“A LOT of people romanticise what New York was like in the 1980s, but it was tough,” says Kim Gordon as she stands across the street from 84 Eldridge – the red brick tenement building in Manhattan’s Lower East Side where she lived from 1980 until 1990 with her then-partner and bandmate, Thurston Moore. Unlike most places in the ever-changing metropolis, this address has escaped gentrification. A ghost sign awning printed with faded Chinese characters hangs unevenly over the front door; the façade is pockmarked with rusty protruding husks of ancient airconditioning units. The apartment, Gordon recalls, had a cockroach problem. It looks like it probably still does.
“The main thing I remember is having to throw our keys out of the window whenever somebody came over, so that we wouldn’t have to walk down the four flights of stairs to let them in,” she says. She and Moore paid $150 a month and slept on a mattress on the sloped floor. There was a bathtub in the kitchen. They were happy. Not least of all because this part of Manhattan was, at that moment, a crucible for creativity – where art and music were being made that would seismically shift popular culture – and they were at the centre of it all. Gordon points to a doorway down the street on Eldridge, that once opened into pioneering conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s studio. CBGB was a 10-minute walk up Bowery. Just a few blocks west, the rough and tumble, graffiti-covered, pre-chain-store iteration of SoHo crackled with awakening energy.
Gordon doesn’t seem to be someone who spends much time looking backwards. She occasionally refers to something she’s “not sure” if she put in her book (her incredibly articulate, vulnerable, and self-possessed 2015 autobiography ), and is casually vague about the years she documented collapse – along with her and Moore’s, will drive home how relentlessly forward-thinking both Gordon’s worldview and her approach to music are.
