There’s a building at 57 Great Jones Street in New York City which continues to draw me into its sphere. To find this building, I had to pick up a book. To enter this building I had to find a sake bar and meet a woman who had a business card with a secret phone number. This building was owned by Andy Warhol and it’s whereJean-Michel Basquiat worked and lived. This is a story about the power of connection and collaboration. It’s a story of things moving full circle and it’s a story of exploring different methods of creative practice.
The book that started it all was “Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone” by Olivia Laing. In 2017, I found it on a bookshelf of a sublet in Alphabet City. It was a book about artists, both famous and obscure, who had lived in New York City and had leaned into the surprising loneliness that comes from being in a big city. Two chapters in, Olivia wrote of walking through Tompkins Square Park to get coffee at a café on East 9th St. The café overlooked a community garden with a huge weeping willow. This coffee shop was the closest to our sublet, a coffee shop we were visiting every day, and from which we too were marvelling at the grace of the weeping willow.
Lonely City became like a mirror for my own life. Olivia Laing weaved her personal narrative with the lives of artists that she found within the streets and avenues of New York City, describing cafes and corners that I was experiencing in real time. The book became like a guidebook, and I succumbed to each artist she told me about.
Laing wrote of Andy Warhol, how his problems with speech isolated him from an early age. Then she told me about Jean-Michel Basquiat, how his experience with loneliness was born from racism. Even at the height of his career, cabs refused to stop, and the art world frequently stereotyped him. Basquiat’s biography was further down on the bookshelf and it was there that I learnt that Basquiat had lived and worked in a building owned by Andy Warhol, a building at57 Great Jones Street. I would walk past this building on my way to work, trying to summon x-ray vision to see inside. I learnt that there was a restaurant inside called Bohemian. A restaurant that you could only access if you had a phone number, a phone number which was not publicly listed. I settled with being able to experience the building from the outside.
At some point in our lives, we’ve all had a favourite neighbourhood restaurant. The local where you’re welcomed by name, and you’ve eaten everything off the menu. Recently, 57 Great Jones Street came back into my sphere of consciousness, by way of a New York Times Article about Angelina Jolie. Jolie has signed an eight year lease on the building and during this time she hopes to create a hub for artists and makers, under the banner of Atelier Jolie. Shared meals and connection through cooking is part of the creative process at Atelier Jolie, with many hands contributing through effort and creativity. People can come and go, be curious, make art or take a class. Artists can use this space for free, with the latest artist in residence, French multimedia artist Prune Nourry, working there for the next two years.
For so many people, food is the ultimate connector. Closer to home in Sydney, Magenta House is a hybrid space that functions as a private home and a public space. Opened by Mariam Ella Arcilla and Mason Kimber, the home is a community hub, hosting workshops, communal meals, talks and library sessions. Designed by previous owner and architect Adele McNab, the 19th century Victorian terrace is only three meters wide, but it manages to pack in a library and creative studio. The kitchen hosts intimate cooking demonstrations, often featuring Filipino chefs.
In Melbourne, Studio Bright has adopted the shared lunch within their workplace. In conversation with Dave Sharp on the Office Talk podcast, Principal and founding director, Mel Bright attributes the shared lunch as one part of a fantastic office culture. The team eats healthier, there’s less chance of skipped meals due to busyness, and there are more opportunities for conversations outside of work.
Before moving to Sydney, my experience of a professional workplace was limited to one. That office was in a suburb of Brisbane and every lunchtime, someone would buy groceries, and we would make and eat lunch together. The food wasn’t extravagant, we each made a ham and cheese sandwich and ate it on the deck of the Queenslander, enjoying a moment of fresh air. That was my life for about 5years. When I moved to Sydney, I was overwhelmed by the smorgasbord of lunch options in Surry Hills. I gravitated to the Organic Bread Bar on South Dowling St, almost taking refuge in its heavy brick walls while I acclimatised to a new city. Maybe the answer lies in more flexibility, less rigidity. Embracing the essence of the collective shared meals at Atelier Jolie, Magenta House and Studio Bright.
Photos below from Never Too Small and Broadsheet
Back in New York, our neighbourhood restaurant was Sake Bar Satsko, a sake bar tucked away in Alphabet City, via a short stroll through Tompkins Square Park. It was here that we perched on stools having our regular chat with the bartender who was studying to become a certified sake sommelier. On this day, a sommelier called Lisa joined in our conversation and before long we learnt that she was the sommelier at Bohemian Restaurant. The restaurant only accessible via a secret phone number. As the night grew old, she gave me her card and as I walked home, I marvelled at the ripple effect of one single moment; picking up a book from a bookshelf.
Whether in the narrow Victorian terrace of Sydney's Magenta House, around Studio Bright's communal lunch table in Melbourne, or within the layered walls at Great Jones Street, the story remains the same: shared meals create moments of pause in our increasingly fragmented lives.
