Carnegie Hall Corporation is the tenant. We were subtenants and our existence was meant to be secured by a Charter written in 1960 stating that the balance of studios must be preserved and continue as originally intended. The lease between the Carnegie Hall Corporation and the City of New York was to remain in effect for 100 years.
     What also must be factored in is this: we are living in corporate real estate-friendly times that are not conducive to preserving these types of artists colonies. The Mayor, if he had chosen, could have saved the Carnegie Studios with one gesture.
     Sanford Weill is the Chairman of the board of trustees of the Carnegie Hall Corporation.
     The son-in-law of Mr Weill was chosen as the architect of the renovations. The Landmarks Preservation Commissioners approved the renovation plans to destroy the rooftop skylights, and gut the interior. Carnegie Hall Corporation hired a ‘historian’ to convince the commissioners the skylights were not original, and Mr Carnegie actually wanted a roof garden instead of artist studios.

I lived for several years in Paris, and somehow I can’t imagine this happening there — or even in London or Rome. What does this say about America and the value we place on art, artists, and cultural patrimony in our society?
I am very curious to see how the film will play in Europe, knowing how they love to characterise Americans as Philistines who destroy their own cultural history, only concerned with a short-sighted view of the present. I hope Lost Bohemia will preserve some of the history of these very unique studios, and capture the intangible atmosphere that surrounded them. But I also hope it will serve as a cautionary tale of how fragile our cultural history is and how much of the soul of the city is due to the artists who live and work in it.

Lost Bohemia had its world premier on November 5 at the DOC NYC Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Prize.