The Downtown Pop Underground

In late 1960s SoHo, one of the biggest draw was an old-fashioned bar that served inexpensive bean soup for lunch, named Fanelli’s, right beneath the Videofreex loft.

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Fluxhouse Cooperative founder George Maciunas and his friends weren’t the first to occupy that former industrial area, but by renovating these old spaces (and fighting for the legal right to do so) they were the ones who established this practice on a wider scale.

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Jack Smith lived in what would later become known as SoHo, back when the rents were low and the city had not yet been ruined by what Smith called “landlordism.”

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Early SoHo gallery OK Harris was owned by Ivan Karp, who had earlier played a key role in promoting Pop Art; in 1970, Karp agreed to let Suicide play one of their first show as a group, which was promoted as “Punk Music by Suicide.”

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In late 1968, Paula Cooper opened the first SoHo art gallery at 96 Prince Street, in the same building that housed the Videofreex loft; a decade later, seventy-seven galleries had been drawn to the neighborhood, where many artists lived and created their works.

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After CBS hired the Videofreex to produce a pilot for an experimental television show, Subject to Change, they rented a SoHo loft above Fanelli’s and the Paula Cooper Gallery where they built a video production studio.

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