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Chelsea Hotel Ashcan Painter Wasn’t Worried About Development

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According to an article in the City Review (Edward Short, 11/16/07), Ashcan painter John Sloan didn’t give a damn when NYU tossed him out of the old Judson Hotel at 53 Washington Square South.  He just packed up and moved to the Chelsea Hotel.  Also, according to the article, he didn’t care that the old buildings around New York were being torn down and replaced with skyscrapers. 

This rather seems like an odd position for Sloan to take, given his fixation on the mundane and seedy details of the city life of his day, and particularly since the one quote from him, as the author notes, can be read as expressing a pro-preservation sentiment.

But Sloan certainly did seem to take a fancy to what must have been the monstrosity of the day, 1 Fifth Avenue, as he photographed it under construction and later painted it, rising in its gargantuan splendor over the low-rise town houses surrounding it, dwarfing the Washington Arch.  Sloan saw at the time what few could see then but what most of us can see now: that 1 Washington Square is a really nice building.

So perhaps there’s a lesson in this for those of us who bemoan the recent spate of development that’s replacing hundred-year-old, human-scale buildings with soaring, futuresque towers of glass.  Maybe, but I doubt it.  1 Washington Square is a stately, solidly-built construction with fancy Art deco touches, while most of these glass houses are just pre-fab, cookie cutter boxes made of the cheapest materials possible.  1 Washington Square is a structure that the architects and the builders took pride in, rather than just sitting down and figuring out how to cut costs.  If, in 80 years, preservationists are fighting to save these glass houses from demolition, we will know that the architecture of the day has sunk to a previously unimagined low.

And maybe Sloan wouldn’t give a damn about what’s happening at the Chelsea these days either; he could just pack up and move.  Or, maybe not: back then there were places to move to; this time there’s no place left in the city that’s even remotely affordable. — Ed Hamilton

Photo:  One Fifth Avenue under Construction, 1927
Photograph, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches
John Sloan Manuscript Collection, Delaware Art Museum

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3 responses to “Chelsea Hotel Ashcan Painter Wasn’t Worried About Development”

  1. The Ghosts Avatar
    The Ghosts

    Well, I spoke with the Distinguished Wraith himself. John Sloan is of course very upset about all this. We all are. He loves Stanley. We all do.

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  2. Edward Short Avatar
    Edward Short

    Dear Mr. Hamilton,
    Thanks for your lively response to my piece about the painter John Sloan in City Journal. I agree with you: one does need to differentiate much of the development occuring in Sloan’s time from the development that is happening now, which is not only shoddy but disproportionate, unaffordable and hideous.
    Best,
    Edward Short

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  3. Sherill Tippins Avatar
    Sherill Tippins

    Sloan may have struck a sardonic pose when talking about the rampant development of the 1920s, but it’s significant that he placed the Washington Square Arch at the center of his painting. Exactly a decade before the painting was made, late one January night in 1917, Sloan had sneaked up to the top of that arch with Marcel Duchamp and some other artist and actor friends, bringing with them Chinese lanterns, balloons, toy pistols, hot-water bottles, a few bottles of wine and some food. At the top, they built a bonfire, got good and drunk, and, as each guest fired off his toy pistol, read aloud a Declaration of Independence announcing the secession of Greenwich Village from the United States. Henceforth, the Village bohemians would have nothing to do with America’s imperialism, capitalism, philistinism, or war-mongering politics. They would maintain their own creative culture, focusing on the quality of their lives instead of the money in their pockets and refusing to sacrifice other people’s happiness for their own.
    As it turned out, the gesture was ignored, access to the top of the Arch was blocked from then on, rampant development continued until the 1929 Crash, tourists overran the Village, and the US entered a world war a few months later. But Sloan had enjoyed the night so much that he commemorated it with his etching, “The Arch Conspirators.”
    His painting of the clearly incongruous “skyscraper” going up behind the Arch says all there is to say about the values of the development-mad 1920s versus the fertile, creative, bohemian Village life of the 1910s. Sloan, a passionate Socialist, would have had the same skeptical attitude toward today’s New York that he had in the 1920s. If he were alive today, he’d no doubt be contributing some lively posts to this blog.

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