“We just wanted to shine a light on the fact that this guy never stopped evolving, that he kept moving forward one way or the other, all of this time, decade after decade,” said Stern. The curators hope that this exhibition provides perspective on the breadth of Reed’s work. “We just let the guy speak for himself wherever we could” Lou was very open about his decision making and his process and his intentions,” said Stern. “You’re going to see Lou’s text all over every wall, because every section, it was about the deliberate nature of how he knew he what he was doing when it comes to every facet of his career. “We knew that this period existed for Lou, and we knew that John and Lou had actually been on street corners busking songs in this manner, but no one had ever heard what it actually sounded like, and so for the first time, we were able to hear that.” The demos will be released as a standalone record titled Words & Music, May 1965 on Light in the Attic Records in partnership with his widow, musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson.įleming and Stern explained that they wanted Reed’s voice to be felt throughout the exhibition. He’s got a harmonica with the neck brace, and it’s got the whole Dylan sound,” said Fleming. “We were literally packing up the boxes of Sister Ray Enterprises after cataloging just about everything, and one of the last parts of the office that we were boxing up is what contained this tape.” The tape contains a recording of Lou Reed and fellow Velvet Underground founding member John Cale performing Reed’s compositions as folk songs. “We’d heard of, we knew it existed,” said Stern. Fleming and Stern recall searching for the tape and stumbling upon it by surprise. One notable find from the archives is a demo tape from May 1965 that Reed mailed to himself but never opened up. So we’ve made a whole day’s worth of screenings of material from that collection,” said Fleming. “We not only had hundreds of hours of audio that no one’s ever heard, but Lou had collected, amassed a lot of videos, mostly references of him on television shows or different things. While the story of the Federal Archive Building today may seem like just another example of a luxury loft conversion, it was one of the first old industrial buildings to undergo such a transformation, occurring at a time when New York City was still very much uncertain about how, or even whether or not, to honor its industrial heritage.Caught Between the Twisted Stars also has a screening room. Today, rents for an Archive studio apartment start at $5,500 a month and increase to $10,500 a month for a two-bedroom penthouse. Rents for studios in the Archive started at $1,400 a month and increased to $3,400 a month for a penthouse. When the building reopened in 1988, it contained 479 loft-style rental apartments with up to 20-foot ceilings. Construction work was completed in 1988 at a cost of $112 million, and the building was renamed the Archive. The Federal Archive Building’s redevelopment was a complicated process, but in 1982 an agreement was reached between the UDC and two developers, Teitelbaum Group and Rockrose. Luxury loft advertisement in the rental office of the Federal Archive Building. With the wounds from the loss of the original Pennsylvania Station still fresh, and the success of SoHo’s upscale rebirth quite obvious, New York State’s Urban Development Corporation bought the building for $10 and began looking for a developer to convert it to residential use. Although the building was from another era, it was unlikely to be torn down because it had been designated a New York City landmark in 1966 and a national landmark in 1973. By 1976, the move-out was complete and the building sat vacant, with the federal government declaring it surplus property soon after. Throughout the early 1970s, as New York City was hitting the bottom of its long decline, the National Archives was moving its offices out of the Federal Archive Building and into new facilities in suburban New Jersey. For the next 40 years, the building would primarily be used as the National Archives’ office space, although the building also housed a post office on its first floor. However, during the Great Depression, the federal government decided to move its offices for the National Archives and Records Administration into the building, giving it the name Federal Archive Building. During its more than 30 year lifespan as a Customs facility, the building was called the United States Appraisers’ Warehouse.

The archive nyc