The Factory was never one place. It was a name that Andy Warhol carried with him across four different locations in Manhattan between 1963 and 1987 — each reflecting a different phase of his career, a different relationship with fame and danger, and a different answer to the question of what an art studio was supposed to be.
Warhol didn't actually name the spaces himself. The term was coined by visitors and associates who recognized something industrial about the way Warhol worked: the silkscreens cranked out like assembly-line products, the films shot in marathon sessions, the collaborative energy that more closely resembled a workshop than a solitary artist's garret. The name stuck because it was accurate.
THE SILVER FACTORY: 231 EAST 47TH STREET (1963–1968)
The original Factory occupied the fifth floor of a building at 231 East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Warhol moved in around January 1964, after a previous stint in a former firehouse at 159 East 87th Street. Almost immediately, the space was transformed by photographer and lighting designer Billy Name (born William George Linich), who covered the entire loft — walls, ceiling, elevator, bathroom — in aluminum foil, silver spray paint, and fragments of mirror. The result was a space that seemed to exist outside of time, a shimmering, reflective environment that embodied the amphetamine energy of 1960s New York.
This was the Factory of legend. Edie Sedgwick held court on a red couch that Billy Name had rescued from the sidewalk. Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground rehearsed and performed. Warhol shot his experimental films — Sleep, Empire, Chelsea Girls — in rapid succession. The space was open to virtually anyone who showed up, creating an atmosphere that was equal parts art studio, social club, and ongoing performance piece.
The Silver Factory produced Warhol's most iconic work of the decade: the Brillo Boxes, the Campbell's Soup Cans (in their various silkscreen iterations), the Marilyn Monroes, the Elvis Presleys. The studio's Flowers series alone produced over 900 prints in the summer of 1964 — eighty per day, a pace that justified the Factory name completely.
The building was scheduled for demolition in 1967. It no longer exists. The site is now the entrance to a parking garage beneath One Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza.
THE DECKER BUILDING: 33 UNION SQUARE WEST (1968–1973)
In February 1968, Warhol relocated to the sixth floor of the Decker Building at 33 Union Square West. The new space was less bohemian than the Silver Factory — no aluminum foil, no open-door policy. Warhol's office manager Paul Morrissey and business manager Fred Hughes had begun shaping the Factory into something more professional, more controlled. Hughes pushed for a space that could accommodate both art production and the growing business operations around Interview magazine, which Warhol founded in 1969.
The Decker Building Factory is primarily remembered for one event. On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas — a writer and radical feminist who had appeared in Warhol's 1968 film I, a Man and harbored grievances against him — entered the Factory and shot Warhol multiple times. The bullets damaged his lungs, spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus. He was pronounced clinically dead on the operating table before being revived. He would wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life and live with chronic pain and health complications that likely contributed to his death nineteen years later.
The shooting transformed the Factory permanently. The open-door spirit of the Silver Factory was over. From this point forward, Warhol's studios would have increasingly tight security — screening systems, receptionists, protocols for vetting visitors. The Factory would continue to be a social space, but it would never again be a genuinely public one.
860 BROADWAY (1974–1984)
The third Factory, located at 860 Broadway at the north end of Union Square, was where Warhol spent the decade that produced some of his most commercially successful work and most significant cultural collaborations. This was, in many ways, the Factory as corporate headquarters — larger, more organized, and more explicitly tied to Warhol's expanding business ventures.
It was here that Warhol filmed Andy Warhol's TV from 1980 to 1983. It was here that he collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, producing the paintings and prints that brought street art into the gallery world. Security was tighter than at previous locations — the legacy of the Solanas shooting — with a system that included foreign-language receptionists hired partly to confuse and deter unwanted visitors.
It was also here, on June 7, 1984, that a nineteen-year-old Diane Lane was photographed wearing a "Nuke The Valley" t-shirt. That contact sheet, preserved among the thousands that would eventually be transferred to Stanford University, captured a moment at the intersection of Warhol's social world and 1980s celebrity culture — an image casual enough to be forgotten and distinctive enough to become viral decades later.
By the early 1980s, Warhol had outgrown 860 Broadway. His Interview magazine had reached a circulation of 90,000, and he was expanding into television. In August 1981, he toured a former Con Edison substation at 22 East 33rd Street and purchased the building in November.
22 EAST 33RD STREET (1984–1987)
The final Factory was the least like a Factory. Located on 33rd Street near Madison Avenue, it was a conventional office building — approximately 40,000 square feet across connected sections. Gone were the silver walls, the open lofts, the bohemian chaos. In their place: offices, conference rooms, and the production infrastructure for Warhol's television venture, Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, which aired on MTV from 1985 to 1987.
The 33rd Street location reflected what the Factory had become by the mid-1980s: a production company, a publishing house, a brand. Warhol was still painting — his late-period work includes the Camouflage series, the Last Supper paintings, and the self-portraits that would become his most recognizable images — but the Factory's social function had narrowed. It was a workplace now, not a scene.
Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, of cardiac arrhythmia following gallbladder surgery. He was fifty-eight years old. The final Factory closed with him.
WHAT'S THERE NOW
Of the four Factory locations, none functions as a museum or memorial. The 47th Street building was demolished; a parking garage entrance occupies the site. The Decker Building at 33 Union Square West still stands and at street level has housed various retail tenants. 860 Broadway still stands at the north end of Union Square. 22 East 33rd Street remains a commercial building.
The Factory, in the end, was never the building. It was the gravitational field that Warhol created around himself — the ability to attract, document, and transform everyone who entered his orbit. The silver walls at 47th Street were iconic, but they were also just foil on a wall. The Factory was Warhol. When he died, it closed, regardless of the address.