The cover of Prudence Peiffer’s new book, The Slip, features the kind of photograph New York City dreams are made of. In the 1958 shot, taken by Hans Namuth, a bohemian-looking group – many of whom would later become giants of American art – smoke and sip coffee on a Manhattan roof, a greyscale higgle-piggle of apartment blocks and art nouveau buildings as their backdrop. They include Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Jack Youngerman, along with Delphine Seyrig, the Lebanese-French actor, and Seyrig and Youngerman’s blond toddler son, Duncan.
The photograph was taken on the roof of 3–5 Coenties Slip, a warehouse in a small street in Manhattan’s Financial District. Artists lived in the Slip for just over a decade, from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, very cheaply and in most cases illegally, in warehouses that had once served the maritime industry. During that time, Peiffer argues, the work they produced changed American art for ever.
Peiffer – an art critic, historian, and director of content at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – started researching the Slip in 2016, after seeing a photograph of Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly riding bikes together in the area. “It sparked a moment of: what were they doing down here? It was sort of an uncanny pairing,” she says.
Coenties Slip runs between Pearl Street – one of the first Manhattan streets to be built by Dutch settlers – and Water Street, which was the waterfront until lower Manhattan was expanded using landfill. It was originally an inlet for boats, a bustling port and marketplace when New York was a maritime trading hub. Herman Melville wrote about Coenties Slip in Moby Dick, which came out in 1852, describing it as somewhere where “thousands of mortal men” are “fixed in ocean reveries”.
During almost seven years of research, Peiffer discovered that artists had moved to the Slip in its postwar decline, convening at a pivotal moment in their careers. The community, which also included Lenore Tawney and the pop artist James Rosenquist, were varied in age, from 24 to 50, but at similarly early career stages, lured by space and cheap rent. Peiffer’s research, which included interviews with Youngerman, who died in February 2020, and access to letters and journals, told a first-hand story of “what makes people want to make something, to really devote their life to something that’s so uncertain?”