On one of the last remaining blocks that still feels like Little Italy, through any other doorway, up all the stairs to the top floor, a painter’s studio sits, frozen in amber, a portal back to a bygone Manhattan.
For half a century beginning in 1958, the painter Frank Herbert Mason used the fifth story of 385 Broome St. as his atelier, filling the cavernous, uninsulated floor-through loft with his life, work and memories from star-studded soirees.
When Frank — a legendary teacher, revered painter and ardent opponent of over-cleaning art — passed away in 2009, his widow, Anne, preserved the space just as he left it — as though Frank might again appear and take a brush to the canvas once more.
But this portal to a New York of yesteryear will soon close, for the landlord has recently raised the rent by about 25%, much more than Anne can afford, and now she and Frank’s beautiful relics must find new homes.
“There’s been no reason to change anything,” Anne Mason, 88, recently explained from beneath the skylight her late husband soldered into the ceiling over the course of two 1960s evenings, once on Chinese New Year, once on San Gennaro.
“There’s no way to recreate it.”
Anne met Frank in Italy, 1964, after she ran away from a job she hated in the midwest and got one working as a switchboard operator in Rome, where Frank happened upon her.
When she followed him back to New York, he’d been in the Broome St. space for eight years but…