Andy Warhol’s move to the 33rd Street building

Andy Warhol’s move to the 33rd Street building was a drawn-out passage between a property he regarded as a potentially valuable investment and a workspace at 860 Broadway that he found increasingly difficult to leave. The new building offered room for work and storage, but the move’s practical steps—scouting corners, shifting equipment, packing boxes—made the loss of the old office tangible. Even after much of the space had been cleared, Warhol hoped to remain there as long as possible.

The purchase and the first preparations

Warhol’s doubts about the 33rd Street building preceded the move itself. He kept worrying that buying it had been a mistake and wondered whether it would have been better to purchase the property and turn it over immediately. Yet he also saw a strategic advantage in its position: because the building formed a T shape, he considered it the real-estate key to the entire block. The decision therefore carried two possibilities at once: a source of regret and a way to secure a larger foothold in the area. A truck was due to take some things out of 860 Broadway that Friday, making the abstract question of the purchase part of an actual change in place.

When Warhol first went to the new offices on 33rd Street, he made his first phone call from there and walked through the premises to identify corners where props could be stored. The space had already filled up before he had moved his own belongings in. The cramped, unfinished quality of the transition extended beyond the office: he felt that his house was becoming cluttered, but his camera could focus only on small areas, making each isolated patch look neat instead of showing the larger mess those patches composed. The contrast between a property large enough to hold more work and belongings and the difficulty of seeing the whole disorder at once gave the move a domestic as well as a business dimension.

Discovering the new office

By June 1984, belongings were being transferred from 860 Broadway to 33rd Street. Warhol had expected the division between his own space and Interview to be different; at the new offices, he discovered that Interview occupied only a small area while his section was much larger, with rooms and spaces he had not known about. The move thus revealed the scale of the operation he was taking on: the new premises were not merely a replacement office but a substantially larger territory to understand and fill.

That discovery did not make leaving 860 Broadway easy. On June 23, the furniture was packed for shipment by a moving company Warhol called Nice Jewish Boys. The movers wanted books, and he gave them some copies of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. While sorting an old box from 1968, he came across a photograph of himself with Viva and about twenty others at a college. He remembered them as the only freaks there, set apart from students whose hair and clothes seemed to belong to a different moment. The image was from before The 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol, and seeing it made the packing emotionally charged: a box being emptied for the move unexpectedly returned him to an earlier version of his life.

Clearing 860 Broadway

As the departure advanced, the office’s emptiness became its own presence. On June 25, Warhol found the rooms sad and bare; even the coffeepot had been moved uptown to the new office. Brigid Berlin wanted to buy a replacement for the interval before the move was complete, but he refused. The episode makes the transition visible through an ordinary object: the old office was losing even the small conveniences that had made it usable, while Warhol resisted treating the remaining days as a reason to furnish it again.

By July 23, the gym equipment had been removed over the weekend, leaving only the bare essentials at 860 Broadway. Packing boxes wore him out more than making ten paintings, he observed, because the labor was emotional. Three days later, after working out and trying to pack through the afternoon, he said he would stay in the building as long as possible, until he was made to leave. He had come to love it in its emptied state: the front was sunny, and he knew he would miss the trees at Union Square. His stated minimum for remaining was strikingly small—if he had a phone, that was all he needed. By then, the move was no longer simply a question of whether the new building was a sound purchase. It was also a separation from a familiar place whose cleared rooms, sunlight, and nearby trees had become difficult to relinquish.