860 Broadway was the third-floor office where Andy Warhol’s magazine operation, portrait business, and everyday work increasingly converged. The address was more than a replacement studio: after Interview became a central source of activity and new contacts, the office offered a different way to keep Warhol’s world in motion. Its rooms accommodated art, editorial business, visitors, and the practical arrangements of a working enterprise; when they were finally cleared, Warhol mourned not just the furniture but the sunny space and the nearby park.

From the Factory to the office

The move to 860 Broadway took place in the summer of 1974, when The Factory left 33 Union Square West for the third floor of a building just half a block away. The former address had occupied the whole sixth floor of a white-and-mirrored loft. At 860, the change was marked not only by a new address but by a change in name: Warhol instructed receptionists to stop answering the telephone with “Factory,” which he considered too corny. The workplace became simply the office.

The move kept Warhol in a neighborhood he valued. He loved Union Square’s trees and the view of the Con Edison tower from his earlier loft; from there, the West Village, East Village, and SoHo were within walking distance. Max’s Kansas City, a block away from the old address, had been a gathering place for the art, fashion, music, and underground-film crowds whose presence shaped the Factory scene. The nearby streets and social circuits remained part of the setting for the office, even as its daily purpose grew more commercial and administrative.

That shift was already visible in the people who worked there. Fred Hughes handled business arrangements and helped Warhol make decisions, while Vincent Fremont managed the general office. Bob Colacello’s work increasingly centered on Interview, and in 1974 he became its executive editor. The magazine had begun in 1969 with a low-budget, film-oriented idea: let stars speak in their own words, preferably to other stars. At the new office, this editorial project stood alongside the art and business rather than merely supporting the old Factory model.

A magazine becomes the engine

In 1975, Warhol bought out Peter Brant and became Interview’s full owner and publisher; Hughes took the title of president. Warhol, who had previously kept some distance from the magazine’s daily operation, began coming in to look at art director Marc Balet’s layouts and arranging lunches in the conference room to pitch the publication to prospective advertisers. The office was a place where ownership became visible as work: layouts to review, advertisers to meet, and a magazine to keep growing.

Interview also supplied a new reason for people to come through the door. Warhol had once drawn people to the Factory with the possibility of appearing in his inexpensive underground films. By the 1970s, the rising cost of making commercially exhibitable movies left fewer roles to offer and no guarantee that a discussed film would be made. The magazine filled that gap. Its circulation grew, and by 1976 it had acquired a glamorous, knowingly self-mocking character that made celebrities want to appear in it. Warhol’s familiar offer changed accordingly: appearing in the magazine took the place of appearing in a movie.

The office’s rooms reflected that overlap between publishing and art-making. A photograph caption identifies the sunny front of the third-floor offices and notes that Warhol did much of his artwork in the back, while work in transit was often stacked near the elevator doorway and Interview’s area. By February 1980, Interview had taken over Warhol’s old room, and he wondered where he could paint. The address was neither a separate editorial suite nor simply a painting studio: its changing arrangement registered the magazine’s growth and the pressure that growth placed on the space available for art.

Portrait work and daily production

Portraiture remained a major source of income, and the office formed part of the environment in which that business operated. Warhol’s process began with roughly sixty Polaroid photographs, taken with a Polaroid Big Shot. He selected four images for transfer to acetates, chose and cropped one, and altered details to flatter the sitter before enlarging it for silkscreen production. The finished image was aligned with colored areas already painted on canvas; slight differences in registration gave the portraits their characteristic shifting effect. A first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with additional canvases priced at about $5,000 each. The method depended on a sequence of decisions, materials, assistants, and specialist labor—not just a moment of painting.

The diary’s office scenes show that commercial portrait work could also be a public performance. In April 1980, a television crew came to film Warhol painting Carly Simon’s portrait alongside portraits by Larry Rivers and Marisol. Warhol had said he would not do another project without payment, and Vincent Fremont arranged a contract under which Simon would pay most of the cost. The office thus stood at the intersection of commissioned art, television exposure, and negotiation over compensation.

On Memorial Day in May 1980, Warhol went to the office and worked on six or seven portraits. The following month, a client from Munich came to see his portrait and was startled by its strong character. Warhol had followed Hughes’s advice to leave some wrinkles in older sitters’ faces; he changed the client’s red veins to black and gave him brighter clothing colors than he usually wore, while making the client’s daughter especially elegant. Hughes watched nervously, feeling responsible for the portraits’ appearance. The scene captures the office as a place where aesthetic choices were also part of a client-facing business, with the maker, adviser, and sitter all implicated in how a likeness would look.

Other visits reveal the office’s practical range. In January 1980, Gigi did Warhol’s makeup there for a Whitney poster, though he disliked the wig; Ronnie was away sick. In December, after photographing Howdy Doody for a portrait, Warhol sat for a team making a head mold, with photographers present and Ronnie taking three-dimensional pictures. The process made him feel ill, and the first mold was dropped; a later attempt also failed to capture all the fingers cleanly. The office could function as a workplace for painting and publishing, but also as a temporary production site for photographic and sculptural work.

Emptying the address

The office remained a daily workplace through a gradual relocation. In November 1983, Warhol walked to new offices on 33rd Street and made his first phone call from there while scouting corners for prop storage. The space was already filling up before he had moved his own things in. The diary presents relocation as a problem of space and possessions as much as a change of address: his home, too, seemed cluttered, but photographs focused on small areas and made the larger mess look neat.

By June 1984, furniture at 860 Broadway was being packed and shipped out. Warhol gave some of his books to the movers, then looked through an old box from 1968 and found a photograph of himself with Viva and a group of about twenty people at what he thought might have been a Catholic college. Seeing that image before the move stirred a comparison between the earlier group and the young people of the present, as well as sadness at seeing his own younger self. A few weeks later, gym equipment had been removed and only bare essentials remained. Packing boxes, he observed, tired him more than making ten paintings because it was emotional.

Even as the rooms emptied, Warhol wanted to remain there as long as he could. He loved the office when it was vacant, especially the sunny front, and said he would miss the trees of Union Square Park. For him, a telephone and an open stretch of the familiar space seemed enough. That attachment gives the address its lasting significance: 860 Broadway had accommodated the shift from film-centered Factory life to a magazine-powered routine, but it had also become a lived-in place whose light, rooms, and neighborhood could not be replaced by a new office alone.