In the following decades the building hosted activities for the supply of metal carpentry and kitchen equipment. Don DeLillo wrote Great Jones Street into the annals of American literature in 1973, when he titled his third novel after the street. The book’s narrator-protagonist, a disillusioned rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, hides him in a slum apartment there: “I went to a room on Great Jones Street, a crooked little room, cold as a penny, overlooking warehouses, trucks and rubble. .”
Mr. Warhol purchased 57 Great Jones Street in 1970 under the company name Factory Films Inc., according to a report by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 1983, when he became a mentor to Basquiat, then a fast-rising art world star, Warhol rented the upstairs loft to him. In subsequent years Basquiat produced works including “King Zulu” and “Riding With Death.”
“Jean-Michel called,” Warhol wrote in his diary on September 5, 1983. “He’s afraid he’s just a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I got scared because he rented our building on Great Jones what if it was a flash in the pan and he didn’t have the money to pay the rent?”
After Mr. Basquiat’s death, the building’s exterior became a mecca for street artists who left tributes to him, and the site has since been marked with renditions of his crown motif and graffiti tag.” SAMO”.
Warhol’s estate sold the building in the early 1990s. Later, as the neighborhood’s gentrification accelerated and nightlife hot spots like B Bar and the Bowery Hotel thrived, a referral-only Japanese restaurant with no phone number listed, Bohemian, occupied the address. It was hidden, speakeasy style, behind a butcher shop.
In 2022, the building was put on the rental market by Meridian Capital Group for $60,000 a month. Its owner, according to real estate records, is well-known real estate appraiser Robert Von Ancken, whose services have been used by New York real estate families including the Trumps, the Helmsleys and the Zeckendorfs. Reached by telephone, Mr. Von Ancken clarified that he purchased the building with his business partner, Leslie Garfield, who died last year, and who now owns the property with Mr. Garfield’s family.