MOLI VIEW™

MOLI's Starving Artist Contest might get lucky and receive a photo or painting or poem or video from a resident of Carnegie Artist Studios in NYC. The towers have been the artistic home to many big hitters of American culture, like Marlon Brando, Leonard Bernstein, George Balanchine, Lee Strasberg — and more recently John Leguizamo, Mira Sorvino, and Marisa Tomei. I say we'd be lucky here at MOLI, because the artists who live and create there (some in their eighties and nineties) are distracted these days with a tough fight. They've been threatened with eviction (again!) by the Carnegie Hall Corporation, and were recently served notices to oust them in June.

Janice Orlandi, spokesperson for the studios' tenants group, in a reply to a post on Gothamist, said that the Carnegie Hall Corporation has not made any offers to rent-controlled tenants. "Carnegie Hall has filed DHCR [Department of Housing and Community Renewal] applications to remove the rent-controlled tenants, and no official offer by the Carnegie Hall Corporation to relocate them has been made," writes Orlandi.

It's a damn shame, because way back in 1895, Andrew Carnegie designed long, sweeping dance studios with high ceilings, great acoustics, and strategically placed northern skylights. Tenants believe that his plan for the towers was for more than just rental income. They think his vision was to create a comprehensive artists community, and they're ready to fight to defend themselves.

Previous Page  1  2  Next Page