Ivy Brown is unique. She’s an artist, a sculptor, and a gallerist. She’s 47 years old and five feet tall. She owns a mixed breed dog and a crazy eyed cat. Most importantly, she lives in the Meatpacking District.
In 1985, Ivy Brown read an ad in the Village Voice that read, “Meatpacking-1800 sq. ft. loft, wood burning fire place”, and decide d to check it out. Little did she know 25 years later she would still call that place home. Now, the loft has expanded another 1200 ft., boasts an art gallery, and a wall sized aluminum foil sculpture. This is a drastic change from broken windows and decaying rooms of the 80s. Regardless of the mess, from the moment Ivy walked in, she admits that it waslove at first sight. “I walked in and said ‘Oh my god, I need to live here,’” she remembers. “There was something sacred here.”
The building, located at 675 Hudson St. was once a transvestite help center, a weed shop and a Civil War hospital. Not in that order. “It’s never been a normal apartment building,” she laughs. Clearly, she’s made it work.
Before she became a part of the then seedy neighborhood that was the Meatpacking, Ivy was just a Jewish girl from Queens. She had tried a European lifestyle for a while, ten years to be exact, before she realized she needed to be back on the right side of the pond. “For me, it felt natural to come back here,” she says. “London is not New York.”
In the 1980s, the Meatpacking was transitioning and so was Ivy. It was a time of liberation as well as survival. By day the streets were littered with dead cow and pig carcasses, while by night the transvestites were on the prowl. Ivy witnessed it all. The meatpackers, bloodstained and all, huddled around garbage fires, trying to keep warm, while prostitutes and transvestites met their match for the night. “It was all very cinematic,” she says. It was then after witnessing one too many meat deliveries that Ivy realized something about herself. “I became a vegetarian,” she laughs.
What Ivy believes to be one of the most pivotal times of her Meatpacking residency is when she befriended Florent Morellet. Ivy remembers stopping in at his restaurant, called Florent’s, for eggs three times a week, talking social issues and maps. “His place was a safe haven and a continuation of the night,” remembers Ivy. Florent was open about his positive HIV status and politically active, something that Ivy herself became involved in. There were trips to Washington to rally and nights looking over maps of imagined places.
David Brown, Ivy’s husband of about 2, 668 days (they count), realizes what his wife means for this transforming neighborhood. “Like the Meatpacking District, Ivy has evolved and re-invented herself over the last two decades,” says Brown. “Ivy is as iconic to the Meatpacking District as the building we live in.”
Unfortunately, it’s no longer 1985. Florent has closed shop, Google is taking over, and the skyline is drastically gaining more height. 675 Hudson Street has the same exterior that it did back then but is now the home of 675 Bar and Dos Caminos, gentrification at its finest.
Ivy has accepted the change somewhat gracefully, until she sees the empty alcohol bottles and the morning vomit on the sidewalk. Nancy Friedman, a long time friend of Ivy's for 40 years, knows the dedication that Ivy has for her neighborhood. "The Meatpacking District has been changing for as long as Ivy has lived there," she says. "She has done all she can to direct that change in a positive direction." Within the past month Ivy has been invited to speak on behalf of the Gansevoort Market, in front of Community Board 2, to get some litigation passed. “There’s an assumption that nobody lives here,” she says. “But we do live here and we do cherish it.”
So my friends, before you engage in revelry and complete debauchery, remember people like Ivy. The woman who has seen it all and will continue too from her perch in the triangle building. "For better or worse this is my home," she smirks. "I take it very seriously."
