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September 25, 2007

Cold Comfort Charm

The nicest furnishings in my flat belong to the dogs, and I don’t mean Shearling beds or ergonomic water-stands. I refer to the fancy tresses above the pasterns and at the rear, which, I’m told, are called exactly that: furnishings.
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In general, I do not like furnishings. I think couches, armchairs, rugs and the like belong in fictional murder mysteries. I’ve felt this way since childhood, though I grew up in lovely suburban Miami, in an elegant home of Danish Modern, teak and cherry wood, Steuban glass, and Jensen flatware. My own little room was ascetic, deliberately spare as a ship. As such, there is hardly anything about it to describe.
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I moved to New York in 1974, to a studio apartment on E. 79th St. that I actually used as a painting studio. Besides the stretchers, canvas, paints and brushes, and the jars of turps, it contained only a sleeping bag, a wooden stool, and 2 cooking pots. Instead of having a table, which would take up too much room, I balanced my plate at night on the windowsill, looking east. The two cats perched with me, luckily never defenestrating. We were a bit cramped, because the windowsill also held a spider plant, a sansavaria, and a miniature India rubber tree. (The notion of indoor plants still seems odd, because there didn’t seem to be any in Miami when I was growing up. When I was 18, we visited New York friends of my parents, the Dreylings. Their uptown hi-rise was the first apartment I can remember [except for the one in the Bronx where we lived until I was five]. I was shocked that people actually lived in such small, traffic-noisy, dark cubicles, had to use elevators to get home, and grew “houseplants” in their windows.)
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In Feb. 1976, I moved downtown to an illegal (i.e., nonresidential) loft on Hudson Street. I shared the floor with a working printing factory. The rent was $250/month. My half (1,200 sq. ft.) came with four full-size (but desiccated) trees in huge plastic tubs, a rickety bed cobbled from odd planks, a dozen dried up oil-paint tubes. Until I found someone to jerry-rig a private bath, I used the men’s room in the hallway and showered at the Y. The ceilings were so tall that eventually I built a bedroom on stilts. I cooked on a hot plate, and balanced my well-balanced dinner of soup on a window ledge--as I’d done uptown--but instead of eyeing the ice-tray cubicles of fellow hi-risers and a smidge of the East River, I now gazed over majestic, unpopulated, industrial spans and sunsets over the Hudson. Often I climbed out one of the enormous windows to dangle my feet on the adjacent rooftop. No one around, except the wolf-like dog that patrolled up there. I met him after my first trepidatious night in this new, dead-quiet, pre-gentrified, desolate neighborhood. Awaking at sunup (no curtains, no shades), I was aghast to see the wolf-dog, staring in at me with feral blue eyes.
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I had to leave the loft in 1982, when the building was sold to a harassing, unlawful yet litigious reprobate. (The usual story.) I moved a few blocks to a four-story walkup with a bar beneath, on Harrison. My four-room railroad flat had reptilian green walls, seven cracked, boarded up windows, and no kitchen to speak of, or bathroom–just a toilet at the end of a long dim hallway. The previous tenants had been there for 60 years and had paid $60/month. (Mine started at around $325.) The two useless wall outlets probably dated from Thomas Edison days. The gas jets in the narrow stairway had been plugged. Each room had an iron bed and a heavy armoire filled with Miss Havisham-type items. Since I wouldn’t dream of taking up valuable square footage with furniture, I happily got rid of everything. Now rattling about in four empty rooms, I dug up literally ten layers of linoleum, under which were newspapers from the Korean War, and beneath them, papers from World War II, and beneath them, wide-plank 19th-century floors.
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I maintain little in the way of furniture, except for a number of desks. I prefer that housewares be necessary and that they do not match, an aesthetic I picked up from my friend Miriam, a weaver now in her 90s who lives in Bennington, Vermont, in a one-room-schoolhouse that she made into a kind of arts and crafts cottage. Up in the loft, which sleeps about 20 at once, and whose rail is an old hayloft ladder, the mattresses lie directly on the floor, made up with thin cotton sheets and pillow cases in divers florals and plaids, no two matched.
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My proclivity for oddment dishes is an aesthetic I acquired a little later, in the mid-70s, when my friend Lil told me about a remarkable brunch she went to, in a genuinely bohemian Greenwich Village apartment. The host and hostess, both artists who will remain unnamed because of their fame, used mismatched, chipped plates and mugs in an unaffected flea-market style. In fact, I'll bet they invented shabby chic.
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Besides eschewing furniture and home accessories, I also abstain from using heat. When I moved in, the radiator at one end of the flat was broken and the other, which probably had stood near the blocked-up fireplace, was missing. I disconnected the gas line. Of course, it was midsummer, and I was unperturbed. In December I taped plastic dropcloths on the windows (a custom I still practice, 25 years later). This solution worked fine, except that the wind off the river blew in through fissures in the ancient walls. Only when it gets below freezing out is it a mite chilly indoors; but there are always hot baths, fingerless gloves and the animals, equipped with furnishings enough for all.

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Posted by Jane on September 25, 2007 5:10 PM

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