane and Joe Henderson rented rooms on the fifth floor for a few months after moving to New York from Detroit in 1961. Musicians from other genres frequented the place, too: minimalist composer Steve Reich, conductor Dennis Russell Davies, and folksinger Nehama Hendel. Photographers Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson went there, as did painter Salvador Dalí and writers Anaïs Nin and Norman Mailer. For every renowned musician who visited 821 Sixth Avenue, however, there were dozens who were obscure. Strangers--unproven newcomers-- wandered into the place: if you could play an instrument, you were okay. Fifteen-year-old pianist Jane Getz came in from Texas, pianist Dave Frishberg from Minnesota, and bassist Jimmy Stevenson from Michigan. But this was no romantic oasis of "cool" acceptance and warm fellow feeling. If you couldn't play--if you weren't good enough-- there was no reason for you to be there, unless you had other assets. There was dope to be smoked, and sometimes heroin or methadrene to shoot up, and every once in a while there was sex to be had. The door facing the sidewalk could be unlocked or completely missing--a cave or mine shaft in the dead center of Manhattan--and junkies snuck in, climbed the stairs, and stole things to pawn. Roaches and mice and rats and stray cats loved the place, too. During the daytime the smell of flowers wafted through the neighborhood and the open windows of the loft building. Growers from Long Island had begun ferrying and carting their flowers to the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street sometime around the Civi Excerpted from The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 by Sam Stephenson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
