Drawn to New York for a variety of reasons—the promise of gallery representation, the prospect of a fresh start— the artists central to the book converged upon the Slip with an eye for low rent (which hovered around $45 a month) and ample floorspace. They worked in different mediums in the service of different muses, but they found themselves living in close proximity in just a handful of squat buildings, and lounging among the same sycamore and gingko trees of nearby Jeanette Park.
Peiffer starts with individual portraits of the artists at play before moving on to a more engrossing core in which she documents relationships (friendly and romantic), passing encounters, and exchanges of influence among them, showing all the while how they drew on the Slip’s rarefied atmosphere and sedimented histories in highly personal but compatible ways. What she emphasizes most is the quality of separation that the area afforded those who lived there.
By the time of their arrival, the Slip’s 18th- and 19th-century history as one of the “loudest, busiest spots in the city”—a panorama of loading carts, unruly barrooms, and buzzing markets, presided over by a forest of ship masts—was firmly in the past. As Peiffer recounts in painstakingly researched dispatches of urban history, the Slip’s namesake waterway had long been filled in, warehouses had been vacated, and, except for the Fulton Fish Market on South Street (still busy in the mornings), the only locus of activity was nearby Wall Street. The Slip was deserted at night, providing its artists an exquisite quiet in which they could commit themselves to focused work.
It was also small enough to facilitate intimate interaction and the forging of something like community. Peiffer refers to a sense of “collective solitude” when discussing the Slip’s dual opportunities for restorative isolation and small but significant moments of connection: lunches, river walks, and gatherings on the loft buildings’ low roofs. For the gay inhabitants of the Slip (Kelly, Indiana, and Martin), this solitude and openness also accommodated modes of living and loving unsanctioned in the chilled social climate of much of the rest of the city.