Hidden among the three-hour-long lines for sample sales, the luxury boutiques selling $4,000 bags and the street vendors hawking $100 knockoffs of those bags, in SoHo, is a time portal.
The five-story building at 48 Howard Street is where, for roughly 50 years, the conceptual artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude lived and worked. Much has changed in the neighborhood since the 1960s, when the couple first moved there, renting two floors for just $150 a month. The property value has gone up — the median rent for a property in SoHo these days is $7,750, according to Zumper — but inside, the home remains almost exactly as it was when they occupied it. The top-floor studio still has Christo’s sketches, art supplies neatly arranged in cookie tins and an unopened Coca-Cola bottle (their son, Cyril, loved Coke). Downstairs, where they ate and slept, trinkets and family photos surround the dining table and stools he built to furnish the space.
Soon after Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in the neighborhood, in 1971, SoHo was rezoned to allow certain artists to live and work in their industrial lofts, further solidifying its status as a bohemia. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, On Kawara and Richard Prince had all lived in SoHo. Now, more than five decades later, many of the artists from that era have died or left the neighborhood, and the question of what to do with their studios arises.
Jeanne-Claude died in 2009, and in 2020, so did Christo. Since then, 48 Howard’s future has been uncertain. Their foundation uses the building as its office, but walls are deteriorating, paint is peeling and the facade has needed renovation. The possibility of opening the home up to the public is being explored, but that could mean having to make structural updates to get it up to code and make it accessible, an expensive undertaking possibly undermining its authenticity.
“I consider the apartment and the studio as part of our own archive, especially because Christo and Jeanne-Claude built the place with their own hands — he designed it, and he built literally everything from the walls to the furniture itself,” said Lorenza Giovanelli, the foundation’s collection and exhibition manager. “We want to find a way to keep their legacy alive, preserving the space where they lived and worked.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude were known for their massive, site-specific installations that explored themes of ephemerality and public space. They never accepted money from sponsors, financing their own projects, no matter the scale, so as to remain independent and avoid commercial influence. In 1995, they famously wrapped the Reichstag, the German parliament building, in 100,000 square meters of fabric. A decade later in New York, the couple installed 7,503 saffron-colored, nylon “gates” in Central Park.
They created fleeting, monumental pieces that were feats of engineering and negotiation. Their installations often involved intense debates with governments and were met with protests from environmentalists. The resulting works were owned by no one but could be experienced by everyone, changing the way the public interacted with art altogether. “Our work is a scream of freedom,” Christo often said in interviews.
Earlier this year, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of The Gates, The Shed held a retrospective spotlighting the couple’s unrealized projects and, in Central Park, the public could view an augmented reality version of the work. It’s no surprise that their works still resonate — in today’s post-Covid New York, where many aspects of city life are largely unaffordable and public space feels increasingly threatened, the search for the kind of egalitarian wonder and excitement that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art provided continues.
At a moment when the creation of art at such a scale feels impossible without a corporate sponsor, when most visual stunts are shallow cries for publicity, the preservation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy feels urgent. And a crucial part of their oeuvre is that the inception of their grand, internationally known works happened humbly, in an unglamorous, gritty industrial building.
Discovering SoHo
Christo, originally from Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude, originally from Morocco, met in Paris in the 1950s. In 1964, they came to New York via the SS France. They brought with them two mattresses, a chair by Gerrit Rietveld and a painting by Lucio Fontana. Those items don’t fit easily into suitcases, but Christo “was a master in terms of wrapping and packing,” Ms. Giovanelli said with a smile.
Like many artists of the time, the couple moved into the Chelsea Hotel. They were in search of a more permanent place to stay, and the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who also lived at the Chelsea Hotel, suggested Christo and Jeanne-Claude check out 48 Howard. Mr. Oldenburg had a studio there and knew that several floors in the building were vacant.
The building was owned by two brothers, Max and Ben Rosenbaum, who ran a tin roofsmithing business. They were charging $75 per floor in rent — Christo and Jeanne-Claude immediately decided to move in, taking over the top two floors.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude had to “literally build the walls, paint everything and scrub all the filth,” Ms. Giovanelli said. They called in other artist friends, including Gordon Matta-Clark, to help build a bathroom and closets. Then, they had to furnish the place.
Having little money, the couple became “professional scavengers,” Ms. Giovanelli said. “They would literally walk up and down the streets of SoHo and Brooklyn and get furniture that other people discarded.” While Christo was shy, Jeanne-Claude “was known for being shameless,” Ms. Giovanelli said. He’d pretend not to know her as she picked up chairs and tables from the street.
The objects in the home “have a patina of repeated use,” said Yukie Ohta, an artist and archivist in SoHo. “They aren’t quite dirty, but they are not as shiny as the Subzero refrigerators or as fresh as the Room and Board sofas that one might find in a renovated SoHo loft today.”
In 1973, the Rosenbaums told Christo and Jeanne-Claude that they were planning to sell the building and had found a buyer. Jeanne-Claude asked whether she and Christo could buy it instead if she could match the offer plus a symbolic $1. The owners said yes, but finances were again a problem for the couple.
“We tried everything possible to get the money,” Christo said in a 2014 interview with T Magazine. “At the time, we sometimes weren’t even able to pay the rent for a few months. But the landlord, Mr. Rosenbaum, gave us a mortgage himself so that we could buy the building from him.”
They ended up purchasing the building for $175,000.
Dismal Dinner Parties
At first, only Christo was recognized as the artist behind the pieces, but in the mid ’90s, he started sharing equal credit for outdoor works with Jeanne-Claude. She also acted as his publicist and began hosting dinner parties, inviting influential dealers and gallerists. “She was notorious for being a terrible cook,” Ms. Giovanelli said. “They had no money at all, so she would cook flank steak and canned potatoes. That was it.”
The evenings were often the source of gossip in the art world, Ms. Giovanelli added. They didn’t always curate the guest list carefully, and some of the attendees didn’t get along.
In Burt Chernow’s biography of the couple, the dealer Ivan Karp described one of the gatherings as “a disastrous, bleak evening with some of the worst food served in a private home, ever!”
Still, some people returned — two frequent dinner guests were Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny.
In 1981, Willy Brandt, who had served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974, visited the home to discuss a seemingly impossible project. Christo had been plotting to cover the Reichstag in fabric. The building has a dark history — in 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, it was set on fire. A pivotal moment in the Nazi regime’s rise, the event would be used to rationalize mass arrests and the suspension of press freedom.
German authorities repeatedly denied Christo and Jeanne-Claude permission to wrap the building. But they had the support of Mr. Brandt, who had come to 48 Howard to urge them not to give up. In 1992, however, Mr. Brandt died. The couple continued to push.
The project became the subject of a roll-call vote in the German parliament in 1994, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude won by 69 votes.
The following year, in his victory lap, Christo stated his mission plainly. “Nobody can buy this project. Nobody can own this project. Nobody can sell tickets to this project,” he told The Los Angeles Times the week before its unveiling. “This work will not exist because a president wants it, or because a corporation commissioned it, but only because of the artist, who is not rational.”
Then, over 200 workers draped silvery fabric over the Reichstag. From conceptualization to realization, the project spanned three decades; it stayed wrapped for just two weeks. The display cost over $15 million, money the couple earned by selling Christo’s sketches and models.
It was “the only time in history that the creation of a work of art was decided by a debate and a roll-call vote in a parliament,” Jeanne-Claude told Sculpture magazine in 2003.
A ‘Sacred’ Space
Christo’s studio is “the most sacred part of the house,” Ms. Giovanelli said.
Stepping inside is like entering the great artist’s mind. Every item is meticulously organized — a single marker used to create “the red edge” is labeled and taped to a desk, a can of YooHoo is repurposed to hold pens. Technical drawings and maps abound — a plan with measurements for wrapping Snoopy’s doghouse is hung on the wall next to a photo of Jeanne-Claude.
Jeanne-Claude’s imprint is all over, too. Where the radiator used to be, she traced the words “I Love You” out of grime on the wall. In the living area, she also pasted pieces of paper with quotes she enjoyed around the space, one of which reads, “to be is to do (Descartes) / to do is to be (J-P. Sartre) / do be do be do (Sinatra).”
The public anger and institutional battles that came with every work were part of the art itself. “For me esthetics is everything involved in the process — the workers, the politics, the negotiations, the construction difficulty, the dealing with hundreds of people,” Christo told The Times in 1972. “The whole process becomes an esthetic — that’s what I’m interested in, discovering the process. I put myself in dialogue with other people.”
And though there were many triumphs — L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped in Paris and Surrounded Islands in Florida — there were also several occasions in which the years of fighting didn’t lead to success.
Starting in the 1990s, the couple wanted to suspend nearly six miles of luminous fabric over the Arkansas River. In 2011, two years following Jeanne-Claude’s death, Christo received the permits necessary to bring the project to life. But then, environmentalists protested, a local opposition group called Rags Over the Arkansas River formed and students at Denver University’s Environmental Law Clinic filed a lawsuit to halt the project. But only in 2017, after President Trump was first sworn in, did Christo announce he wanted to step away from it, in an act of his own protest.
“The federal government is our landlord. They own the land,” Christo told The Times following his decision. “I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord.”
Though the physical installation never came to fruition, in a way, the work still existed through the conversations it sparked. And still proudly on display in the home today is a bumper sticker made by Rags Over the Arkansas River, which reads, “Just say no to Christo.”
Even now, the dialogues inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, spawned from 48 Howard, are ongoing.
“The aura of the possible, which is what drew people to SoHo in the first place,” Ms. Ohta said, “emanates from the building’s bones.”
