New York City is the diary’s principal working landscape and social stage: a place where Andy Warhol’s art, magazine, routines, and friendships repeatedly meet, and where the promise of glamour coexists with the practical demands of work. From the Factory and Max’s Kansas City to changing offices, galleries, and streets, the city is not merely a backdrop but the infrastructure through which Warhol’s public image and daily life are made.

The Factory, Max’s, and the early working world

Warhol met Pat Hackett in New York City in the autumn of 1968, three months after he had been shot and nearly killed. Earlier that spring, the Factory had moved from its original silvered loft on East 47th Street to a white-and-mirrored loft occupying the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West. The city’s geography thus registered both a change of workplace and the return to work after a life-threatening event.

A block away on Park Avenue South, Max’s Kansas City gathered the art, fashion, music, and underground-film crowds. Its back room was a place to watch one another’s clothes, makeup, wit, and love interests, while visiting directors and producers from Europe and Hollywood circulated among New York regulars. The crowd’s hoped-for passage from local notoriety to global fame gave the room a larger social purpose; Warhol’s art hung on its walls, linking the venue’s scene to his work.

Hackett, then an undergraduate at Barnard, first went to the Factory hoping to become a part-time typist. Warhol suggested that she work whenever she could, and she began coming in several days a week after classes. They shared a cramped four-by-ten-foot office piled with clutter. While Warhol read newspapers and drank carrot juice from Brownies, Hackett transcribed tapes of his telephone conversations, recorded while he was recovering first in hospital and then at home in a narrow Victorian house on Lexington Avenue and 89th Street. The arrangement tied her entry into his working world to the city’s ordinary distances between school, office, neighborhood shop, and home.

A city organized by routine and recordkeeping

Warhol’s weekday life moved through a repeated New York itinerary. After the morning diary call, he made or took more calls, showered, dressed, and took his dachshunds Archie and Amos down from the third floor of his house to the basement kitchen, where he ate breakfast with his housekeepers Nena and Aurora Bugarin. He then went shopping, usually along Madison Avenue, at auction houses, in the jewelry district around 47th Street, or in Village antique shops. He carried copies of Interview to hand to shopkeepers in hopes of attracting advertisements and to fans who stopped him in the street. The magazine was both a business and something he could give to people who recognized him.

The diary itself grew from a practical record of this city-based business. For several years before 1976, Hackett kept a sketchy Factory log listing office visitors, the previous night’s main events, and Warhol’s cash expenses. In autumn 1976 they began speaking by telephone on weekday mornings to record the places he had gone, the events he had attended, and the costs he had incurred. What began as documentation for tax purposes also became a way for Warhol to examine daily life. He tracked expenses down to ten-cent calls from street payphones, against the background of recurring IRS scrutiny that had begun with a major audit in 1972.

The routine followed the workweek rather than the calendar without interruption: they did not make diary entries on weekends, even if they spoke or saw one another. On Monday, they combined Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in a triple session. Hackett made notes on a legal pad and typed them up immediately after the call, while Warhol’s intonations remained fresh. The resulting record was shaped by both the daily conversation and the discipline of a working schedule.

Interview, portraits, and the production of celebrity

By 1976, Interview had gained a reputation for sophisticated, self-mocking silliness that made celebrities want to appear in it. Warhol often conducted the cover interview himself, sometimes with a staff member. The magazine also depended on a steady supply of new faces, and its headings for pictures of previously unpublished young men and women included “Interman,” “Viewgirl,” “Upfront,” and “First Impression.” It became a glamorous publication, replacing Warhol’s earlier promise of putting someone in a movie with the offer of placing them in the magazine.

The city’s stream of visitors to the office fed directly into Warhol’s portrait business. He began a portrait session by taking approximately sixty Polaroid photographs with a Big Shot camera. After that model was discontinued, he arranged to buy the company’s remaining stock. He selected four images from the sitting and sent them to a screen printer, who made positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. Warhol chose one, determined its crop, and cosmetically altered it to suit his preferred ideal of attractiveness, adjusting features such as the neck, nose, lips, and complexion.

The selected image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate for the screen printer to use in making a silkscreen. Assistants prepared rolls of canvas in advance, using one flesh-tone background for men and a pinker shade for women. Warhol transferred the image onto the canvas, painted in areas such as hair, eyes, and lips or ties and jackets, and then aligned the silkscreen with those painted colors. Small shifts in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic changing appearance. The commercial terms were also standardized: approximately $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one. In the New York office, celebrity was not just observed; it was selected, adjusted, reproduced, and priced.

Streets, workplaces, and changing city rhythms

New York City’s public spaces could interrupt Warhol’s routine as forcefully as they enabled it. During a transit strike, he walked through streets filled with people who were out because buses and other traffic were disrupted. On another day, strong winds caught people at street corners and lifted them into the air; after cabbing to Union Square, Warhol went to the office, where Stephen Mueller and Ronnie were stretching Shadow paintings for an upcoming show. The streets and the studio existed in immediate succession, with the city’s conditions entering the workday rather than remaining separate from it.

Warhol’s movements also linked his New York work to events elsewhere. After a three-week promotional tour for the book Exposures with Bob Colacello and Fred Hughes, he contrasted a reception in Washington in President Carter’s box at the Kennedy Center with a signing at a B. Dalton bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. In Dallas, the hosts held a party in a boiler room. The tour’s changes of setting made the New York-based celebrity enterprise appear less like uninterrupted glamour than a sequence of very different public encounters.

A fire alarm at 245 Park Avenue interrupted a meeting about investments. Warhol had walked into the building and taken the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor when he noticed something burning; the secretary then warned that the building was on fire and that they should leave. In a separate account of the city’s workday, he had difficulty handing out Interview because few people were around, worked for several hours, and then visited a gallery staging a repeat of Walter de Maria’s Dirt show, now filled with fresh black dirt. Office business, publishing, gallery-going, and disruptions all belonged to the same urban circuit.

Nostalgia, expansion, and the city’s changing address

In 1982, a walk through the East Village made Warhol feel strange and nostalgic. The illuminated places recalled several periods of his life: the 1950s, when he lived on St. Mark’s Place; the 1960s, when he ran the Dom discotheque there with the Velvet Underground and Nico; and visits to psychedelic events at the Fillmore and meals at Ratner’s delicatessen. The same neighborhood held successive versions of the city, and walking through it turned a familiar route into a record of time passed.

The search for larger work space brought another change in his relation to the city. At a new building, he found workers still at work and discovered that the proposed painting area was in a dark basement, though he had thought it would be for storage. He compared it unfavorably with the bright front of the 860 Broadway studio and considered other possibilities, including the Great Jones Street building or a glass-covered third-floor terrace. He also wondered how the large allocations of space for Fred Hughes, Brigid Berlin, and Vincent Fremont would affect the office’s shared life: with everyone spread out, people might no longer see one another. Expansion promised room while threatening the proximity that had defined the earlier workplace.

Later, when belongings were being moved to the 33rd Street building, Warhol went there rather than to 860 Broadway and discovered that his own section was much larger than Interview’s, with more rooms than he had known existed. On the first full workday in the new building, he noted that there would be no more Union Square and anticipated difficulty finding cabs in the new area. He missed ordering carrot juice and food from Brownies and wondered what could be found in a neighborhood where he had seen only greasy coffee shops. The move altered not only the work address but also the familiar supports of his routine.

New York City remained a place where art and reputation could still gather a crowd. At a packed exhibition at Gagosian’s, Stuart Pivar called the works masterpieces, while older visitors asked Warhol how he had made them; he did not explain the works’ actual method to them. At another opening, people offered him their limousines, Paige Powell supplied the gallery with fifty more people to invite, and attendance grew from a scattering of guests into a larger crowd. These scenes echo the earlier room at Max’s Kansas City: the city continually assembles audiences, but the settings and the terms of attention change. Its lasting significance in the diary lies in that double function—as the machinery of Warhol’s work and fame, and as the lived terrain of habit, disruption, memory, and relocation.