Director Josef Astor on Lost Bohemia

Photo: Lost Bohemia

Carnegie Hall recently celebrated its 120th anniversary. While the storied Midtown concert venue has inspired some of the most memorable performances from some the greatest performers of all time—that like its Roman brick exterior are tinted in those nostalgic ochre hues—that same landmark which occupies an entire stretch of Seventh Avenue, was also, not so long ago, home to a community of artists that lived and worked in the Carnegie Studios.

In 2001, unbeknownst to anyone living atop the Hall, eviction notices began to appear on doors, and soon, like jazz pianist, Don Shirley, tells it in photographer Josef Astor's documentary Lost Bohemia, the Carnegie Hall Corporation (which leases the building from the City of New York) started "picking them off one by one like blackbirds on the fence. Bing! Bing! Bing!" Everyone was forced to leave, including Mr. Shirley and Black Bessie—his grand piano which he and Duke Ellington would jam on late into the night after concerts "downstairs." But why did this have to happen, and who should be held responsible?

First, a little history. In 1895, four years after the "Music Hall" was established, Andrew Carnegie designed what Agnes De Mille describes as "a crazy quilt of studios" specifically intended to accommodate artists: wood-spring floors for dancing, skylights which allowed for remarkable amounts of sunlight, and cavernous rooms with incredible acoustics. On the tenth floor was Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio: Marilyn Monroe, Elia Kazan, James Dean, Jane Fonda. Life Magazine was launched on the ninth floor. Two floors down—though de Mille once stated "I never did find out where the seventh floor was, if any"—Ballet Arts was established in Studio 61. Dancers and choreographers ranging from George Balanchine to Bob Fosse, Martha Graham and Jerome Robbins, all rehearsed and taught there. The list, the anecdotes, the lore, it goes on.

Today, the Studios—gutted and renovated into neon-lit cubicles—carry none of these memories and discount what came before. Especially terrible was how the Carnegie Corporation relocated some the building's last residents—a few of which had been tenants for more than 50 years. Notably, portrait photographer, Editta Sherman, aka the "Duchesse of Carnegie Hall," who often collaborated with longtime friend and Studio neighbor Bill Cunningham.

While Josef Astor's doc, Lost Bohemia, which will enjoy a run at IFC starting today, May 20th, charts the residents' fight against an insurmountable Goliath, it's also a portrait and oral history of his neighbors—their illustrious lives and eccentricities. Astor, a photographer who once assisted Irving Penn and Deborah Turbeville, and whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, among other publications, spoke with Elle about the Studios, the stories, and some of its stranger more elusive tenants like the anonymous poet, who Astor describes as the omnipresent, "disembodied" narrator of his film.

ELLE: There are some great tales, perhaps even fabled, that are shared in Lost Bohemia. As told by Bill Cunningham, there's that anecdote about Judy Garland, which was really terrific.
It's a great anecdote. Can I tell you the rest of it?

ELLE: Yes!
The whole story is that Bill Cunningham said that Judy Garland used to come to the building because there was a man on the 9th floor that they called the Phantom of Carnegie Hall. A lot of people had nicknames; there was the Duchess, Jeanne Beauvais the singer, she was the Merry Widow of Carnegie Hall because that was her starring role, and I'm the Birdman, and there's the Phantom. He was a brilliant musicologist—he had something called the Library of Recorded Sound and it was an authority on odd bits of sound.

ELLE: But we don't know who he was?
I couldn't tell you and I'm a research geek. Supposedly he's from a very good family, and kind of slipped through the cracks of society, became a drug dealer and a drug addict, and because he was wondering through the halls of the studios—this is in those times when it was really bohemian, before I got there in '85, in the 60s and 70s, and it was really kind of loose and crazy—and he would wander around in his bathrobe late at night. And this I have on first hand, Judy Garland was a good friend of his and she would visit him all the time. You can ask yourself was it the music library or the drugs, we don't know, but anyway, Bill Cunningham says, "Oh, they're just all on drugs and they come up to the roof and they sing all night long!" And I just love how he says it: "It would be 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and they'd be up there, not just once or twice, all the time."

ELLE: What is it like to look back on 8 years of footage?
It's funny because when I was filming there wasn't a story arc. It was more of a retro tapestry, but when the eviction notices came, it got its arc—it got its teeth. There was now a more dramatic plotline to support. I remember thinking, how can I capture that intangible essence and feeling of being in those studios. There's a great Agnes de Mille quote about the power and promise, and glory of the Studios; of its immortality. It was really bohemian.

ELLE: How did find your studio in Carnegie Hall?
Do you want me to rephrase the question? You know that joke right? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. I was living in the East Village like every other artist who was knocking around in the mid 80s, and I was at the Pyramid Club, like everybody else, during happy hour, like everybody else, and talking people about how I have to start getting my own thing going. I was an assistant then but I wanted to get my act together and do my own work. So someone in the bar overheard me and said, "Oh you know, I'm moving out of my space." I did not see it as a sign at first because he did not say Carnegie Studios. I thought it was very perverse and weird, all he said was, "Why don't you come and look at it, it's a great space!"

ELLE: Who was it?
This turns out to be John Schaefer who was a young composer and conductor at that time. And I remember telling him once I saw it, that I couldn't afford it. I came all the way to nasty old Midtown where you don't know anybody and there's nothing around, and all of sudden there's this fantasy; this studio with quotation marks around it, with a spotlight. It was totally like La Boheme; this atelier, Parisian thing. It was not a New York style studio. For somebody starting out though, it was a little fancy and I couldn't afford it. But a group of friends of mine said, "Josef, don't you recognize a sign when you see it?" My dream studio fell out of the sky and into my lap. So I took this massive leap of faith.

ELLE: Do you think that Bohemian New York life is still possible? Is that kind of creative energy and community something that can break away from simply being a nostalgic faraway ideal?
I'm a firm believer that it's not a wistfulness—that has nothing to do with it. It has to do with recognizing that the effect artists have does not happen in a corporate or privileged environment. The idea of cleaning the place up and making all these spaces, most people I know, know that's not how art is made. Andrew Carnegie built the place but that didn't mean it was an instant hotbed and incubator of creative people. That evolved over the years, that cumulative effect, and to allow for that happen is important. The Studios were designed specifically to be inspiring, and the fact that that wasn't respected by an arts institution is just want to call it corporate vandalism? It's a shocker.

ELLE: Who is the anonymous poet?
I just talked to her today.

ELLE: She's a she? I assumed it was a man.
I know. Everybody think she's a man. She'd prefer it if you thought she was a black man. But she is a female poet, activist, anarchist from the 60s. She wrote a book called The African Boy. Eccentric isn't even a strong enough word; she's such a recluse. She's probably the real thing if there's such a thing as the real thing.

ELLE: Has anybody seen her before?
Well, when those eviction notices started to appear, people started to crawl out of the woodwork to band together. I was starting to see people that I had only heard about before, that were kind of legendary, that I assumed were dead or had moved out. Her name is Elizabeth Sargeant—I wonder if she knew the Phantom. Even though there were enough interesting people when I was there, when I hear about the old days it was teeming with freaks. In a way she's the perfect person for Carnegie Studios—she used to say it was a place where you could have people around if you want or be completely by yourself and everyone will leave you alone. Both things existed at once: the community and the possibility to be a recluse.

Lost Bohemia opens at the IFC Center tonight at 323 6th Avenue.  To celebrate the opening, Editta Sherman will be autographing Cunningham's rare out of print Facades on May 20 and 21 after the 7:00 pm and before the 8:50 pm screenings.