The New York Apartment - Where the Starving Artists Slept

John Quincy Adams Ward, 1887

As befit an artist whose statue of George Washington had just been installed at Federal Hall, Ward’s studio at 119 West 52nd Street was designed by the preeminent architect Richard Morris Hunt.

Photo: Pach Brothers/Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Walkowitz, 1908

Walkowitz in his studio at 8 East 23rd Street. For three months that year, he shared his cot with the artist Max Weber, who needed a place to crash.

Photo: Pach Brothers/Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution

Walker Evans, c. 1935

Evans kept part of his mother’s car engine behind the clothes hamper in the kitchen of 441 East 92nd Street.

Photo: © Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Robert Rauschenberg, 1953

Rauschenberg in his Fulton Street loft. He had built a bathtub by lining a fish crate with tar but could only use it in the summer because he had no hot water.

Photo: © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York/Schirmer/Mosel

Leonard Horowitz, 1961

Horowitz, the Village Voice art critic, playing his recorder in his loft at 645 Broadway, where he lived for 25 years. According to the photographer Fred McDarrah, the visible items—shower, bed, dining table, vanity screen, ladder, record player, coffee table, dead avocado plant—were everything Horowitz owned.

Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

Patti Smith, 1974

Smith in her apartment on Macdougal Street. She had just performed her first extended gig, a six-day stint at Max’s Kansas City.

Photo: Allan Tannenbaum/Polaris

William S. Burroughs, c. 1978

Burroughs nicknamed his room in this partially converted YMCA at 222 Bowery “the Bunker.” He lived in the former locker room; twenty years earlier, Mark Rothko worked on his murals for the Four Seasons in the abandoned gym.

Photo: Udo Breger

Cindy Sherman, 1982

Sherman with her blind pet dove in her apartment at 64 Fulton Street, where she lived until 1983. The shower was in the kitchen and the toilet was down the hall.

Photo: Mary Ellen Mark

Keith Haring, 1983

Haring with his boyfriend, Juan Dubose, in the railroad apartment they shared with a friend at 325 Broome Street. To maintain some privacy, Haring and Dubose slept in a camping tent.

Photo: Laura Levine/Corbis

John Cage, 1979

Cage and Merce Cunningham shared a loft at 101 West 18th Street. By 1982, Cage had filled the space with 203 plants.

Photo: Lelli & Masotti/Alinari/The Image Works

John Ahearn, 1983

Ahearn working on his piece Bobbie (Sneaker Town USA) in his apartment on Walton Avenue in the South Bronx (his frequent collaborator Rigoberto Torres sits to the left on the couch). The living room doubled as Ahearn’s studio.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Taylor Mead, 1984

Mead’s rent-stabilized apartment cost him $75 a month in 1979 and is now nearing $460. The 86-year-old Warhol “superstar” still performs at the Bowery Poetry Club, but his clutter has restricted other activities. “I’ve painted myself out of the apartment,” he says.

Photo: Peter Bellamy

Ralph Ellison, 1986

Ellison at 730 Riverside Drive, where he lived until his death, in 1994. He left behind thousands of pages of writing, some of which were posthumously collected and published as Juneteenth.

Photo: Keith Meyers/The New York Times/Redux

Terence Koh, 2003

Koh shared this 400-square-foot apartment, a third-floor walk-up on Henry Street, with his partner, Garrick Gott.

Hayden Cummings and Liam Crill, 2009

Cummings co-founded a trailer park in the lot behind this former nut-roasting factory at 304 Meserole Street in Bushwick. Rent started at $550 and included access to the interior communal space, which contained a metal shop, a ceramic studio, and an Airstream with an aquaponics garden. It turned out, however, that the building’s landlord did not control the lot, and last month all the trailers were removed.