But to remind ourselves that we are still a tribe of urban eavesdroppers, it’s only when you listen rather than look at these pictures- perhaps hard to do as they remained staunchly wordless in their slapstick pantomimed anarchy- that the artist’s voice sounds oddly familiar. Also lost is this peculiar kind of disjointed view, now all but obliterated by the new tide of luxury high rises. That sort of space can hardly exist when neither the premium of real estate in the media nor the city can afford such follies. More than thirty years since they were first dreamt the drawings remain here, hut the room is gone.
It’s not a picture unless it has a frame, and it’s not a view unless that frame is a window. I’m not sure we could have ever really understood or collectively shared Gurbo’s vision if it were not inherently blinkered. In a maze of walls, canyons that make anything above gutter level seem like big sky country and a compartmentalized nexus of endless boxes, you get used to looking through windows. Nothing can surprise New Yorkers it’s true, but that’s a good part of why they make a perfect audience for the absurdities that made the Drawing Room such a comfortably familiar fixture among all the other cropped views and mini-dramas glimpsed like prurient snatches in the tenements, towering offices, migratory street corner socials and (of course) subways of Gotham. So playful, theSe drawings never grew up, got tired or sold out. Escalating costs and rising expectations that have only grown exponentially since then. Thinking back on it now, Walter Gurbo’s Drawing Room was not just a weird hole punched into the wall of babble, but something of lost strand connecting the impoverished means and grand illusions of New York City at its late Seventies economic nadir and creative apogee to the rising bottom lines. An oddity by most any standards today- already then more an atavistic throwback to the underground press of yore- its curious fit within t he low-end commercialized zone of this once radical weekly seemed with each passing year ever-more like some out of time eccentricity, a past whimsy that by the grace of its wit somehow continued to survive on amidst pop culture’s pernicious progress. For over a dozen years, from 1977 to 1989, on the back pages of downtown New York’s former preeminent local crier, The (Village) Voice, was a picture window.