Carnegie Studios By Josef Birdman Astor (Click to enlarge)

He once said: ‘I like playing downstairs, because I can just run up here to my studio afterward, sit in my bathtub and drink champagne.’
Elizabeth Sargent is the real thing, a poet who lives as a poet 24 hours a day. She’s a recluse who keeps unusual hours, and was rarely seen around the building. She would leave multiple messages every day on my answering service, beginning at 5:00 am – advice on art, love, life and how to structure the film I was making about the Carnegie Studios; she wrote a history passage that’s included in it.

What happened when you received official word that the Hall’s board was evicting everyone? And how long after did you start to organize yourselves for a fight?
We all sensed right away that it was an ‘all-or-nothing battle’, not just to save our studio spaces, but the entire place. There were some evictions in the past, but this time it felt final. Nonetheless, we were naively confident that we could win. We organised quickly, but not very efficiently. We were an eclectic group of artists and artist-adjacent businesses, and keeping them cohesive was very difficult. In hindsight, I’m glad we didn’t know then what we know now, meaning the actual scale of the Goliath we were up against. So we did the maximum we knew how, figuring things out as we went along – we wrote letters, met with City and State politicians, went to Albany, staged a rally outside City Hall lead by former Modica student John Turturro, made t-shirts, pamphlets….