#Living art entertainment how to
#Living art entertainment plus

But like, why would you buy someone’s defibrillator? There were like fifty guns, but they were broken guns, old guns, that didn’t work. And then from the pawnshop days, there was all this random stuff like trombones, guitar cases, mannequins, Christmas decorations, typewriters, gift-bow makers. You see, before it was a pawnshop, the building was occupied by Sakowitz. And so when I first got the building, I go up to the second floor, there were ten thousand pairs of shoes in boxes-brand new-from 1971.

#Living art entertainment how to

JIM PIRTLE: This place was locked, and the pawnshop dealer told me how to break in. We did a video where we put on these disco shoes and videotaped our feet and looked like burglars going in-cartoon burglars looking over our shoulders. It had been a pawnshop and a bunch of different things. We broke into 314 Main and checked it out. You could lay on Main Street and few cars would come along. NESTOR TOPCHY is an artist: It was like a neutron bomb went off downtown. JIM PIRTLE: There’d been a porno house nearby, and they couldn’t make it in the world of VCRs. When people were done working, they went back to the suburbs.

#Living art entertainment plus

We bought 314 Main for $20,000 plus back taxes.ĭYLAN FRANCIS is an artist: Downtown, at the time, was kind of a ghost town. So we called about that one building and it didn’t work out, but then one owner we talked to was like, “There’s a building down the street they haven’t paid the taxes in years.” We tracked down the owner, got some money from Jim’s parents, and Jim cashed out retirement from his school.

There were “For Sale” signs on the buildings and I was like, “This can’t cost more than a house.” This is before the internet. MISSY BOSCH is an artist who co-owns notsuoH: We were like, “Let’s look at old buildings!” Everything was boarded up and run-down back then. Further motivating him, the cafe where he regularly played chess with artist Michael Galbreth began discouraging lingering, as the business needed to make room for more customers. Like other local artists who’d watched the Lawndale Art Center develop in a 100,000-square-foot warehouse at the University of Houston, Pirtle felt that artists could succeed if they simply bought an abandoned building and followed the saying “don’t ask permission, just do.” So when Pirtle fell off a ladder in the mid-nineties and broke his back, he began wondering, during his convalescence, if he should pull out his teacher retirement savings and buy a large space to make art. Afterward, for a few years, he was known as the man whose goat grazed on his roof in the Sixth Ward neighborhood. He was a performance artist known as the Polyester King of Houston (because he wore polyester from 1986 to 1992). Pirtle felt the most appropriate name for such a place would be Houston spelled backwards: notsuoH.īefore 1996, when Pirtle bought the Main Street building with his wife at the time, Missy Bosch, he was working as a kindergarten and pre-K teacher, though he had already been active in the art world. From this magical spot, all of Houston radiated outward the location would offer a shelter for ideas and strange happenings. Pirtle would take people up to the roof and show them the downtown Houston surroundings that encircled the 1893 building: expensive lofts, the Alley Theatre, Jones Hall, and Minute Maid Park. The address of the venue and performance space-314 Main Street-was his evidence: 314 backwards spelled “PIE,” he’d say, and pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, was 3.14. Jim Pirtle would once claim that it was the center of Houston.