The Loft 'Bad Paintings' Bought

When artist Neil Jenney paid just $36,000 for this 11,000-square-foot Soho loft in 1973, it was "completely unlivable."

- WENDY GOODMAN

YOU SEE, I HAVE THIS PROBLEM," Neil Jenney tells me when I meet him at the Wooster Street end of his 11,000-square-foot full-floor Soho loft. "I have a landline telephone, and I tell people, 'Let it ring because I have to run down the block to answer the phone." That phone is located in what Jenney calls his "everything" room, which is at the West Broadway end of the space that he bought for $36,000 in 1973.

Jenney, 77, got into Soho and the art world when the two were entirely intertwined and full of possibility. He grew up in Westfield, Massachusetts, around chickens and tobacco farms, where he worked in the summers. To this day, wearing V-neck denim overalls of his own design, he still looks a bit like he could be heading out to do some chores.