Dear Editor:
The Hoboken Fair Housing Association is pleased to announce a film screening of Josef Astor’s documentary “Lost Bohemia” on Friday, Dec. 5 and we’d like to invite everyone to join us. Director Josef Astor will give both an introductory presentation at 7 p.m. and answer questions at the end. The location is the Community Church in Hoboken, 606 Garden St. Doors open at 6:30, admission $10.00.
For those that have never heard of the film, it is a riveting documentary that anyone concerned with the role of art and artists, of all sorts, in society should see. Many of us had no idea about this little known, but culturally significant community that, until a few years ago, existed above Carnegie Hall.
By way of background, in 1895, 165 live/work studios were constructed as residences and teaching spaces for musicians, painters, actors, dancers, photographers, poets, writers and designers. For over 100 years the amount of history made in those studios was nothing short of amazing. Mark Twain and Norman Mailer wrote, Enrico Caruso recorded, Isadora Duncan danced, Bob Fosse choreographed, Leonard Bernstein composed, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Jason Robards, Marilyn Monroe and Robert Redford rehearsed lines.
In the early 2000s the Carnegie Hall Corporation decided to knock down the studios and replace them with administrative offices. Without warning the tenants received eviction notices. This film documents the brave, but futile battle for the artists/residents to maintain their homes and work spaces against a calculated, well-funded effort to remove them and systematically demolish all that they-and the studios- represented.
The film poignantly presents the age-old struggle between art, culture and commerce and asks us to consider and re-think the direction that our society is headed. To the members of HFHA, it’s pretty evident that more and more there is a rush to commoditize, dollarize and elevate commercial considerations above human needs while extinguishing the desire to experience true artistry and all that it represents: originality, creativity, imagination, individualism and what it means to be alive and human.
We hope you will join us to experience this powerful and moving little slice of history.
Cheryl Fallick