LET’S START WITH an acknowledgment: We are aware that, to some people, the word “freak” may not sound entirely complimentary. It connotes the unusual, the peculiar, the weird, the marginal. To those of you who feel that way, we say, exactly. The margins are where all the fun happens. Welcome to our celebration of those who’ve proudly populated, redefined and expanded the shadowlands of New York City — a metropolis that, for a century or more, has in turn reshaped and reimagined itself to accommodate them. Here, we showcase the long history, and the current flowering, of those who have let their one-size-doesn’t-fit-all flag fly in their lives, in their art … or in lives that they have turned into their art. People who came to New York not because they were hoping to find people just like them but because they knew they would somehow feel at home on the edges of a city full of people who weren’t like anybody else.
Freak CityNew York has always attracted the most out-there artists. Here, T looks at the singularly strange talents who’ve built a metropolis unlike any other. Plus:
- Why New York has long been the freakiest place to be.
- Julia Fox’s advice on how to be a freak today.
- Cole Escola, Princess Nokia and more share their favorite freaky artworks and city spots.
- How New York Fashion Week came to outfreak Paris and Milan.
We’re not going to try to define freakiness here, since it would almost be a contradiction in terms to suggest that anyone has to adhere to certain standards to qualify. We can, however, say that being a freak is not the same as being an eccentric or an oddball. A set of slightly strange habits, obsessions or tastes is not, in itself, freaky; it’s practically an entrance requirement for living in New York — or a natural byproduct of having been here for a long time. Freakiness is something more esoteric, something that requires lifelong dedication to expending effort on a certain kind of creation (or self-creation), often in the face of scorn or indifference. It takes work, and freaks are willing to put in that work. They’re industrious; they have to be, since the world doesn’t always make it easy for them.
ImageClockwise from top left: Charles Ludlam; Grace Jones; Honey Dijon and Ladyfag; Terence Koh; and Iggy Pop.Credit...Clockwise from left: Arthur Tress; Adrian Boot/urbanimage.tv/Camera Press/Redux; Billy Farrell Agency/Shutterstock; Robert Maxwell/CPI Syndication; Ian Dickson/ShutterstockFreaks are scroungers, thrifters, salvagers; they’re unmatched in their ability to repurpose the discarded, to find value in things — and in people — that it sometimes seems nobody else wants or esteems. They are, by nature, retrievers and rescuers: of things, of people and, in New York, of neighborhoods. Starting in the 1960s, many of them found themselves and one another near the piers of the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Then it was Chelsea and the hotel that bears its name, where the TV personality Lance Loud and the writer and musician Patti Smith lived. Then the abandoned warehouse spaces of SoHo to the south and the walk-ups of Alphabet City to the east. Then, once all of those places, thanks in large part to freak pioneers like the artists Klaus Nomi and Jean-Michel Basquiat, became so desirable that there was no longer room for the people who’d made them cool in the first place, they found new turf in fringe neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. (The Bronx and Staten Island, too, as the song goes.)
As the official history of New York has unfolded — charted and graphed in growth arcs and real estate booms and the maneuverings and depredations of the city planner Robert Moses and the stampeding forces of money culture and conspicuous consumption — freaks have always remained essential to the city’s identity because, collectively and cumulatively, they’re the authors of the counternarrative. They write between the lines, telling stories that some would prefer to see expunged from the public record. Freaks, in short, have always helped make New York the city we want it to be. They are the weeds that sprout in sidewalk cracks, the elaborate graffiti that enlivens the drab wall of an abandoned building. That rat that went viral nine years ago for dragging a slice of pizza down a flight of subway steps? An absolute freak mascot. We could not do without them. We wouldn’t want to.
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