Right across the street from Madison Square Garden, there is a secret garden. It’s 13 stories aboveground inside a former fur atelier that is now a 2,000-square-foot loft overlooking the arena and most of midtown.
The front door opens to a wall of giant spindly cacti masking large south-facing windows. “They were meant to provide shade without having to bother with curtains, which we found never worked,” says Stewart Rahtz, a retired modeling-business executive who has shared the home with his partner, the artist Bill Farmer, for nearly 50 years. The first six-inch starter plant they brought in now reaches the ceiling. “They just grow and grow and grow,” Farmer says.
The couple rented the apartment in 1980 after Farmer saw a listing in the Village Voice. At the time, all but one of the furriers in the 1927 building had been replaced by music studios and the neighborhood was rough. “A lot of drugs, prostitution, and the Guardian Angels on patrol,” Farmer recalls.
Securing the lease would cost him all the money he had, and he was nervous about committing. “The previous tenant was so shady,” Farmer says. “Remember the TV ads for Jacoby & Meyers? They used to promote free consultations, so I went and the lawyer told me, ‘Do it. In 20 years, you will be the envy of every friend you have.’”
Farmer and Rahtz cleaned out the space and took sledgehammers to the walls, including a vault that was refrigerated to store pelts. Some of the furniture is from Farmer’s family in Kansas, where his father was an oil wildcatter; other hand-me-downs were sent by Rahtz’s relatives, including his maternal grandfather, who was a vaudevillian who started his own movie company in Astoria in the 1910s.