Seeking alternatives to the gallery and the museum, whose doors were often closed to the most experimental art, many artists embraced their immediate environment as a place to make and display their work. By the mid-1970s, New York City was essentially bankrupt, in disarray, and left to fend for itself—as telegraphed in the infamous 1975 New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Yet Lower Manhattan’s desolate industrial landscape yielded spaces for Downtown artists to establish not-for-profit alternative venues. In these factory lofts (where many artists also lived) and in the gritty streets, they created art that directly engaged the urban scene: Gordon Matta-Clark carved a parabolic aperture into the wall of an abandoned Hudson River pier, and Scott Burton cast a discarded Queen Anne chair in bronze and displayed it on the sidewalk. David Wojnarowicz photographed a friend wandering Downtown wearing a mask of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, while Adam Purple built a floral paradise on a rubble-strewn lot on the Lower East Side.
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When Adam Purple moved to 184 Forsyth Street in 1972, his tiny backyard doubled as his neighbors’ trash heap. The following year, New York City razed two Eldridge Street tenements nearby, opening up a huge rubble-strewn lot on which Purple constructed his Garden of Eden. Emphasizing gardening’s ecological benefits, Purple fertilized his plot with manure from Central Park carriage horses, which he transported via bicycle. A spearhead of the Downtown community garden movement, Purple’s garden was bulldozed by the city in 1986 following a protracted court battle. |