Known as the Warhol superstar, beloved as a poet and LES legend, 88-year-old Taylor Mead is leaving the city. The Anthology Film Archives moved up his talk before the screening of Cleopatra with Nico from the weekend to last night to accomodate his scheduled departure. If you hadn’t caught him, you won’t see him for awhile. You won’t hear recite his memories of “such a rapist, a whispering rapist” that “will remind me, indefinitely, baby.”
Mead had lived in a run-down, heavily roachy, rent stabilized apartment on Ludlow Street for 34-years. His rent is $380 a month. Now that the building has been bought and is being gut renovated, what seems like the last old era hold-out can’t keep holding out with the round-the-clock construction noise, plaster raining from the ceiling, broken everything and panicked roach armies.
One can’t help but see Taylor’s exodus as symbolic and depressing. R.I.P. ye olde East Village.
ANIMAL favorite, photographer Clayton Paterson told E.V. Grieve that Taylor is going to Denver, then, possibly New Orleans and Upstate New York and “then hopefully back to the LES.”
(Photos: The Paris Review, This Long Century, Copyright © Robin Holland/Bohemia Lost Courtesy Robin Holland)
