Angelina Jolie sets up fashion studio with her daughter in a building that was once owned by gangsters and Warhol

When Angelina Jolie opened her first fashion boutique in a two-story building at 57 Great Jones St. in lower Manhattan about a month ago, she joined a long list of notable New Yorkers, including gangsters and artists, who lived or worked at this discreet address.

Atelier Jolie, which has a walk-in fitting room on the second floor, sells clothes made from vintage and deadstock materials and offers Turkish coffee and mini Syrian pies in its chic cafe. “I hope to see you there and be one of the many people creating with you within our new creative collective,” Jolie wrote in a statement about the news. “Bear with me. I hope to grow this with you.”

The Atelier Jolie brand is linked to the artistic heritage of the address. Andy Warhol bought the building in the 1970s. Everyone from Keith Haring to Madonna has been there. Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and painted in the upstairs loft studio, producing some of his most significant works, before dying there of a heroin overdose at age 27 in 1988.

If you dig deeper into the structure’s past, you’ll find the foundations of New York. The brick building was once used by mobsters and wrestling boxers.

It was built in the 1860s, architect unknown, and its first known use was as a stable, according to Village Preservation, an advocacy group. Great Jones Street, a two-block street in NoHo named for lawyer and politician Samuel Jones, was home to the city’s wealthy merchant class, which included the mayor and day laborer Philip Hone among its early residents. During the Civil War, the 69th Regiment gathered in the street to march toward a steamship on the Hudson. Crowds watched as the young men went into battle.

As Manhattan grew and wealthy residents moved north of the city, the neighborhood began to decline. At the east end of Great Jones Street was the Bowery, a once respectable avenue that became a thoroughfare famous for brothels, beer halls, boarding houses, and pawnshops.

The building became a hall and dance venue, the Brighton, which the New York Times called a “notorious lair.” The place was almost destroyed in 1901, after some men making a beer delivery ruptured a gas pipe in the basement. When the owner of the establishment, Charles Deveniude, went to investigate, he lit a candle. The explosion was heard “several blocks away,” the Times reported, and Deveniude suffered burns to her face, hands and shoulders.

The Brighton was sold a few years later to Paul Kelly, who the Times described in a 1912 article as “perhaps the most successful and influential gangster in New York history.” In a nod to his Italian heritage, Kelly, a former boxer born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, renamed the salon Little Naples.

Kelly commanded the Five Points Gang, one of the most feared street gangs of the time, and Little Naples served as his association’s headquarters and as a meeting place for the city’s political elite. He was an enforcer for the corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic political organization, and his henchmen helped provide paid voters, known as “floaters,” to vote for Tammany candidates. The gang’s members included future underworld leaders such as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone.

A 1905 article in the Times reported a “desperate fight” in Little Naples in which one man was killed and several others were injured. “Dozens of shots were fired, but, as far as is known, only one man died,” the newspaper reported, adding: “His body was found in the hall almost half an hour after the smoke from the battle cleared. There was a bullet wound on his left breast.” The man was found with his legs hanging out of a swinging bathroom door. His dog, a spaniel, was whining beside him.

The Times also reported that one of Kelly’s lieutenants, John Ratta, was wounded in another shooting at the saloon the same week. He refused to cooperate with police, saying only that he “slipped and fell so hard on a bullet on the floor that it went into his flesh.” The Times noted: “Ratta will live to carry a revolver, and he says he will solve the difficulty in his own way.”

In the following decades, the building housed metalworking and kitchen equipment supply companies. Don DeLillo immortalized Great Jones Street in American literature in 1973 when he named his third novel after the street. The book’s protagonist-narrator, a disillusioned rock star named Bucky Wunderlick, lives in an apartment there: “I went to the room on Great Jones Street, a small, crooked room, cold as a coin, with a view of warehouses and trucks and rubble.”

Warhol purchased 57 Great Jones Street in 1970 under the corporate name Factory Films Inc., according to a report from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 1983, when he became a mentor to Basquiat, who at the time was a rising star in the art world, Warhol rented the upstairs loft for him. In the following years, Basquiat produced works such as “King Zulu” and “Riding with Death”.

“Jean-Michel called,” Warhol wrote in his diary on September 5, 1983. “He’s afraid it’s just a fad. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I was left with afraid because he rented our building at Great Jones; what if it’s just a fad and he doesn’t have money to pay the rent?”

After Basquiat’s death, the building’s facade became a pilgrimage site for street artists to leave tributes to him, and the site has been marked with depictions of his crown and the “SAMO” graffiti tag ever since.

Warhol’s estate sold the building in the early 1990s. After that, with neighborhood gentrification accelerating and nightlife hotspots like B Bar and the Bowery Hotel thriving, an invitation-only Japanese restaurant with no phone number listed , called Bohemian, occupied the address. It was hidden, speakeasy style, behind a butcher shop.

In 2022, the building was placed on the rental market by Meridian Capital Group for US$60,000 (about R$289,000) per month. Its owner, according to real estate records, is renowned real estate appraiser Robert Von Ancken, whose services have been utilized by New York real estate families including the Trumps, the Helmsleys and the Zeckendorfs. Reached by phone, Von Ancken clarified that he purchased the building with his partner, Leslie Garfield, who passed away last year, and that he now owns the property along with Garfield’s family.

“When we first occupied the space, we didn’t know much about the artist who lived there because he wasn’t that well-known at the time,” recalled Von Ancken. “There were all these drawings on the walls. We rented it as it was. A tenant painted over it. All of that was lost.”

He added: “The building has been a target for graffiti for years. I tried to repaint the facade but ended up giving up. It’s clearly very important for young artists, even today, to leave their mark on this facade.”

About a year ago, Jolie and her teenage daughter Zahara began looking for commercial space downtown, and their wanderings led them to 57 Great Jones. They felt an immediate communion with the building, Jolie said in an interview with Vogue, so she quickly rented it. As the store approached its opening date, one of her sons, Pax, helped paint the Atelier Jolie logo on a canvas covering the entrance.

On a recent evening, a security guard stood at the entrance to Atelier Jolie while two young employees explained the store’s mission of promoting sustainable fashion to a visitor. Upstairs, in the same space that the Five Points Gang used as a meeting place, another employee was working on a laptop in the dressing room.

Outside, a couple stopped to read the sign referencing Basquiat’s residence at the address and noted its early use as a stable. Then they remembered they were late for a hard-to-get dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant.