Andy Warhol's New York
Andy Warhol didn’t just live in New York — he colonized it. From a cramped Upper East Side townhouse full of cats to a succession of downtown studios that defined an entire era, the city was both his raw material and his audience.
1. The First Factory: Lexington Avenue Townhouse
1342 Lexington Avenue, Upper East Side
Before there was a Factory, there was this modest Upper East Side townhouse. The building was designed in 1889 by Henry Hardenbergh — the same architect who did the Plaza Hotel and the Dakota — which makes the fact that it housed Andy Warhol, his mother Julia, and 25 cats all named Sam feel slightly absurd in the best possible way.
Warhol bought the place in 1959 and lived here until 1974. In the early 1960s, the ground floor doubled as a studio, and it’s where the soup cans and Brillo boxes that would define pop art first took physical form. Julia Warhol moved back to Pittsburgh in 1970, but her influence lingered long after — her hand-lettered script appears throughout Warhol’s commercial work from this period. It’s often called the “first Factory,” though Warhol himself never branded it that way. The last asking price was $5.8 million, in case you were wondering.
2. The Silver Factory
231 East 47th Street, 5th Floor (building no longer exists)
This is the one everyone pictures when they think of Warhol’s Factory — the silver one, the mythological one. Warhol rented the fifth floor of this Midtown building from 1962 to 1968 for approximately $100 a year. One hundred dollars. A year.
Billy Name (born Billy Linich) covered the walls and pipes and every available surface in tin foil and silver paint, creating that eerie gleam that became inseparable from the Factory’s identity. This was the Silver Era: amphetamines, Warhol Superstars like Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Candy Darling, decadent parties, and the almost 500 Screen Tests Warhol shot of friends and celebrities between 1963 and 1966. Bob Dylan sat for one. So did Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Edie Sedgwick, and Harry Smith. The instruction was simple: hold still and look at the camera. What you got back was something raw and real and unlike anything else Warhol made — the posed pretense he carefully maintained everywhere else finally stripped away.
The building is gone now. Gone the way of a lot of Midtown that mattered.
3. The Union Square Factory (Second Factory)
33 Union Square West
By 1967 the building on 47th Street was being torn down, so the Factory moved south. Paul Morrissey found the space on the sixth floor of the Union Square Decker Building, and Warhol set up shop here from 1968 to 1973. The move put him closer to Max’s Kansas City, which was not a coincidence.
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas — author of the SCUM Manifesto, a woman who had developed a paranoid fixation on Warhol — walked into the Factory and shot him three times. The third bullet went through his left lung, spleen, stomach, liver, esophagus, and right lung. He was pronounced clinically dead and then revived. Mario Amaya, the art critic who was also there, got shot too, but survived more easily. Warhol never fully recovered. He wore a surgical corset for the rest of his life.
After the shooting, Warhol installed closed-circuit video cameras throughout the space — ostensibly for security, but also, inevitably, as documentation. When he moved out in 1973, he began packing his life into the famous Time Capsules: boxes of ephemera that now live at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
4. Max’s Kansas City
213 Park Avenue South (at 17th Street)
Max’s Kansas City is gone — it closed in 1981 — but you can still stand on the corner and feel the ghost of the thing. From its opening in 1965, it was the place where the Factory crowd ate, drank, argued, and performed. Warhol essentially held court in the back room. The Velvet Underground played there regularly. Lou Reed and John Cale and Nico filtered in and out. The entire downtown scene, from musicians to painters to drag queens, cycled through those booths.
This is also where Candy Darling came into Warhol’s orbit in a more formal sense — she’d first spotted him at Tenth of Always down in the Village, where she was working as a dancing waitress, but Max’s is where the relationship solidified. Taylor Mead eventually introduced them properly, and Darling became one of Warhol’s most iconic Superstars. The back room at Max’s was its own ecosystem, and Warhol was at the center of it like some pale, wig-wearing sun.
5. The Dom / Exploding Plastic Inevitable
19-25 St. Marks Place, East Village
Before Chipotle moved in and killed the block’s soul entirely, this was where Warhol staged the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 — a multimedia happening that combined the Velvet Underground (with Nico) with films, strobe lights, and general sensory overload. The ground floor venue was called The Dom, a name taken from the Polish word for “home.” Warhol and Paul Morrissey had sublet it from the original tenants, converting a former ballroom upstairs into their clubhouse.
The site had a violent past even before Warhol: the buildings were bought in the 1870s by the German Music Club and turned into Arlington Hall, where in 1914 there was a shootout on the dancefloor between Italian and Jewish gangsters. Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst had both spoken there. After the Factory crowd moved on, it reopened as the Electric Circus, a full psychedelia nightclub that ran until someone literally dropped a bomb on the dancefloor — rumored to have been set by the Black Panthers — after which people understandably stopped coming. It closed in 1971.
Now it’s a row of chain restaurants. Enjoy your burrito.
6. Tenth of Always (now The Madelyn)
82 West 3rd Street, Greenwich Village
This is where the story of Warhol and Candy Darling actually begins. Tenth of Always was an afterhours restaurant in the heart of the Village — run by the mob, frequented by a young gay crowd, with rumors of a prostitution ring to go along with the dancing waitstaff. Warhol would come through in the wee hours, and it was here that Candy Darling first laid eyes on him. She was working the room. He was doing what he always did — watching.
The place is now called The Madelyn, which tells you everything about how the Village has changed. But the address is the same, and if you know what happened here it’s hard to just walk past.
7. The Third Factory
860 Broadway at Union Square West
After the shooting of 1968, and after the chaotic years at Union Square West, Warhol moved the Factory again in 1974 — this time to a higher-security building, with bulletproof doors, closed-circuit surveillance, and secret rear exits. He also hired only foreign receptionists, which served the dual purpose of sounding cosmopolitan and deterring obsessive fans who would give up trying to spell their names over and over for someone who barely spoke English.
The Factory was here from 1974 to 1984, and this decade produced some of Warhol’s darker, stranger work: the Skull paintings, the Oxidation (piss) paintings, the Shadows series. The Time Capsules continued here too, an ongoing project of archiving and boxing everything — mail, magazines, random objects, photographs — that has become one of the more strange and compelling bodies of work in his catalog. There are over 600 of them, all at the Warhol Museum now.
8. The Fourth Factory
22 East 33rd Street
The final Factory, where Warhol worked from 1984 until his death in 1987, was in a former Con Edison building in Midtown. This is where he made the Last Supper series — enormous appropriations of Leonardo’s painting commissioned by a Milan gallerist — as well as the camouflage works and his collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Warhol and Basquiat had met in 1982; by 1984 they were painting together at this address, two of the biggest names in contemporary art working side by side in a space that still operated like a factory in all but name.
Warhol died on February 22, 1987, following gallbladder surgery. He was 58. Not long after, Basquiat — who had been working in a building that Warhol owned at 57 Great Jones Street — died of a heroin overdose at 27.
9. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Studio (Warhol-owned building)
57 Great Jones Street, NoHo
This building, now home to a semi-secret Japanese restaurant called Bohemian, was owned by Andy Warhol and rented to Jean-Michel Basquiat as a live-work space. Basquiat had come up through the SAMO graffiti tags on East Village walls and the no-wave punk scene — his band Gray played Max’s Kansas City and CBGB and the Mudd Club — before Warhol became a mentor and collaborator.
The friendship was complicated and genuinely productive. They painted together, showed together, and irritated the art establishment together. When Warhol died in February 1987, Basquiat was reportedly devastated. He was dead within 18 months, in the same building, on August 12, 1988.
10. The Mudd Club
77 White Street, TriBeCa
If Max’s Kansas City was Warhol’s uptown moment, the Mudd Club was where he came downtown to prove he was still relevant as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. Opened in 1978 by Steve Mass in a TriBeCa loft owned by painter Ross Bleckner, the Mudd Club was the deliberate anti-Studio-54: no velvet ropes for the gorgeous and famous, but rather a grimy street-level door for the artists and musicians and weirdos. Keith Haring ran a gallery on the fourth floor.
Basquiat’s band Gray played there. Madonna and Basquiat were dating and both went regularly. Debbie Harry, Klaus Nomi, David Byrne, Ginsberg, Burroughs — everyone cycled through. And Warhol, of course, because Warhol was everywhere. By 1983, it had run its course. As one regular put it: “At the end, it was not much fun anymore. It had just become kind of like the hangers-on to the hangers-on.” It’s a condo building now.
11. Elaine’s Restaurant (now The Writing Room)
1703 Second Avenue at 88th Street, Upper East Side
Elaine’s opened in 1963 and quickly became a creative refuge on the Upper East Side that crossed all the usual art-world boundaries — painters, writers, filmmakers, all mixed at Elaine Kaufman’s tables. Warhol dined here regularly, alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Mia Farrow, and George Plimpton. Elaine herself was a force of nature: brassy, chain-smoking, and fully willing to kick out a paying customer to make room for someone she liked better. She famously refused to serve hamburgers.
Elaine died in 2011 and the restaurant closed after 40 years. It’s now called The Writing Room, and they kept the original canopy, which is either a touching tribute or a bit sad depending on your mood. The building is the same building. The regulars are long gone.
12. The Chelsea Hotel
222 West 23rd Street, Chelsea
Warhol’s connection to the Chelsea Hotel runs through his film Chelsea Girls (1966), shot in various rooms throughout the building with Factory regulars. But the Hotel also appears throughout the broader Factory social universe: Nico lived there intermittently, Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in one of the rooms, and the whole place operated as a kind of extended crash pad for everyone adjacent to the downtown scene.
There’s a video that captures something essential about this moment: Warhol and William S. Burroughs having dinner together, followed by a serenade by Nico, all inside the Chelsea Hotel. The Chelsea is now a boutique hotel after years of renovation and controversy, but the architecture is intact and the ghosts are stubborn.
13. Times Square (Screen Tests, 2015)
Times Square, Midtown
This one is less a fixed address than a recurring apparition. In May 2015, the Andy Warhol Museum collaborated with Times Square Arts to project a selection of Warhol’s Screen Tests onto the advertising screens of Times Square from 11:57 to midnight each night. Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Harry Smith — their faces, blown up enormous, running in slow motion on the same screens that normally hawk credit cards and Broadway shows.
The Screen Tests were shot at the Silver Factory between 1963 and 1966. The instruction was always the same: sit still, look at the camera, don’t perform. What Warhol got back was the opposite of the manufactured celebrity he was simultaneously creating — people going from posed to awkward to bored, sharing something honest that his other work deliberately avoided. On Times Square’s screens they looked haunted and beautiful and completely out of time.
What’s remarkable about tracking Warhol across New York is how much ground he covered — from Upper East Side townhouse to East Village clubs to Midtown factories to downtown bars — and how, at almost every stop, he was less a tourist than a defining presence. The addresses changed every few years, but the orbit remained the same: a shifting cast of superstars, musicians, hangers-on, and genuine talents, all circling a man who understood better than almost anyone that in New York, being seen is half the work.