The Downtown Pop Underground

Before the Mercer Arts Center collapsed in 1973, it was where underground theater, glam rock, video art, and performance art briefly intersected in the early 1970s—planting the seeds of what would become known as “punk.”

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• Downtown Freaks Take Over Public Access Television
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The Project of Living Artists, where Suicide’s Alan Vega worked in the late 1960s, was a collaborative space funded for a short time by the New York State Council on the Arts.

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• Alan Vega’s Artistic Journey

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Andy Warhol worked with his printing assistant Gerard Malanga in an uptown studio near his brownstone home until the artist needed a larger studio, leading to his acquisition of a space in a midtown industrial building that became the Factory—which Billy Name turned into a glittering, silver installation art piece.

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• Andy Warhol Meets Gerard Malanga
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• Bibbe Hansen Enters the Factory Fold
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• Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol Butt Heads

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In 1967, Andy Warhol moved the Factory to 33 Union Square, between East Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets in Manhattan, across Union Square Park from Max’s Kansas City; one year later, Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in its offices, putting an end to the Factory’s more freewheeling, open-door policy.

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• Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling Try to Crack the Glitter Ceiling

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