Home at Carnegie Hall.(The Carnegie Hall Studio Towers)

For twenty-two years, the photographer Josef Astor (no relation) has had a studio above the stage at Carnegie Hall. It's on the eighth floor, although technically the eighth is below the seventh; to get to it you take an elevator to six and walk up half a flight of stairs. The Carnegie Hall Studio Towers, as these quarters over the concert hall are known, contain many such oddities, but they also harbor one Manhattan commonplace: a band of artist-occupants whose tenancy is venerable, tenuous, and probably doomed.

Astor is one of the leaders of the tenants' association, which is fighting the landlord, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, which wants them all out. It intends to gut the building and make space for its own offices and programs. It has recently commenced eviction proceedings. The fifty or so artists who occupy the studios--most of them have been here for decades--contend that a provision in the lease between the corporation and the city, which owns the property, guarantees their right to stay.

Astor's studio, with creaky wood floors, faces north; the indirect light, from a giant skylight, twenty feet overhead, is ideal for photography and painting. There is a balcony, with room for a bed, and a kitchenette. Last Wednesday, he'd arranged a dozen chairs--no one like the other--in a circle, in anticipation of a meeting, that evening, between some tenants, their lawyer (a woman named Ms. Boop), and local politicians, whose vaguely articulated sympathies they hoped to convert into tactical support. A Senegal parrot named Zoltan flew freely about the place. Astor ticked off the names of some of the studios' former residents (Isadora Duncan, Agnes de Mille, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer) and current ones (such as the ninety-five-year-old photographer Editta Sherman, known as the Duchess of Carnegie Hall, and the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, seen occasionally in the hall on his way to the showers) and evoked the days when the corridors were filled with the sounds of piano and clarinet.

Astor led a tour. The only music in the halls, on this afternoon, was the yowl and pop of saws and nail guns; some interregnal renovations were under way. One chamber, a rehearsal and recital space, had until a few years ago housed a giant pipe organ, in place of which there was now a contractor's boombox playing Madonna's "Holiday." Up on thirteen, Astor knocked on the door of the pianist Don Shirley, a resident for fifty of his eighty years. Slight and pop-eyed, Shirley, wearing slippers and a white Adidas tracksuit emblazoned with a yachting insignia, ushered Astor and a visitor into an impossibly high-ceilinged vault crammed with bric-a-brac--bell jars, glassware, statuary, Chinese lanterns, nautical paintings, a Buddha, a bottle of Chivas. "These are gifts from fans all over the world," he said. There was a concert grand in one corner, which had been damaged, he said, by a burst-pipe flood. He began to enumerate various grievances with the landlord, a recitation requiring him at ...