The Fluxhouse Cooperatives
In 1966 George Maciunas, an artist working
in the dadaist tradition of anarchistic and irreverent art, became entranced
with the idea of artist cooperatives as a vehicle for the emancipation
of artists. Beyond residences and studios, Maciunas hoped to establish
collective workshops, food-buying cooperatives, and theaters to link the
strengths of various media together and bridges the gap between the artist
community and the surrounding society. Maciunas concretized his utopian
planning impulses with endless and minutely detailed projections of renovation
costs and the advantages of wholesale purchases. He had the conviction,
essential in a social catalyst, that legal prohibitions and entanglements
could be overcomes, and that the first priority was to get on with the
living experiment. Maciunas established himself as the president of Fluxhouse
Cooperatives, Inc., in order to “perform all the organizational
work” involved in “forming cooperatives, purchasing buildings,
obtaining mortgages, obtaining legal and architectural services, conducting
work as a general contractor for all renovation and [handling the] future
management if so desired by the members.”
With preliminary buying agreements with
several SoHo building owners and with speculatively based bust convincingly
detailed renovation estimates, Maciunas approached Kaplan for backing.
Kaplan had formed a joint venture financed by the J. M. Kaplan Fund and
the National Foundation for the Arts. Not only did this provide a source
of capital, but it enlisted new and important interest groups to back
Kaplan’s experiments in artists’ housing. According to a foundation
consultant, Henry Geldzahler, the joing venture with Kaplan was designed
to break through the city’s M-1 zoning designation, which excluded
residential occupancy in areas of light manufacturing. “The M-1
zone, now forbidden to artists-in-residence, embraces areas of downtown
Manhattan where light manufacturing has declined and many buildings now
stand empty,” said Geldzahler. The Foundation and the Kaplan Fund,
with a contribution of $100,000 each, were looking for a test case where
artists could challenge the M-1 restriction. Maciunas appeared at the
opportune moment, and Kaplan agreed to fund his Fluxhouse program.
By the end of 1966 Maciunas had picked out
the first of the SoHo buildings that he was to promote as artist cooperatives,
80-82 Wooster Street, and was taking deposits from buyers of floors and
half-floors. In the summer of 1967, with $20,00 from the Kaplan Fund and
the Foundation, Maciunas was able to make the cash down payment on this
$105,000 building. As was to be the pattern with other SoHo cooperatives,
the former owner assumed the mortgage for the balance owed. With $20,000
in grants, Maciunas was able to offer spaces for only $2,000 cash down
per shareholder, using the money for renovations and charging initially
only $205 per month maintenance for 3,300 square feet. By August 1967,
80 Wooster Street was fully subscribed and undergoing basic renovations,
and Maciunas was lining up buyers for a second building, 16-18 Greene
Street. This time he had $5,000 from Kaplan and the National Foundation
to hold the building. But serious setbacks had occurred in the Fluxhouse
program. The Federal Housing Administration, which Maciunas had counted
on to take over the mortgages as buildings were established, in order
to free the Kaplan seed money for new purchases, had refused to become
involved, citing fire hazards in the area, referred to by a series of
city fire commissioners as “Hell’s Hundred Acres.” In
addition, the National Foundation for the Arts and the Kaplan Fund has
embarked on a project of their own, the sponsorship of a conversion of
the old Bell Telephone Laboratories in Greenwich Village into a huge artist
housing complex, and had therefore lost interest in the Fluxhouse venture.
With the withdrawal of the legitimating momentum of philanthropic and
governmental sponsorship, Fluxhouse residents were acutely conscious that
they were occupying buildings that had been illegally purchased and illegally
renovated. Without philanthropic sponsorship, they had no leverage to
get required zoning variances from the Board of Standards and Appeals
or the occupancy permits form the Department of Buildings.
Maciunas, however, relied upon a different
basis of legitimacy for the occupants, a pattern of building purchases
and conversions that involved enough people to make the city hesitant
to enforce its own residency codes. In September 1967 he advertised shares
in three buildings at Grand and Wooster streets at prices ranging from
$2,200 to $5,000, or roughly $1 a square foot. Within three days the buildings
were 60 percent subscribed, and by December Maciunas had the $50,000 necessary
for the down payment.
Maciunas moved from block to block throughout
SoHo, tracking down owners who were closing their businesses and anxious
to sell their buildings. His method was to hold buildings with deposits,
then to line up shareholders to provide the down payments. Maciunas balanced
his increasingly complex financial arrangements with a continuous flow
of new cash deposits. By June of 9168 he had sponsored cooperatives on
Prince Street, Broome Street, and along West Broadway, a total of eleven
cooperative units involving seventeen buildings.
The city’s planning policies indirectly
aided Maciunas. By casting the depressing shadow of the Lower Manhattan
Expressway over the area for so long, the city planners had driven down
the building values and undermined the real-estate market. As early as
1963, local real-estate interests whose properties had been rendered unacceptable
as loan collateral had filed suit in fruitless effort to force the city
to either buy their buildings or abandon the expressway. Maciunas was
operating in a buyer’s market, purchasing in an area many feared
would become an industrial slum. Shael Shapiro, an architect-resident
in one of the first Maciunas buildings, and later a consultant for many
cooperatives and an active civic leader, agreed that the city had inadvertently
aided Maciunas. “The Lower Manhattan Expressway made this [Fluxhouse
project] possible. It depressed values throughout this area. The day after
Lindsay announced the end of the expressway, real estate along Broome
Street went up 50 percent.”
The Emergence of Vested Housing Interests
The cooperatives, which Maciunas envisioned
as a numbered series of affiliated “Fluxhouses,” quickly became
autonomous and resident controlled. The shareholders had become restive
under Maciunas’s single-handed directorship, and they felt fully
competent to take over building management themselves. All residents were
artists under the broad definition (which included writers and composers
along with visual artists, “events” artists, architects, and
in one case, a flower arranger), but many, especially the writers, college
art teachers, and architects, were experienced with legal and financial
matters and were comfortable dealing with the city bureaucracies. These
co-opers were not bohemians desirous of protection from the harsher realities
of their situation.
The cooperative food-buying schemes were
the first to collapse “I can remember sitting in my loft surrounded
by dozens of loaves of Russian black bread,” said an early resident.
“George thought this kind of buying would save us all money, and
he just went out and bought what he liked. We ate it for weeks.”
Another time it was oranges, and then toilet paper. Cooperative buying
soon ended.
Residents faced the chronic problem of undercapitalization
stemming from the fact that Maciunas’s coast estimates were always
too low, and because the shares had been sold at prices that attracted
artists with very little money. Residents repeatedly found themselves
having to pay special assessments for unforeseen plumbing costs or to
make up a low fuel bill estimate. For a time, this condition was not attributed
to deception on Maciunas’s part, but rather to his alleged warmhearted
incompetence. “We were all smart enough to know that George was
totally unrealistic in his expense estimates,” said one resident,
“and we allowed for it.” But as the levies continued, many
found they were financially overcommitted. Their access to capital, largely
through modest loans form their middle-class families, had been exhausted,
and more assessments were due. Individual buildings had to resort to independent
action to save themselves from default. In some cases only the exceptional
connections of one or two residents saved their buildings from bankruptcy.
One resident, a painter and his building’s first president explained,
I have a Harvard education, and so I have
connections that way. We brought this building with a mortgage almost
due [one of three], and it was immediately called. We were really
about to lose the building. I had been to every bank in the city
and had been laughed at. You couldn’t get a mortgage on anything.
At nine in the morning of the day the mortgage was due, I had the
idea of calling the father of a girl I used to date at Radcliffe.
By one P.M. I had the money.
I knew he was in real estate, but
it also turned out he was a chairman of the board of the [N] Bank.
Uncle Jim, we used to call him. He simply directed the head of the
branch bank to make the new mortgage. He said that had it not been
for him, we would not have been able to get an appointment with
the secretary to the branch manager, with the kind of building we
had…. [B] was another dear friend. I just happened to be mentioning
the building’s situation one day, and she offered five thousand
dollars. She said it was probably made by exploiting someone anyway,
and she had no doubt clipped a coupon to get it. But she offered
it interest free to us for five years. |
Residents solved their financial problems
as a unit, giving some members grace periods on debts, taking loans from
others, and using the borrowing ability of a select few. But they could
not assume responsibility for the financial problems of cooperatives other
than their own.
At first, however, George Maciunas handled
the deposits and bank transactions of the cooperatives on a different
basis. One cooperative in the formational stage found that he had lent
$26,000 in members’ deposits to four other cooperatives also being
established, all without the depositors’ knowledge. Maciunas was
unable to calm the irate shareholders with this explanation of his accounting
methods, published in his Fluxhouse Newsletter.
The reason for such
disposition of monies is my principle of collectivism- running the
cooperatives not necessarily in a legalistically correct way, but
in a way to benefit the collective good. When a particular cooperative
is in danger of losing a building to foreclosure of lien, every
effort-0all the funds, go to the rescue. This has worked well without
detriment to anybody. Not one of the 4 closings we had so far was
delayed by this principle of a “collective chest.” It
would not have delayed the closing of 465 West Broadway either had
it not been for the interference of the “shadow kitchen.” |
The “shadow kitchen” consisted
of shareholders who did not trust Maciunas and who were eager to take
over their building affairs. They believed that his financial control
and manipulation of deposit accounts enabled him to speculate at their
expense. The president of one early Maciunas cooperative pointed out,
George sold the garage
on the ground floor of our building for a ridiculously low price
to a friend of his. It’s now a theater, and a very valuable
space. We saw collusion, with his friend working behind the scenes
in partnership with George. When we protested, this guy rented the
space to a company that parked garbage trucks there, just to spite
us. Maciunas was dishonest from the very beginning. |
Cooperatives found, contrary
to Maciunas’s reassurances, that they could not get their deposit
money back from other co-ops when their own closing date for purchase
arrived. One cooperative reported having to pay an interest rate of 25
percent a month to borrow two thousand dollars from another Fluxhouse
in order to forestall the foreclosure of their mortgage. In another instance,
a cooperative found itself sued by the bank which handled its deposits
because of Maciunas’s policy of shifting money from account to account.
Individual cooperatives quickly discovered that if they were to survive,
they had to fend for themselves in financial matter. Maciunas was hurt
by this turn toward economic self-interest on the part of the cooperatives
and by the criticism of his leadership which he felt had inspired it.
In a letter in which he relinquished all managerial connections with two
Fluxhouse units, Maciunas explained the dispute from his side.
I did not mind doing
all this [managerial work] free of charge if it was going to advance
the selfless spirit of collectivism. Unfortunately, it did nothing
of the sort. As soon as opportunity presented itself, the collective
spirit fell apart- members selfishly promoting their own interests
at the expense of the cooperative and separate cooperatives promoting
their interests at the expense of the entire collective. More specifically,…
the Grand St. directors saw no reason why their temporarily excessive
funds should have been used to save Wooster St. from disaster and
Wooster Street’s treasurer saw no reason to reciprocate this
good will by returning this borrowed money or part to save Grand
Street from disaster. Members showed their distrust in me, or envying
better spaces of other members, actually entered those spaces to
remeasure and recalculate the spaces as to increase other’s
and decrease their own monthly rents. Etc., etc., ad nauseam…
Furthermore, since several members expressed dissatisfaction with
my methods of management and accounting, a few even suspecting me
of making a fortune (!), I decided to stop wasting my selfless interest
which is unappreciated anyway and become just as selfish as everybody
else.
THUS: … I will stop giving free
time and advice on all matters relating to architecture, electrical
engineering, management, accounting, carpentry, building code, contractors,
supplies, etc…. I will charge… for my past work in management,
general contracting and accounting at the low rate of $40 per week….
Any further time spent by me on any of the above matters will be
charged to you at the rate of $10 per hours (which is the rate I
received at the time I quit my job).
|
Maciunas continued to sponsor cooperatives,
but only as individual ventures and for a fixed fee The Fluxhouse phase
in SoHo was over by late 1968. In the absence of any overall financial
resources, the problem of survival had individuated each cooperative.
Financial anxiety and the recourse to purely personal resources available
to the individual; shareholders made self-management for each cooperative
a necessity. A secularizing monetary fear had washed away any illusions
about the bonds of a gemeinschaft between cooperative. Nevertheless, it
soon was to become apparent that the larger problem of resolving the artists’
illegal residential status would require an area-wide organizational approach.
The territorial district itself evolved as the basis for a functionally
important form of community in the next phase of development.
Charles R. Simpson, “The Achievement of Territorial Community”
in SoHo: The Artist in the City (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1981) pp. 153-188.
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