• Crosby St Construction, By Anthony Haden-Guest (Published 2020)

    Crosby St Construction

    By Anthony Haden-Guest (Published 2020)

    When Arturo Di Modica happened upon 54 Crosby Street in the late ‘70s it was barely an address, just a dilapidated shack alongside the house next door. The artist clearly saw potential magic there though and he was prescient. Crosby Street was in the heart of what many were still calling the Cast Iron District, a neighbourhood formerly occupied by light industries, now mostly defunct. A quarter of a century before it had been targeted for destruction along with much of Downtown by the power broker Robert Moses who planned to run a superhighway through it, but who was thwarted by the activist, Jane Jacobs. Artists began moving into those paleo-industrial spaces after the Second World War, and in the 1970s galleries had started opening in what is now called SoHo. Indeed it was now on the verge of blooming.

  • Much of the area remained an urban slum though, when Di Modica planned his move there, including the patch upon which the artist had set his heart. But there was one problem: the owner of the plot he was fixated on knew that he didn’t have the moolah. “What are you going to pay me with? Stones?” he demanded. At last, after much back-and-forthing the owner called Di Modica and said, “Okay! Come down to the office with $5,000.” Di Modica scrambled the sum together and went to the office accompanied by a lawyer, but only when he was on the point of signing the papers did he learn that the five grand was just a down payment. That had been all he could scrape together but he signed anyway, ignoring his lawyer’s insistence that he was crazy.

     

    Being now without funds, Di Modica acted as he had upon his move from Sicily to Florence, namely finding and salvaging materials from the street. He first found a bunch of seven-meter beams of timber, which he attached to himself and dragged back to Crosby Street through the streets at night. Then he built a fence around the property using the timber, tore down the original shack, and located the foundations of the original building. Once done, he bought 8,000 bricks for $400 from a priest and got down to work. He was building wholly without planning permission and completely to his own design. Eventually Di Modica had built 54 Crosby Street two floors up and was ready to move into his new studio.

  • "I built 54 Crosby St studio 2-floors up, with salvaged materials, and then wanted a basement but couldn’t get permission."

     

    - Arturo Di Modica

    Arturo Di Modica still wasn’t finished with 54 Crosby though. It wasn’t that his two floors were dwarfed by his neighbours more that the shortage of space cramped his ability to execute his most ambitious plans. But his requests for planning permission to add another two floors below ground were turned down. A Sicilian element in his nature now surfaced, an obduracy, which led him to bring out his fork and shovel and settle down to work. By day Di Modica dug into the ground, by night he covertly snuck the rubble out and brought in whatever new materials he needed. This continued day after day, night after night, until, in the fullness of time, Di Modica had his two new underground levels.

  • "So I just started digging into the ground, sneaking the rubble out by night. I went two floors underground."

     

    - Arturo Di Modica

    Manhattan can be a human switchboard and in due course, news of Di Modica’s extensive private building reached the ears of the officials. An individual from the City was dispatched and came knocking. So impressed was he by the quality of the work that the City forgave the ardent sculptor. Di Modica’s basement duplex was duly approved. Few artists have fabricated their environment as audaciously, as uncompromisingly as Di Modica. Crosby Street became his center, where he lived and worked. He would build a bar and give lively art parties there and it went on to become the place that his most important works were conceived.