that her tweets are all hers. “I have no
filter when it comes to being honest,”
she added. She credited her grandfa-
ther, a minister in whose church she
sang as a girl. “He told me ages ago, and
I didn’t forget it, ‘Why tell a lie when
the truth is available?’”
Was she always so unfiltered? Before
she could answer, her cousin Diane
Whitt, seated next to her, nodded yes
with comic forcefulness. “Oh, yeah, my
foot has been in my mouth several times,”
Warwick said, laughing. “I never find
any reason not to be straight up. I have
no reason not to be me.” Cousin Diane
nodded again.
—Bruce Handy
1
DEPT.OFRELICS
COMMUNE
E
victions have been mercifully rare
in New York during the past year
and a half, thanks in part to city, state,
and federal moratoriums that have kept
people in place through the pandemic.
But those protections weren’t able to
save Aubergine, a picturesquely decrepit
flophouse, salon, and culture-freak com-
Long said that her own space once had
a leak so big that the ceiling “looked
as if it were pregnant.”
The group moved downstairs, shuf-
fling past a bare mattress on a landing,
a hi-fi, and an LP called “Don Rickles
Speaks” and into the basement, which
was littered with ancient chalkboards
and old school chairs. Before its days
as an intellectual flophouse, the build-
ing was home to Columbia’s Depart-
ment of Slavic Languages. “It’s actually
a lot better than it used to be!” Long
said brightly.
Aubergine, named not for a French
eggplant but as a twist on the French
auberge (inn), was launched, in 1973, by
a group of young people, half of them
students, who responded to an ad that
the university placed in the Times. The
city was in fiscal crisis; two years later,
President Gerald Ford told New York
to drop dead.
On the tour, some parts of the house
appeared to be uninhabited. The front
parlor contained only a Warholesque
silk screen of Bill Clinton. A ground-floor
kitchen was nearly free of appliances.
The back yard, occasionally used as a
party space, was bare, save for a medieval-
style plowshare.
“We’ve never had rats,” Siena Ori-
staglio said. She is the founder of an
arts organization and was a tenant for
nine years. “But there was one in the
yard. His name was Frankie. He died
during Covid.”
After the walk-through, the group
sat down in a big dining room, remi-
niscing under the gaze of a mounted
mannequin head wearing a Viking hel-
met. Past roommates were enumerated.
There was the sculptor who, in the late
nineties, filled the living room with giant
wooden pylons. (“The big dicks,” Brodsky
said.) There was the dominatrix who
absconded with fifteen thousand dol-
lars from the joint household account.
(Brodsky said that she spent a portion
of her twenty-first birthday in a Mc-
Donald’s, psyching herself up to con-
front the culprit.) There was the tenant
who launched a sauerkraut business out
of the building. “They called it Brine
and Dine,” someone recalled. Dinners
and parties were recounted. Sting is said
to have come to one, Kathy Bates and
Marina Abramović to others. Group
meals ranged wildly in edibility; several
munity at 546 West 113th Street. For
half a century, a rotating cast of urban
homesteaders—mostly young, often art-
ists or academics—have found refuge
in the five-story Beaux-Arts building,
which is owned by Columbia Univer-
sity. Rent: five hundred and forty dol-
lars a person. Earlier this year, citing
safety concerns, Columbia moved to re-
possess the building.
A couple of weeks before the movers
arrived, a few housemates gathered for
a stroll through the place. Emilyn Brod-
sky—thirty-six, a physical-therapy stu-
dent and a musician, whose most re-
cent record is called “Emilyn Brodsky’s
Digestion”—stood in the musty front
hall. Having spent the past seventeen
years at Aubergine, hers was the lon-
gest tenure of the bunch. Tall, with
bleached-blond hair, she had been out
of town for most of the pandemic, and
she looked around in wonder. “It’s all
still here!” she said.
Brodsky and company continued
the tour. In one bedroom—tall win-
dows, double-height ceiling—Cassan-
dra Long, a thirty-four-year-old painter
and teacher, and an Aubergine resi-
dent for two years, pointed to some
elaborate original molding. “The plas-
ter falls off,” she said. A chunk is said
to have brained a guest in the mid-
seventies, sending her to the hospital.
“I can’t wait to get home and insult my parents
from a position of authority.”
