The Factory was Andy Warhol’s shifting workplace and creative hub, a series of New York spaces where film production, painting, publishing, business, and social life occupied the same crowded rooms. After moving to 33 Union Square West in 1968, it became a center for feature-length films and the people who gathered around Warhol. In 1974 it moved to 860 Broadway, where its identity gradually changed from Factory to office: Interview and portrait work became central, and the old promise of a movie role gave way to the promise of appearing in the magazine.

Setting and Changing Addresses

In the spring of 1968, the Factory left its original silvered loft on East 47th Street and took over the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West, a white, mirrored space overlooking Union Square. The location placed Warhol’s workplace amid a neighborhood of conspicuous contrasts: the park and the clock of the Con Edison tower outside, bargain shopping along 14th Street, and the West Village, East Village, and SoHo within walking distance. A block away, Max’s Kansas City drew artists, fashion figures, musicians, filmmakers, and visiting celebrities into its back room. Warhol’s art hung there as the city’s social and artistic circles watched one another and pursued wider recognition.

The Union Square loft was not simply a studio set apart from the city. Its position tied work to daily movement between the Factory, nearby gathering places, and the surrounding streets. In 1974 the Factory moved only half a block, to the third floor of 860 Broadway. The short distance marked a substantial change in identity: Warhol instructed receptionists to stop answering the phone with Factory, a name he considered outmoded, and to call the place the office instead. The new label registered a shift from the legendary collective atmosphere of the earlier Factory toward a more explicitly organized business and publishing operation.

Film Production and the People at Work

In the years following Warhol’s 1968 shooting, feature-length 16mm films formed a major part of the Factory’s activity. The films were intended to be enlarged to 35mm for commercial release, and the people who came through the loft supplied both labor and performers. While Warhol recuperated at home and in hospital, Paul Morrissey made Flesh, starring Joe Dallesandro as a hustler trying to raise money for his girlfriend’s abortion. Jed Johnson, who had begun working at the Factory that spring, assisted Morrissey. Johnson’s early tasks included stripping paint from window frames facing Union Square Park and building shelves to store film cans; he also taught himself editing on the Factory’s Moviola, working with footage from San Diego Surf and Lonesome Cowboys.

The film operation depended on different kinds of participation. Morrissey later made Trash and Heat, while Women in Revolt and L’Amour involved Warhol, Morrissey, Fred Hughes, and Johnson in casting, shooting, and editing. By 1974, Hughes handled office deals and helped Warhol make business decisions, and Vincent Fremont managed the general office. The Factory was thus both a place of production and a working organization whose members’ roles could extend from making films to managing business.

The space also contained less visible forms of withdrawal. After the move to Union Square, Billy Name, photographer and creator of the earlier Factory’s silvered look, lived in a darkroom at the back of the loft. During 1968 and early 1969 he withdrew from daytime activity, appearing only at night after everyone else had left. The next day’s discarded takeout containers were the only sign that he was still there. After more than a year of this nocturnal isolation, Johnson arrived one morning to find the darkroom door open and Name gone. The episode gives the loft’s busy, collective reputation a counterimage: even within a space organized around constant activity, someone could retreat almost entirely from view.

From Factory to Office

At 860 Broadway, Warhol’s own office and painting area shared a floor with the Interview staff, separated from them by a wall. The physical closeness did not erase a social distinction. Warhol treated people working directly for him as family and the magazine employees as a separate group, referring to the two sides as us and them. Bob Colacello and Catherine Guinness were among the exceptions who combined magazine work with friendship and social contact. The arrangement made the office both a shared workplace and a space divided by different degrees of personal access.

Interview increasingly drew Warhol into its daily operations. After he bought out Peter Brant in 1975 and became the magazine’s sole owner and publisher, with Hughes as president, Warhol began checking art director Marc Balet’s layouts and arranging advertiser lunches. The magazine’s low-budget origins reflected Warhol’s preference for starting businesses with limited financing and retaining ownership rather than relying on outside backers. Its initial movie orientation centered on stars speaking in their own words, ideally to other stars. In its first issue, staff members spent hours crossing out one potentially libelous word with black felt-tip pens after the issue had already been printed—a practical, collective repair that captured the improvised conditions of the early operation.

As Interview’s circulation grew, it became a new source of faces, activity, and invitations. Warhol had once attracted visitors with the prospect of appearing in his films; in the 1970s, he could offer a place in the magazine. Its pages introduced unfamiliar young men and women through headings such as Interman, Viewgirl, Upfront, and First Impression, and celebrities increasingly wanted to appear in it. The magazine helped keep Warhol connected to new people at a time when commercially exhibitable films had become expensive and uncertain to make. Its prominence did not eliminate the Factory’s other work, but it changed what the workplace could promise its visitors.

Portraits, Routine, and the Workday

Commissioned portraits were a continuing source of income, and the office and painting area accommodated them alongside magazine and business work. Warhol’s portrait process began with roughly sixty Polaroid photographs, taken exclusively with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. After that model was discontinued, he arranged to buy the company’s remaining unused stock. He selected four photographs for a screen printer, then chose one resulting image, decided how to crop it, and altered features such as necks, noses, lips, and complexions to make the subject appear more attractive.

The chosen image was enlarged onto a 40-by-40-inch acetate and made into a silkscreen. Assistants prepared rolls of canvas in different flesh-tone backgrounds for men’s and women’s portraits. Warhol traced the image onto the canvas, painted selected areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and then aligned the silkscreen with those colors. Small shifts in registration produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance. A first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with each additional canvas about $5,000. The procedure made portraiture a repeatable office practice while preserving variations in the relationship between photographic image and painted color.

The Factory’s workday was connected to Warhol’s personal routines and errands. After recording the Diary by phone, he typically took his dachshunds Archie and Amos in the elevator from his bedroom to the basement kitchen, where he ate breakfast with his housekeepers. He then spent hours shopping, often along Madison Avenue, at auction houses, in the jewelry district near 47th Street, or in Village antique shops. He distributed copies of Interview to shopkeepers in the hope of attracting advertisers and to fans who recognized him. At the office, usually arriving between one and three, he checked appointments, returned calls, and sent an assistant to Brownies for snacks while he drank carrot juice or tea. He also sorted daily mail and gifts, placing many in dated cardboard boxes for Warhol’s Time Capsules. The Factory’s daily activity therefore extended beyond the making of objects: it included maintaining business relationships, managing an appointment-filled social life, and sorting the material that flowed through Warhol’s hands.

Visitors, Incidents, and Departure

The office continued to host varied encounters. In 1978, Truman Capote arrived for a High Times Christmas-cover photograph and spoke with Brigid Berlin about a drying-out facility; he was visibly drunk and asked her for a drink without telling Bob MacBride. Paul Morrissey spent the afternoon discussing scripts with him. Later that year, Tom Sullivan showed Cocaine Cowboys on Betamax at the office. Warhol liked parts of the film and assessed his own performance, while also judging the story as foolish and questioning Sullivan’s estimate that it had cost $950,000 to make. These visits show the office functioning as a meeting place for film projects, magazine work, and personal business, not just as a room where paintings were produced.

The Factory’s relationship to the city could also appear in moments of disruption. During the July 1977 blackout, Maxime de la Falaise called to ask whether the Factory had electricity while she was moving into her loft on 19th Street. In December 1979, Warhol entered a meeting in a 27th-floor office at 245 Park Avenue and discovered that the building was on fire. He and Bob Denison left by the stairs after finding one exit locked, joining the descending occupants as each floor added more people to the stairwell. Once outside, they went on to hold their meeting at a restaurant. The contrast between ordinary office appointments and sudden building-wide evacuation places the Factory’s working world within the larger, unstable city around it.

By the early 1980s, the space also carried the memory of the original Factory and its former inhabitants. In 1982, Billy Name asked Warhol to give photographs from the East 47th Street Factory to Jean Stein for her Edie book; Warhol did not want to part with them. In 1984, Keith Haring worked on an elephant that had been bought for Diana Vreeland’s costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The elephant had passed from the exhibition to Fred Hughes and had previously been painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Victor; Hughes had it painted white so Haring could work on it. The object’s successive use brought the Factory’s shifting artistic relationships into view through a single, repainted surface.

The final move from 860 Broadway was recorded as an end rather than a routine relocation. On November 30, 1984, Warhol described it as the last moving day and the departure from the building forever. He asked to remain and paint until 8:30, while the keys went to a friend of Stephen Sprouse, who thanked Warhol for the air conditioners left in the windows. Exhausted, Warhol went home after Jay drove him. The Factory’s history thus concluded in the evidence with the closure of a particular workplace, after years in which its function had expanded from film-centered loft to office, magazine operation, and portrait-production center. Its significance lies in that continual remaking: a place where artistic production and social access were reorganized as Warhol’s work and the means of attracting people around it changed.