Forrest Myers, The Wall
Year unveiled: 1973 (original) / 2007 (reinstated)
Location: 599 Broadway, New York, NY 10012 (E Houston Street and Broadway)
The Wall is hard to miss. At the corner of Broadway and Houston in Lower Manhattan, the sky-blue mural spans almost eight stories, with forty-two turquoise beams protruding four feet from the windowless facade. In the fifty years since its debut in 1973, Forrest “Frosty” Myers’s site-specific installation has witnessed—and actively shaped—the transformation of SoHo from a post-industrial district to an artist-led neighborhood to the ultra-luxury hotspot of today.
In the late 1960s, a wave of artists, including Myers himself, moved into dilapidated cast-iron lofts abandoned by garment manufacturers and light industry. These artists unofficially rezoned the district, signaling the raw potential of industrial sites, while leveraging manufactured materials as artistic media. The Wall belongs to this Minimalist moment in which artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella—Myers’s most famous neighbors—enacted spatial interventions, often through serial arrangements on the scale of architecture. Myers’s sparse, symmetrical composition is compelled by a formal interest in light and perception, as the shadows of the beams shift throughout the day, depending on the perspective of the passerby.
Commissioned by City Walls Inc.—a now defunct nonprofit founded in 1969 to reinvigorate the city through large-scale murals—The Wall was conceived as a place-making endeavor. Myers was recruited alongside artists including Dorothy Gillespie, Jason Crum, and Richard Haas to execute City Walls’s founding vision, as expressed by the organization’s first president, Joan K. Davidson: “Paintings on the walls of the City endow daily life with a bit of gaiety and delight, represent an important movement in contemporary art, and serve as a kind of city planning as well.”[1] These SoHo-based artists abandoned the figurative tendencies associated with murals to enact site-specific interventions that veered toward geometric abstraction, with vibrant color palettes that effectively elevated the aesthetic appeal of dull industrial facades. With The Wall, the then-owner of 559 Broadway eagerly accepted the artwork proposal as a means to cover the joists left exposed after the demolition of the adjacent building to accommodate the widening of Houston Street in the 1930s.
The Wall was soon dubbed the “Gateway to SoHo”—an apt nickname for this installation demarcating the northern threshold of the newly rebranded artist-led neighborhood. As art historian Andrew Wasserman explains, The Wall “provided definition to a post-industrial SoHo,” alongside artist zoning exemptions and community-based infrastructure.[2] Simultaneously, the installation bolstered the cultural cachet of the district.
That cultural cachet, in turn, primed the neighborhood for gentrification. By the 1980s, many of the artists who had made SoHo “cool” were priced out by wealthier tenants drawn to the creative energy forged by those very artists. Luxury boutiques replaced artist-run spaces. Air rights were sold, and sidewalks were widened. What was once an experimental enclave slowly morphed into one large high-end showroom. With escalating commercialization, The Wall helped promote the artistic identity of the district while serving as a placeholder for a community increasingly displaced by development.
By the 1990s, The Wall was one of the few remaining murals commissioned by City Walls, as the nearby installations were neglected, destroyed by new construction, or replaced by advertisements. The economic potential of the 559 Broadway facade eventually proved too tempting. In 1997, the building owner attempted to remove The Wall, citing structural concerns and, tellingly, the intent to substitute the mural for billboards estimated to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Myers fought back, filing a federal lawsuit with the support of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the SoHo Alliance. The local community rallied around The Wall, with artists like Frank Stella and critics like Rosalind Kraus vouching for both the artistic merits and the historical significance of the installation.
Still, the legal saga continued. In 2002, the Commission allowed the removal of the mural, with the stipulation that the owners would reinstall the work after completing repairs. When the owners failed to do so by 2004, the city sued. The suit was unsuccessful. The federal judge ruled that because the work was not structurally integrated into the building, the owners were not responsible for its maintenance. This decision underscored the precarity of public art under the late-capitalist logics of private property, while prompting a broader reckoning with the status of cultural memory under economic pressures.
The decade-long legal rollercoaster culminated in 2007 with a compromise: The Wall would be restored, but raised eighteen feet to accommodate billboard space below at street-level. This agreement—art above, ads below—was undoubtedly a triumph for public art, yet also a concession to market forces. The endurance of The Wall is conditional, resting—literally—on a base of commerce.
From its prominent perch, the artwork doesn’t sell anything directly, but it does participate in another kind of marketing, as it has since its initial installation. The Wall helps sell SoHo itself as a tangible citation of the area’s artistic heritage. In a neighborhood where “authenticity” is now a market category, the mural functions less as a challenge to advertising than as its sublimated companion.
Cynicism aside, the very persistence of The Wall cannot be discounted. The installation remains—not untouched but not erased—as a fragment of cultural memory lodged within the cast-iron architecture of a transformed cityscape. In a neighborhood where advertisements far outnumber murals, The Wall stands as both a rare victory and a cautionary tale, a beacon of resistance and a reminder of cooptation. To trace the history of The Wall is to reckon with the forces that shape and dismantle the built landscape, considering not only what stands, but also what has been lost. Today, Myers’s installation is an invitation to contemplate what public art once hoped to do, and to imagine what it still might.
[1] Antonio Gómez Davó, “The Architecture of Valencia: A Study of Urban Development,” VLC arquitectura. Research Journal 12, no. 2 (2024): 45–67.
[2] Andrew Wasserman, “Beyond The Wall: Redefining City Walls’ ‘Gateway to SoHo,” Public
Art Dialogue 4, no. 1 (2014): 71-98.
