The Mini Dakota
In high school I took the train into San Francisco every weekend to go to gay youth activist meetings. We were usually organizing a conference or a teach-in, and it was also an excuse to be in the city to socialize with other gay kids. For a while, we met at LYRIC, a queer youth community center in the heart of The Castro. My goth friend Christian would sit in the corner with his tin lunchbox chewing on cinnamon sticks. My other friend Hayley was a green-haired punk, who quietly observed the meetings and made incisive suggestions. One summer, as I was leaving a meeting, I saw a flier on the bulletin board for a documentary film about the gay rights pioneer Harry Hay—the founder of one of the earliest gay rights organizations, the Mattachine Society. The filmmakers were looking for interns, so I called them up that afternoon to enthusiastically volunteer.
The next week, I took the train up from San Jose, boarded the Muni bus heading to Haight Street, and I arrived at an old Victorian apartment building right by Golden Gate Park. When I walked in, the director Eric Slade and the producer Jack Walsh were slightly disarmed to see an eager 16-year-old. Nonetheless, they put me right to work. I went through a database and called gay liberation pioneers to ask if they had any photographs of Hay. I remember naively calling Barbara Gittings— a major lesbian activist from the early Daughters of Bilitis organization— to ask for pictures (her papers were already stored at the New York Public Library). Jack would take me out for lunch to get a burrito, and he answered my questions about his life as a queer experimental and documentary filmmaker.
One day when I arrived at the office in Eric’s living room, I was told that Hay himself was present. I tentatively walked into the bedroom, where an elderly man sat on the bed with an entourage of Radical Faeries. Hay was covered in feathers, wearing an elaborate sequined robe in preparation for a parade or ceremony. I tried to be invisible, but he looked at me in the corner and said, “Hello dear.” I wish I had fully understood the significance of that encounter at the time. Eric’s film Hope Along The Wind: The Life of Harry Hay is a great record of Hay’s trailblazing life.
Three years later, I was in New York at film school. NYU was very much geared toward “film bros,” so I was searching for a queer film education. I had heard about the MIX: Experimental Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and when I read that it was happening at Anthology Film Archives, I showed up. While I was milling around the lobby hoping to make a friend, I saw a flier for a documentary called Trembling Before G-d about gay Orthodox jews. The filmmaker was looking for interns, and just like in high school, I called up the director Sandi DuBowski to volunteer.
I remember showing up to Sandi’s salmon-colored apartment building on Bleecker Street. He lived on the ground floor in a former fur factory, across the street from Planned Parenthood. Inside the cave-like space, Sandi worked under his loft bed with books and magazines piled around his computer. He was putting the finishing touches on his groundbreaking documentary. Each week, I would deliver packages for Sandi, organize receipts on his living room floor, and over time, we started to just chat about queer film in New York. (I was a mediocre intern who just wanted to socialize and today Sandi is one of my closest friends).
One night, Sandi asked me to attend a rough cut screening. I showed up to the editor’s office in the East Village, which to my surprise, was in an enormous gothic Victorian brick building, right off of Tompkins Square Park. It looked like a reform school or an Ivy League library with Hebrew lettering etched into the stone above the regal wood doorway. I later learned that people in the East Village call it the “Mini Dakota,” after the storied Upper West Side building where John Lennon was shot. I climbed the stairs, and entered an amazing loft with dozens of grand windows overlooking the park. In an annex to the side of the living space was a cozy little office, probably just 100 square feet large, with a big window overlooking the historic Catholic church across the street. We huddled around the computer to watch the rough cut, and I thought to myself, I can’t believe people in New York get to work in spaces like this.
Seven years later, I had just finished my first film Wild Combination. I was living with my boyfriend Carl in a beautiful apartment in Williamsburg. The two-family house was owned by an artist, who lived on the ground floor and charged us incredibly low rent because “gays are good tenants.” In the second bedroom, I worked furiously each day and night, and for the previous two years, an editor and my own interns had been coming through the house each day to work in my makeshift office.
A year after Wild Combination was released, I got a prestigious grant. I was 27-years-old, and it was the most money I had ever received. I made a plan to stretch out the funds over the next three to four years, while I scraped together the budget for my second film. But Carl wouldn’t have it. After a series of heated arguments, Carl more or less made an ultimatum— if I made another movie in the house, he was out. (Luckily we’re still together after 18 years.)
Carl’s demand that I get an office outside of the house felt unreasonable. It was a luxury I hadn’t yet earned—I had only made one movie, so calling filmmaking my career seemed like a stretch. Still, I was determined to not get dumped, so I started obsessively hunting for an office. I bookmarked a search query on Craigslist for offices with a price cap at $600 a month. I checked probably 300 times a day, but the options were dismal. Then one day a listing came up without any pictures for a $475 office on 8th Street and Avenue B. It sounded too good to be true, but I went on Google street view to survey the block. As I took a 360 degree look at that street corner, I saw the Mini Dakota.
I sent a message right away, praying that the listing was for the incredible building I remembered from years ago, but I didn’t hear back. In a last ditch effort, I responded to the post once more to make sure that my message hadn’t gone to spam. Then moments later, Roland Legiardi-Laura responded—I was the first person to inquire about his ambiguous listing. When I arrived at 295 East 8th Street the next morning, Roland invited me into his loft. It was without a doubt the same space that amazed me a decade earlier with its stately metal columns and spectacular views. Roland was a poet and filmmaker, and he had owned and lived in the space since the late 1970s. In one corner was his library with a painted self-portrait, and across the loft was his sleeping nook, which he separated with a modular partition. Roland told me that he often opened it up to create a large space for feasts and community gatherings.
Roland took me into his workspace down the hall, and in a corner was a small private soundproof office. It was freshly painted white with empty shelves that climbed up the tall walls. A billowing bed sheet covered the window with the romantic view of the church next door. I wrote Roland a check and he gave me the keys. He said that he was happy the space was being used by an emerging filmmaker.
I started going to the office every day, and without a doubt, it was the best possible use for the grant money. It was a luxury, but a ridiculously affordable one, and taking on that space gave me the sense of “having a job” as a filmmaker. When I left the office on summer nights, I’d wander through Tompkins Square Park, where fireflies sparked around the skaters, yuppies, and junkies.
One afternoon when I was leaving the office, the next door neighbor opened his door. It was Matt Dillon. “Hey man,” he said, as I did a double take. He had been living there for years, and it turns out that Iggy Pop once lived on the entire second floor in a loft with a platform stage (Stella Schnabel had since taken over the lease). The high rise Christadora building (the namesake for a novel by Tim Murphy) was down the street on Avenue B with many illustrious tenants. I liked to think that our building was a secret. It looked like an institution, not a residence, but then I discovered that it had once been both.
The building was designed by Calvert Vaux (co-designer of Central Park with his protégé Frederick Olmsted) and it was built in 1887. However, its mission began much earlier in 1853 when the minister Charles Loring Brace— one of the fathers of modern philanthropy— started a charity called Children’s Aid Society to address the growing crisis of child poverty. He said, “I want to raise up the outcast and homeless, to go down among those who have no friend or helper, and do for them what Christ has done for me.” His organization provided free kindergarten, health care, reading rooms, and lodging for children. The first shelter he built was Tompkins Square Lodging House at 295 East 8th Street. According to Brace, many of the boys who grew up there became politicians and notable businessmen.
Tompkins Square had long been an epicenter of civil disobedience. Most famously, the Astor Place Opera House Riot of 1849 occurred there— the deadliest civic uprising in Manhattan to that date—which led to the militarization of police. Over a century later in 1988, discord erupted between police, protestors, and some 150 homeless people in the park, after Mayor Dinkins demanded that they be forcibly removed. Former Christadora resident Natasha Lyonne’s HBO show Russian Doll is inspired in part by these riots.
When the Children’s Aid Society sold the property in 1928, it became a Jewish center, which explains the Hebrew lettering above the entrance. It remained a Hebrew school for years, and then in 1950, a charity center for the poor. But by 1974, Tompkins Square Park had become a treacherous hub for drug dealing and violent crime, so the Jewish center closed, and the building, like many others in the area, was abandoned.
It was just after Christmas in 1978 when Roland decided to buy his loft. The building was acquired by an East Villager named Max, who planned to open a school, but he lacked the resources and know-how to fix it up himself. Max wanted to break up the building into co-ops to fund the endeavor, and that’s when Roland saw his listing in the Village Voice. Roland couldn’t afford Max’s asking price of $20,000, so they struck a deal— Roland would pay $10,000 and renovate the entire building himself, including Max’s apartment. In a New York Times article profiling the building, Roland said, “I became, in effect, an indentured servant.”
Learning by doing, Roland restored the building to much of its original splendor, dividing it into seven separate apartments, including a work-in-progress loft for himself. In the Times he said the building had “graffiti on the walls, the scars and smell of fires, and syringes strewn on the floors.” He reflected, “If there was such a thing as a building having a soul, this edifice was surely endowed with one.” In the years that followed, Roland hosted readings for Latin American authors, Allen Ginsberg officiated a Bar Mitzvah in his living room, and one night plans for a permanent home for the storied Nuyorican Poets Cafe were conceived at his dining table. (Roland served as a director there for years.)
Roland was also a filmmaker, primarily focused on stories about poetry and education. His film Azul explored poetry in Nicaragua, and when I met him, he had long been at work on a documentary called To Be Heard (co-directed with Edwin Martinez, Deborah Shaffer, and Amy Sultan in 2010). The film profiles three struggling teens from the South Bronx, whose lives begin to flourish as they write poetry. Different community members and collaborators filtered through Roland’s workspace adjacent to mine, and when I saw the finished film, I was very moved.
By then I was the same age as Sandi and Eric when they were finishing their first films, and like them, I had a steady stream of interns. There was Carley, Drew, Cole, Alexandra, Corky, Abbie, Kevin, Lucas, and Paris. Willa was my intern for two years when she was an art student at Cooper Union. We became quite close as I talked her through heartbreak over lunch, set her up with one of her first big relationships, and saw her grow into an amazing artist. I wanted to do what Sandi, Eric, and Jack had done for me, but the city was getting more expensive, and it didn’t feel right to keep asking people to work for free.
My professional life was changing. I had made a few films, and I was finally in a position to make some actual money. I got hired to be a showrunner on a television miniseries for National Geographic, and around that time, Roland increased my rent to just $550 a month. I wasn’t coming by the office very often because I was swamped at my new job. But one evening when I stopped by to go through my mail, I saw Roland struggling to carry a collapsible table up the stairs. I offered to help him, and he almost refused, but I could tell that he was struggling to even stand. He told me later by email that he was sick with cancer.
In the months that followed, I came by the office occasionally to catch up on personal work, but I never saw Roland. Then one day, I got a call from one of his friends. Roland had passed away. What his friend told me next was upsetting, to say the least. Unbeknownst to me, Roland and the building’s co-owner Max had been embroiled in a legal conflict for years. I can only assume that their unconventional barter deal was insufficiently memorialized in a contract. I don’t know the details, but Roland’s friend told me that the apartment was locked and inaccessible until the legal dispute played out. He would let me in to pack up and move.
I had an assistant, Sam, at the time who helped me pack up my stuff. I walked through Roland’s old apartment, which was mostly the same, but there were boxes of paperwork scattered everywhere. Roland had said the building was endowed with a soul, but it felt eerily absent that day. As Sam and I wrapped up my last batch of belongings, I went into the bathroom and cried. I hoped that Roland’s work and the community he so lovingly built in that loft wouldn’t be forgotten.
I met an East Village realtor years ago, and he knew the story of the building. He said that the legal dispute went on for years, and eventually the apartment sold for 4 million dollars. By then the typical rent in the building was $8000 a month. The Astanga yoga studio that used to be in the basement had been replaced with a wealthy Japanese tenant, who sold novelty cameras. If you look on Streeteasy, you can see what a typical unit looks like— a far cry from the burnt out, syringe filled shell that Roland transformed.
Every time I walk past that building, I feel a sense of deep sadness and gratitude. Roland’s simple act of letting me work in that 100 square foot room for $475 a month helped me to become a filmmaker. I don’t think many rooms like that exist in New York anymore. If you find one, think of Roland.
Beautifully told. If the film career slows, writing would be a good venture! Thank you for sharing this wonderful story.
Appreciate this text as a younger queer navigating NYC and seeing the community points that are increasingly disappearing.