33rd Street building

The 33rd Street building marked a shift in Andy Warhol’s working life from moving between rented offices to occupying a building he owned. First visited as a place to scout storage space, it became a much larger base for his operation, with space for Interview and other work, and by the end of 1984 it was also his new home.

From 860 Broadway to 33rd Street

In November 1983, Warhol went to the new offices on 33rd Street and made his first phone call from there. He was scouting corners for storing props, but the rooms were already filling up before he had moved his own things in. The visit captured a transition still in progress: the new premises were being prepared even as the practical question of where to put everything pressed in.

By June 1984, belongings were being moved from 860 Broadway to 33rd Street. Warhol went to the new location instead of 860 and found the move enjoyable. The space assigned to his own operation was much larger than Interview’s area, which occupied only a small part of the premises; he discovered rooms and places he had not known were there. The contrast made the move more than a change of address: it revealed a wider working environment than the magazine’s footprint alone suggested.

A building acquired and occupied

At the end of 1984, Warhol bought and moved into a former Con Edison building. A 1985 photograph places Brigid Berlin’s dog Fortune in its first-floor office area, offering a glimpse of the building as an actively used workplace after the move. Together with the earlier scouting and transfer of materials, the caption connects the 33rd Street offices with the larger property Warhol acquired, though it does not specify the building’s internal arrangement beyond the office area.

Workspaces and changing scale

The building’s documented use combined storage, offices, and the activity of Interview, but the boundaries between those functions were not identical: Interview had a comparatively small area, while Warhol’s part was substantially larger. The available account does not inventory the other rooms or identify their individual uses. Instead, its emphasis falls on the experience of discovering how much space was available and on the accumulation of props and belongings that made a new base necessary.

Significance

The building represents a change in scale and control. In 1983 it was a new office where Warhol sought corners for props; by June 1984 it was receiving the contents of the 860 Broadway operation; by the end of that year he had bought the former Con Edison building and moved into it. The sequence turns an office relocation into a record of increasing physical investment in the spaces where his work and business were conducted.