What the thing is
The Factory was Andy Warhol’s New York City studio from 1964 to 1987.
Where it came from
It originated as Warhol’s studio in New York City, beginning in 1964.
Warhol had bought a townhouse on Lexington Avenue in 1960 and used it as a studio, but the mess his work caused at home pushed him to look elsewhere. A friend found an unoccupied firehouse on East 87th Street, where he began working in January 1963 for $150 a month. In November 1963 he found a fifth-floor loft at 231 East 47th Street, an unlit industrial space whose previous tenant, a hat manufacturer, had removed all the electrical fixtures. The artist Ray Johnson had taken him to a “haircutting party” at Billy Linich’s apartment, decorated with tin foil and silver paint, and Warhol adopted a similar scheme. Linich, who became Billy Name, installed the wiring and floodlights, and the studio became known as the Silver Factory.
The Factory had four addresses. In February 1968 it left East 47th Street for 33 Union Square West, and in August 1974 to 860 Broadway. The last move, at the end of 1984, was to a former Con Edison substation at 158 Madison Avenue, which Warhol had bought in November 1981. From 1985 to 1987 that building housed the production of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes for MTV.
What it gets right
It treated artistic labour as industrial. It turned the studio into a public stage. It made collaboration visible, not hidden.
Warhol used silkscreens so that he could mass-produce images the way corporations mass-produced consumer goods. The musician John Cale later recalled: “It wasn’t called the Factory for nothing.” He described an assembly line for the silkscreens, with someone filming a screen test while another person made a screen. Warhol began shooting films there with experimental works such as Kiss and Blow Job, both from 1964, and screened them at the Factory for friends before public release. When traditional theatres refused his more provocative films, he sometimes turned to nightclubs or porn theatres such as the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre.
The people around him were a mix of poets, drag queens, socialites, musicians and free-thinkers, who became known as the Warhol Superstars and starred in his films. Visitors included Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and Truman Capote. Warhol worked with Reed’s band the Velvet Underground from 1965, designed the cover of its debut album, and included it in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a show combining rock, films and dancers.
What it gets wrong
It displaced authorship without redistributing power. Assistants and drop-ins enabled output but rarely control or credit.
The place was also less safe than its open door suggests. The Factory had an open-door policy until June 1968, when Warhol was shot there by Valerie Solanas. Afterwards his boyfriend Jed Johnson built a wall around the elevator and added a Dutch door so that visitors had to be buzzed in, and Paul Morrissey took over the filming and the running of the Factory while Warhol recovered. Amphetamine use was widespread in the Silver Factory years, and Warhol later described it as a driving force behind much of the creative activity there.
Why it matters now
It prefigured today’s blurred lines between content creation, personal branding, and collaborative labour—without the platforms.
The Factory itself changed as the decades passed. In 1969 Warhol co-founded Interview magazine, and the Factory went from “an all-night party” to “an all-day office”. In the early 1970s the earlier crowd gave way to a more rarefied circle of collectors, dealers and show-business figures, and Warhol moved away from the flat, mechanical look of Pop towards a more painterly approach. By the time it reached 860 Broadway it had become a salon where he entertained celebrities, fashion figures and socialites, many of them prospective clients, and he increasingly specialised in commissioned portraits. His Interview magazine reached a circulation of 90,000 in 1981, and he filmed the series Andy Warhol’s TV from 1980 to 1983.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you want to understand how art production, celebrity, and social infrastructure fused in late-twentieth-century New York.
