Evictions have been mercifully rare in New York during the past year and a half, thanks in part to city, state, and federal moratoriums that have kept people in place through the pandemic. But those protections weren’t able to save Aubergine, a picturesquely decrepit flophouse, salon, and culture-freak community at 546 West 113th Street. For half a century, a rotating cast of urban homesteaders—mostly young, often artists or academics—have found refuge in the five-story Beaux-Arts building, which is owned by Columbia University. Rent: five hundred and forty dollars a person. Earlier this year, citing safety concerns, Columbia moved to repossess the building.
A couple of weeks before the movers arrived, a few housemates gathered for a stroll through the place. Emilyn Brodsky—thirty-six, a physical-therapy student and a musician, whose most recent record is called “Emilyn Brodsky’s Digestion”—stood in the musty front hall. Having spent the past seventeen years at Aubergine, hers was the longest tenure of the bunch. Tall, with bleached-blond hair, she had been out of town for most of the pandemic, and she looked around in wonder. “It’s all still here!” she said.
Brodsky and company continued the tour. In one bedroom—tall windows, double-height ceiling—Cassandra Long, a thirty-four-year-old painter and teacher, and an Aubergine resident for two years, pointed to some elaborate original molding. “The plaster falls off,” she said. A chunk is said to have brained a guest in the mid-seventies, sending her to the hospital. Long said that her own space once had a leak so big that the ceiling “looked as if it were pregnant.”
The group moved downstairs, shuffling past a bare mattress on a landing, a hi-fi, and an LP called “Don Rickles Speaks” and into the basement, which was littered with ancient chalkboards and old school chairs. Before its days as an intellectual flophouse, the building was home to Columbia’s Department of Slavic Languages. “It’s actually a lot better than it used to be!” Long said brightly.
Aubergine, named not for a French eggplant but as a twist on the French auberge (inn), was launched, in 1973, by a group of young people, half of them students, who responded to an ad that the university placed in the Times. The city was in fiscal crisis; two years later, President Gerald Ford told New York to drop dead.
On the tour, some parts of the house appeared to be uninhabited. The front parlor contained only a Warholesque silk screen of Bill Clinton. A ground-floor kitchen was nearly free of appliances. The back yard, occasionally used as a party space, was bare, save for a medieval-style plowshare.
“We’ve never had rats,” Siena Oristaglio said. She is the founder of an arts organization and was a tenant for nine years. “But there was one in the yard. His name was Frankie. He died during COVID.”
After the walk-through, the group sat down in a big dining room, reminiscing under the gaze of a mounted mannequin head wearing a Viking helmet. Past roommates were enumerated. There was the sculptor who, in the late nineties, filled the living room with giant wooden pylons. (“The big dicks,” Brodsky said.) There was the dominatrix who absconded with fifteen thousand dollars from the joint household account. (Brodsky said that she spent a portion of her twenty-first birthday in a McDonald’s, psyching herself up to confront the culprit.) There was the tenant who launched a sauerkraut business out of the building. “They called it Brine and Dine,” someone recalled. Dinners and parties were recounted. Sting is said to have come to one, Kathy Bates and Marina Abramović to others. Group meals ranged wildly in edibility; several people remembered a particularly dreadful crab curry.
The six tenants, who were among the last in residence, concluded that the vibe at Aubergine had become less communal in recent years. Most of them seemed ready, if not quite eager, to move on. “None of us were the keepers or creators of this,” Brodsky said. “If this is the end, it was a wonderful gift.”
Not everyone was going peacefully. One tenant, who had holed up in a bedroom during the tour, has refused to leave the building, choosing to wait out the eviction moratorium alone.
But it looked as if the end were near. Upstairs, in the eccentrically shaped, subdivided bedrooms, books had been emptied from shelves, leaving their outlines in the dust. In the basement, a forlorn puppet theatre sat in a corner. “Does anybody want this?” Brodsky asked. “I think I found it on the street, like, twelve years ago.” The group decided that the puppets should stay, a housewarming gift for the next inhabitants, whoever they may be. ♦
