Rachel Kushner in the apartment she bought on Norfolk Street and filled with her grandmother’s furniture, wearing “some thrift-store coat I considered ‘very Pat Nixon.’”
Photo: Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner’s third novel, Creation Lake, came out this week. It follows a jaded American woman working undercover in France — an assignment she gets at a Williamsburg steakhouse that sounds a lot like Peter Luger, “a place whose heyday was over. The clientele was not Godfather Part III; it was Men’s Wearhouse.” Kushner is known for sharp details that feel cut from life, and her time here also informed her 2013 novel, The Flamethrowers.
Raised on the West Coast, Kushner started coming to New York to visit relatives: Her grandmother Louise Kushner was a tenant organizer, her aunt DeeDee Halleck is an artist and activist, and her cousin Jonathan Kovel would let her tag along with the group that created the cult doc Untitled Pizza Movie. But it wasn’t until 1993 that Kushner tried to move to New York. She left a decade later for Los Angeles. Kushner spoke to us about roving downtown with the Artforum crowd, calling the EPA on ConEd, and the pervasive dread of laundry when you live in a fifth-floor walk-up.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
After college, I moved to New York with my friend Dave. He had worked at one of the same places that I did, a brewery, and was a bass player who produced albums for other bands. We got an apartment on Clinton Street near Rivington. Clinton Street still wasn’t gentrified. Max Fish was already there. My cousin Tovey Halleck was a regular, and one of his artworks was on the wall: an enormous railroad spike that jutted out maybe three feet. But there was nothing else — just a drug dealer at the end of the block in an abandoned building. People would line up there. Now you see a line and you think, They’re buying some limited-edition sneakers. But they were buying dope.
Kushner on Avenue B with her cousin, the sculptor Tovey Halleck, and two friends. As a teenager, Halleck worked for Richard Serra. When Kushner moved to New York, he had a squat called the Gas Station on Avenue B and 2nd Street.
Photo: Rachel Kushner
Nobody would hire me. The way that I went about it, I can now see, was an exercise in futility, and every day I spent doing that was a kind of slow and inevitable assault on my self-esteem. I had a résumé printed on nice paper, and I would pound the pavement going to bars and restaurants. Dave was doing better than I was, but we barely had money for food. Every night, he drank a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English and just went to bed. Finally, one night, we were like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s get out of here.’ We left a note with the keys inside the apartment and locked the door. We didn’t even tell our landlord. You could do this thing called a “drive-away,” a service to move people’s vehicles coast to coast. The car was a Chevrolet Lumina. We had to pick it up in New Jersey, and it started to snow. On a bridge in Pennsylvania, there was a truck behind us that lost control and smashed into us and pushed us to the girder. The car was totaled. We weren’t hurt, but we were on the side of the road in the freezing winter in this town called Clarion, Pennsylvania, for hours and hours.
Kushner had first come to New York on childhood visits. At age 11, she stayed with her friend, the daughter of Ellie Meyer, a longtime employee of the artist Donald Judd.
Photo: Rachel Kusher
After a few years back in San Francisco, I decided I wanted to get an M.F.A. It started to seem like the M.F.A. was partly, for me, a mechanism to come back to New York. Columbia offered me tuition relief and university subsidized housing. Either the rent was included in my deal or was cheap — maybe, like, $400. The apartment was on fraternity row, which kind of sucked. I used to walk alone all the time. I would walk up to the George Washington Bridge at night and go down to a place called the Munson Diner that was way over on 11th Avenue and 49th. They were open all night. I had decided that being a writer meant drinking cup after cup of coffee, like in a Humphrey Bogart movie, writing in your journal in a diner all night.
I used the calling card of being a student to get a job at a magazine, Grand Street. First, I interned and then I ended up hired. Deborah Treisman was the boss. The art editor was Walter Hopps, a kind of legendary curator from the ’60s, ’70s. He was curating a Rauschenberg retrospective at the Guggenheim and paid me in the evenings to transcribe his interviews. Listening to those tapes was like a crash course in art history.
Kushner and her friend Patrick Hambrecht, a musician.
Photo: Rachel Kushner
I met the painter Alex Brown. Through Alex, I met Hudson, who had this gallery, Feature, which had a stable of artists. They were roaming the streets. They were older than I was. And it just felt like this coherent weave — socially, culturally, artistically — that I could just sort of be on the scene of and learn from. And a lot of that is what probably inspired me to write The Flamethrowers.
I applied for a job at Artforum to be the reviews editor, and when I didn’t get the job, the editor Jack Bankowsky asked me to contribute. Through Artforum, I started to meet more people. The artists Huma Bhabha and Jason Fox had this tiny apartment way down on Mulberry, and they would have parties. There was also a warehouse on the corner of Allen and Canal that had been handed down through a number of different artists. Nicole Eisenman had lived there for a time, and there was a complete Nicole Eisenman painting on the elevator doors. Maynard Monrow had the lease. He is a piece of work. They would have these huge parties. I remember seeing Rene Ricard at a party there.
Kushner and friends Tam Miller and Hambrecht at a party in Brooklyn.
Photo: Rachel Kushner
I wanted to leave for the summer, and I couldn’t afford to pay rent in an apartment that I wasn’t occupying. So I moved out of the Columbia housing, and my friend Cynthia Mitchell said that I could leave my belongings in the basement of her house, which was on the end of Plymouth Street in Vinegar Hill. Cynthia and I moved to North Carolina, to Asheville. I was a waitress at the International House of Pancakes and made my way back, and Cynthia decided not to. So I took her old room. My roommate was Cynthia’s boyfriend, Miller Duvall. My rent was $275 a month. It was questionable whether I was getting a good deal. Our pipes would freeze in the winter. This was rowhousing built for the Irish ship workers in the mid-1900s, but it was freestanding because the other houses on either side had collapsed.
Kushner and her roommate on Plymouth Street in Vinegar Hill, Miller Duvall. They took cheesy portraits at the Kmart on Astor Place.
Photo: Rachel Kushner
Our landlords were the Tocci brothers. They were kingpins in the recycling business and were implicated in all kinds of stuff later. Our joke with everybody we knew who had them as landlords was that these people were putting bodies into poured concrete and dropping those blocks into the East River. They just had that vibe about them. They had a huge facility down the street from us, and we would have to go down there to give them our rent check. It was one of those warehouses where there’s Bobcats moving around, compacting huge things of cardboard and putting them on pallets. And in the middle of all this chaos was a windowless office that was lined inside with this vinyl fake-wood paneling. We discovered in the empty lot next to us, underneath a huge pile of vines, a crucifix. They were Catholic, and they had knocked down a church to build housing, and I think they couldn’t bring themselves to dump it.
Kushner’s old building on Plymouth Street is still next to a vacant lot. Adriane Quinlan.
Kushner’s old building on Plymouth Street is still next to a vacant lot. Adriane Quinlan.
At that time, the Navy Yard was still heavily industrial, and my cousin Tovey had a space there where he did blacksmithing. So did the graffiti artist Lee Quiñones. So I could go into the Navy Yard and hang out with my cousin, and he would tell me stories about ships sidling up to these abandoned slips in the Navy Yard and dumping their toxic waste.
Plymouth Street is right across the street from Con Edison’s main substation. There are these huge smokestacks. And then there was a sewage-treatment facility inside the Navy Yard, and it just had a heavy, heavy sewage smell. I had the number for ConEd, and I could call the guy in the tower and say, “It smells.” And they would try to do something. And then underneath the ConEd number, I had “Sewage-treatment smells: …” And then I would call that dude and he would go, like, “Oh, okay, Rachel. Thanks for telling me. We’ll throw some more detergent into the brew.”
The ConEd substation is still on Plymouth Street in Vinegar Hill, across from a line of residential buildings.
With Con Edison, somehow the neighborhood complaints initiated the EPA to come down on them. And Con Edison invited me and Miller and the EPA to tour the substation. So we got to put on hard hats and walk around, and they ended up having to put scrubbers on their chimneys, which they were supposed to have and didn’t. I guess my scrubbers held up, because now there’s people there with very expensive baby carriages.
I lived on the top floor with Miller and then I moved downstairs to the ground floor with my friend Jeanette, who was a girl I knew in San Francisco who had gone to mortuary school. The first floor was quite small, technically a one-bedroom. Our common area was just an alley kitchen, six feet by ten feet. I just had a bed and then our common furniture Jeanette made, because she’s a carpenter. Jeanette was a very mysterious person. She never had a boyfriend; never let anyone into her room. Except that I did go into her room once and take a look around. She had built all these cabinets, and in the cabinets were dental molds — like, a set of teeth. In every cabinet.
After that, there were a number of interim apartment situations. Then I ended up getting a very lucky break. I bought an apartment that was converted by the city under the HDFC low-income-housing program. It was at 139 Norfolk Street, just a standard Lower East Side prewar building. Everybody knew each other. Nobody had a buzzer. People had to yell up and then you’d drop the key. My apartment was a fifth-floor railroad walk-up facing the street. It was very small — I think 300 square feet. I was able to get a loan for the down payment, $8,000, from my parents. I didn’t make that much money — I think it was, like, $28,000 a year — but it was enough to cover the $350 maintenance fee and a mortgage.
Adriane Quinlan The HDFC co-op on Norfolk Street where Kushner bought an apartment.
Adriane Quinlan The HDFC co-op on Norfolk Street where Kushner bought an apartment.
I painted it pink and then I had these orange curtains that filtered the light. I remember somebody telling me it looks like a film set. In the bedroom, I had my grandmother’s desk, which I inherited — this cool, kidney-shaped desk. I wrote at that desk. Grand Street seemed like it was going to close because the editor, Jean Stein, was always threatening that. I was only an assistant editor there, and Knight Landesman at Artforum called me and said, “Betsy Sussler wants to hire a new managing editor at Bomb magazine, and I told her she should hire you.” Bomb was on Broadway and Bleecker. It was very small, all women. I adore Betsy — she was an amazing boss — and there were two people who started there as interns who I immediately became friends with: the artist Lucy Raven and Caleb Smith, who’s now an English professor.
The guy who owned the apartment next door hired a dude to redo all the electrical and plumbing and put in new flooring and walls. The guy he hired was squatting in the apartment. And he and his friend who was helping him were drug addicts and partying all night. Their apartment had been stripped down to the studs, so it had no insulation, and the smoke from their cigarettes came through the electrical outlets into my apartment like someone was blowing smoke rings.
I was thinking, like, What is going on with these people? So I met that guy who was doing that work. He had a lot of stories. He said, “I am a famous artist. I had a booming career in the neo-Expressionist, painterly 1980s. I was rich. I had a huge loft in Soho. My girlfriend was a supermodel. I left her for another supermodel.” He was not lying. He never told me that his name was Richard Hambleton. But when I met him, all of his worldly possessions were in black garbage bags that he stashed at the top of the stairs in front of the fire exit to the roof. He used to send me these long, long, long, long letters that he would write on drywall tape and then he’d feed them under the door. I would get one every night when I came back.
Toward the end when I was living in New York, my social life kind of revolved around the band Gogol Bordello. The singer, Eugene Hütz, was a friend of mine. His girlfriend at the time, Rachel Comey, has since become a very successful clothing designer. She would make outfits for the band — very deconstructed, just cut up and spray-painted or whatever. Wherever Gogol Bordello was playing, we all went. They would play at Max Fish and then they got their own clubhouse, which was on Ridge Street on the very eastern end of the Lower East Side. They had a swing in the middle of it that Eugene would wrap with gasoline rags and light on fire.
A fiery party at Gogol Bordello’s clubhouse on Ridge Street when Kushner was friends with the band.
Photo: Eugene Hütz
After 9/11, I started to realize I needed to leave. I would come home from my job — I was working at Bomb magazine then and would just be so tired. It was something about streets, just the energy it required to be so unprotected from the city and have your “city face” on. Every night, I called this diner, Odessa on Avenue A. They were open all night. I was vegetarian at that time, which kind of just meant I ate unhealthily. I would order a potato pancake and the guy would deliver it, and I would cover it with sriracha and that’s what I ate.
Kushner had a regular delivery order to Odessa Cafe Bar, which closed in 2020.
Photo: Robert K. Chin/Alamy
I didn’t have a lot of extra funds. I was trying to figure out how to write fiction, to teach myself to write a novel. And I was freelancing for Artforum and working full time as a senior editor at Bomb. One of those things had to go, so I quit working at Bomb. Quickly, I realized I can’t afford to keep living in New York. And when I quit, I just felt like I was in a city of working people and I had just called in sick. It just didn’t feel right. And, also, if you socialize in New York, when you meet people, they often want to quickly establish that they’re not wasting their time. But to say, “Oh, yes, and I’m writing a novel” — separate from that being kind of a meaningless statement, it was not something that I wanted to have to talk about.
I wanted to go where I could actually do that rather than say it. I traded apartments with a painter who wanted to live in New York, an L.A. painter. And then an ex-boyfriend of mine who lived in L.A. was going to be gone for the year filming, and he said I could have his car. So suddenly there I was, shopping at a supermarket in the middle of the night in January wearing sandals, passing row upon row of tropical fruit.
On a walk past 139 Norfolk Street years later, Kushner noticed the directory still listed her name, but it was misspelled. “It was proof that I had actually lived there,” she said. The buzzers have since been replaced with a digital system.
Photo: Rachel Kushner
I go back [to New York] often to hang out with people or to do things like publishing stuff or whatever. I was there recently with my son. We were on West Coast time. It was, like, midnight or 1 a.m., just me and my kid. And we walked down Norfolk Street. We walked right up to my old building. It’s a little nicer now, but that doorway still looks kind of like it did. And I got this whoosh of a feeling: honestly, of stress — money stress. The residue of those feelings — everything being a struggle, having to carry the laundry down five flights of stairs, not having money to go out — I sort of thought they would just go away. Instead, I just thought, I could never live on this street again.
