What's becoming an all-too-familiar New York story ... about Taylor Mead, an 88-year-old poet and pal of Andy Warhol, who is battling his millionaire landlord on the Lower East Side to remain in his $380/month rent-stabilized apartment that he has called home for 34 years:
Mead’s friends suspect [real estate mogul Ben] Shaoul wants the poet to evict himself. “It’s going to kill him,” said Clayton Patterson, a neighborhood activist and longtime friend. “This is elderly abuse. It’s pretty Third World when you think about it.”
Mead is one of the last survivors of the Beat generation. He performed in several Warhol movies, including an hourlong silent film that starred only his buttocks. He was the focus of a 2005 documentary and performed weekly at the Bowery Poetry Club for nearly a decade before it closed last year. The old artist can barely stand. When he’s not watching “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Judge Judy” and sipping chocolate milk, he’s writing poems. He can only leave his apartment, a trek from the top floor, a few times a week.Keep reading HERE.
2 comments:
$380 a month??? NYC has changed a lot in 34 years.
Granted, his apartment is trashed. I'd be terrified of rats in that mess, but the man is 88 years old. Where is he going to go if he has to move? Manhattan is all he knows...even if it is a totally different world from the 1960s.
I think Taylor, Brigid, Gerard, Holly, and Ivy should all move in together for a Real World type reality show. Andy would be so proud.
What's going on with the Chelsea? I thought they kicked all the residents out last year?
Love it! The activist Patterson and Mead's other friends leave an 88 year old man living in filthy conditions for years and that is not elder abuse but a millionaire buys the building and is accused of elder abuse. Have to love the activists' goal of improving the world but not with their own money.
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