To get past the front door of 860 Broadway, you had to be buzzed in. The glass doors were installed after the 1968 shooting — when Valerie Solanas walked into the previous Factory at 33 Union Square West and put a bullet in Andy Warhol's stomach. He spent weeks in the hospital. He was never the same. And from that point forward, every Factory location had security.
At 860 Broadway, the doors were bulletproof. Closed-circuit televisions monitored the entrance. Visitors were greeted first by a large wooden bust of Leonardo da Vinci. Then, if they were deemed worthy of entry, they were allowed into what was arguably the last great creative salon of the twentieth century.
THE SPACE
Warhol moved into 860 Broadway in 1974, leasing the entire third floor of a former nineteenth-century warehouse at the corner of East 17th Street and Broadway, overlooking Union Square Park. The renovation was overseen by Warhol's boyfriend Jed Johnson and architect Peter Marino, who would later become one of the most sought-after luxury architects in the world.
The result was something that defied easy categorization. The space functioned simultaneously as Warhol's art studio, the offices of Interview magazine, a television production facility (Warhol filmed his series Andy Warhol's TV there from 1980 to 1983), and an informal social club for the most interesting people in New York.
The interior was deliberately strange. Enormous Art Deco furnishings — chairs designed by Edgar Brandt and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann — filled the rooms. A boardroom featured carved wood paneling and a moose head, a gift from art historian John Richardson. A massive landscape painting by the nineteenth-century French realist Gustave Courbet hung on one wall. Warhol's own paintings were not displayed; they were stacked on furniture and leaned against walls, as if waiting to be moved somewhere more permanent.
It was messy and elegant at the same time. A place that looked like it couldn't decide whether it was a museum, an office, or someone's attic.
THE ATMOSPHERE
The 860 Broadway Factory was quieter than its predecessors. The original Factory — the silver-walled loft on East 47th Street — had been anarchic, populated by drag queens and speed freaks and anyone who wandered in off the street. The second, at 33 Union Square West, was more controlled but still chaotic. By the time Warhol reached 860 Broadway, the atmosphere had shifted significantly.
Much of this was attributed to Fred Hughes, Warhol's business manager, who cultivated a more polished and socially prominent crowd. Under Hughes's influence, the Factory attracted aristocrats, fashion editors, and the kind of people who got invited to embassy dinners. Lady Anne Lambton and Catherine Guinness contributed to both the studio and Interview. André Leon Talley, who would become one of fashion's most powerful figures, was a regular presence.
But the creative edge hadn't disappeared — it had evolved. In the early 1980s, Warhol began collaborating with Jean-Michel Basquiat and mentoring Keith Haring, two street artists whose raw energy brought a different kind of electricity to the Factory's Art Deco rooms. Basquiat and Warhol's collaborative paintings — which blended Warhol's pop iconography with Basquiat's graffiti-influenced style — were produced in this space. The collision of high society and street art that defined 1980s New York was happening, quite literally, under one roof.
JUNE 7, 1984
This was the world Diane Lane walked into on June 7, 1984. She was nineteen years old, fresh off the release of Streets of Fire, and about to appear on the cover of Warhol's Interview magazine. The contact sheets from that day — now preserved at Stanford University's Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts — show Lane alongside Brigid Berlin, one of Warhol's original superstars from the 1960s, and a pug.
Separate contact sheets from the same period at 860 Broadway place Lane in the company of Divine — the legendary drag performer and John Waters collaborator — and Ara Gallant, the celebrity hairstylist. It was that kind of place. The Factory didn't sort people by category; it threw them together and let chemistry happen.
Lane was wearing a dark t-shirt with white lettering that read "nuke the valley." Warhol shot it. Nobody in the room could have predicted that this particular photograph — not the Basquiat collaborations, not the celebrity portraits, not the Interview cover shoots — would become one of the most persistently viral images to emerge from the Factory.
THE END OF 860 BROADWAY
By 1984, Warhol had already purchased a new building — a former Con Edison substation at 22 East 33rd Street on Madison Avenue. He'd bought it in November 1981 for a combined $1.9 million across its three connected sections, acquiring roughly 40,000 square feet of raw, unheated space that he described in his diary as "a beautiful piece of art."
After renovations, Warhol relocated his operations to 33rd Street at the end of 1984. The new space would house the production of Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes for MTV from 1985 until his death on February 22, 1987, at the age of 58, from complications following gallbladder surgery.
The photograph of Diane Lane in the "Nuke The Valley" shirt was taken in the Factory's final months at 860 Broadway. The end of an era — one that nobody recognized as an ending at the time. The space at 860 Broadway continued to house the nightclub Underground (which operated from 1980 to 1989) even after Warhol left. But the Factory itself — the cultural institution, the social experiment, the place where art and celebrity and commerce blurred into something none of them could be on their own — moved on.
What remained were the photographs. Over 3,600 contact sheets from Warhol's black-and-white photography at 860 Broadway are now archived at Stanford. They document a world that doesn't exist anymore — a world where a teenage actress, a pug, and one of Warhol's original superstars could share a frame, and the most memorable thing in the picture would turn out to be the shirt.