That cobblestone street where the Empire stores are--that�s the other street where people lived. There was a theater in one of them. A lot of people lived in them. And Octavio Molina, he was there a long, long time ago.

In my building there was a chef, an illustrator, but very few artists. When we moved in... everyone started moving in. All of a sudden there were a hundred artists. And the second or third year we started BWAC. We had an art show. It was great fun; much more lively than it is now, there were a lot of street performances, people made sculptures outside.

One time (my husband) came home, "There�s this amazing building on Water Street (220 Water Street) that is thousands and thousands of empty square feet. They can�t have businesses upstairs cuz they use the elevator too much. They�d be really happy if artists lived there." The building was 155,000 sq.ft. It was the largest legal loft building in NYC. We had 85 people living there after 5 or 6 years. This was about 1981.

We had a theater we did with people in the projects. It was on that lot that Brooklyn Union gas used. We put bleachers in there. Carl Brown would work with kids from the projects. They would stage plays, we put sculptures out there, we had barbecues out there every night, it was a really nice neighborhood thing.

There was this lot in front of #1 Main Street; it was overgrown with weeds...I used to walk my dogs (there) and one night I stumbled into this guys lean-to...I said, "Oh my god, you live here." And this guy told me that were like 20 people living in this lot, cuz they had come from Vietnam and they had camouflaged their tents. I was there one night, I saw a guy shoot a pigeon out of the sky with a rifle... and that�s how they got their meat...And also Gypsies lived there, they had a station wagon that was low in the back, cuz it was crammed with stuff. They were tinkers; they would fix pots and pans and grind knives. Their whole family lived there.

The factories were going strong then and I guess it was the artists that put an end to the factories--which they never intended to do. There was a gigantic group of companies at #1 Main street. The whole building was garment workers, some made spools, some made sewing machines, some were cutters, some sewed, they were all interrelated. Once 20 moved out, the others left.

...A lot of the factories sold to Walentas. He had this development plan which is being instituted after all these years. They realized they could make more money off the artists than they could with the factories. The artist were a catalyst, to the higher rents.

Soho had become such a big thing, I don�t think they realized the really rich people didn�t want to live on the waterfront, with a huge Conedison plant, and garbage factories and tons of traffic, and a high crime rate. It wasn�t appropriate to being a Soho but they imagined it to be. We�ll see, maybe it will be a Soho.

When I first moved here I was going to art school. I used to be a house painter. I worked at the Met for 7 years. I began on minimum wage but then it was possible to live on minimum wage, which is unimaginable now.

On Water Street, we paid $300 for 5500 sq. ft. What space allowed us to do was, when we were desperately poor, we could take a roommate to subsidize the rent. And we had enough space to do large-scale sculptures; my husband did large paintings. It allowed you to be creative on a full time basis.

My landlord was this guy Ted Mestel, he looked like a vaudeville guy, he wore eye makeup. He was a very strange guy, very nice. He used to take me to baseball games when my husband left he gave me money and didn�t make me pay rent for a couple months. Let me cry on his shoulder a couple times, he was extremely nice.

After a while he got old and his children came in, and they were just greedy horrible people and they wanted to sell the building. There was always this threat of the Jehovah�s witnesses wanting to buy the building. And the Witnesses were nice people, and they didn�t want to be horrible landlords to people so they stipulated that the building had to be empty.

(The landlords) harassed us with a vengeance that was just unbelievable. They set the building on fire and trained attack dogs in there, they would attack people. I was doing an environmental job and they framed me for red-bag waste which is medical waste...It cost me a lot of money to get out of it.

They finally sold the building to Bachman (not his real name). He owns, between here and Williamsburg--he owns over two million square feet. He�s totally unprincipled, rumor has it that he�s sort of a henchman and frontman for the Israeli mafia...he�s done things like push pregnant women down the stairs. That big building on Jay street--which is actually a really a happy little beehive of artist studios right now--when he bought the building, a lot of people illegally lived there, which is a risk you knowingly take and he came in and shut off the gas and water and electric, and cut down some of the stair cases, so people couldn�t physically get to their places. And he threw hundreds and hundreds of paintings down the elevator shaft. Ruined some peoples� lives work. He�s really unscrupulous.

In my building, he clogged up the drain system on the roof with concrete...every time it rained, it would back up. Sometimes my bedroom floor had five or six inches of water on it. We drilled holes into the floor so the water would go straight down, like a sink drain. It just ruined everything. It was like a waterfall, just pouring into the building.

I just set out to fight him. We did that for two years and I just kept thinking we would win... We won... he had to pay us almost a million dollars to get out of the building.

...He was such a monster. The fire department told me that they responded to a fire in one of his buildings. And he had put a bag they had no doubt that it was him, but they could never prove it he had put a garbage bag full of gasoline over the door where they went in they happened to get there right after it had gone up, but if it had gone on top of them, they would have all been killed if gasoline falls on your body, it�s really hard to put out. They would all have melted.

No one has ever cared what happened to artists, cuz we�re white, a lot of us are white, and you have to be pretty inventive or from a wealthy family to survive this experience of being an artist. We�re all pretty well educated and sort of poor by choice...there are real poor people in the city. Nobody wants to hear about a bunch of poor artists. I mean, who cares? It�s sad they don�t realize what liveliness art can bring to a community. It�s really sad.

Something that�s common to artists is that we all grew up in pretty dysfunctional families. There�s either some kind of abuse or alcoholism or violence. I think a lot of people move to NYC basically to get away from what they came from it� leaves you kind of homeless, and so all of us have been a family for each other. When Dumbo started falling apart, when Bachman started buying everything, and Walentas� plan started going into effect, there were 250 people that I knew when I was 22 in that neighborhood. They all lived there until I was 40, and now most of them are gone. It�s quite sad, that hub is necessary for an artist�s life...I never would have been an artist if that atmosphere hadn�t existed in Dumbo. I would have been depressed all my life if I hadn�t had such a family.

The future? I imagine that New York will just be less and less a center for art, and it will just be boring yuppies everywhere. There�s tour buses in Dumbo now!