THEN

Warhol leased former Suburban Hook & Ladder Company No. 13 as his studio during 1963. Built by New York City’s newly-formed fire department in 1868 and decommissioned in the early 1960s, it was here that the artist produced his so-called Death and Disaster series, a group of haunting silk-screened images of car crashes, riots, suicides, and electric chairs. The concourse level of the nearby East 86th Street - Second Avenue subway station displays a monumental mosaic of singer-guitarist Lou Reed, a member of the Velvet Underground, the pivotal rock band Warhol managed in the late 1960s.