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Real Estate|Where Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cast Their Spells
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/realestate/christo-jeanne-claude-soho-apartment.html
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Hidden among the three-hour-long lines for sample sales, the luxury boutiques selling $4,000 bags and the street vendors hawking $100 knockoffs of those bags, in SoHo, is a time portal.
The five-story building at 48 Howard Street is where, for roughly 50 years, the conceptual artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude lived and worked. Much has changed in the neighborhood since the 1960s, when the couple first moved there, renting two floors for just $150 a month. The property value has gone up — the median rent for a property in SoHo these days is $7,750, according to Zumper — but inside, the home remains almost exactly as it was when they occupied it. The top-floor studio still has Christo’s sketches, art supplies neatly arranged in cookie tins and an unopened Coca-Cola bottle (their son, Cyril, loved Coke). Downstairs, where they ate and slept, trinkets and family photos surround the dining table and stools he built to furnish the space.
Soon after Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in the neighborhood, in 1971, SoHo was rezoned to allow certain artists to live and work in their industrial lofts, further solidifying its status as a bohemia. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, On Kawara and Richard Prince had all lived in SoHo. Now, more than five decades later, many of the artists from that era have died or left the neighborhood, and the question of what to do with their studios arises.
Jeanne-Claude died in 2009, and in 2020, so did Christo. Since then, 48 Howard’s future has been uncertain. Their foundation uses the building as its office, but walls are deteriorating, paint is peeling and the facade has needed renovation. The possibility of opening the home up to the public is being explored, but that could mean having to make structural updates to get it up to code and make it accessible, an expensive undertaking possibly undermining its authenticity.
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