Editta Sherman, Carnegie Hall resident

Published 10:55 am Thursday, November 21, 2013

Editta Sherman, a free-spirited photographer who made portraits of celebrities, raised four children and lived for 61 years in an artist’s paradise — a studio penthouse above Carnegie Hall — until forced out in 2010 in an epic landlord-tenant struggle, died Friday at her Manhattan home on Central Park South, only blocks from the hall. She was 101.

Her website announced her death.

They called her the Duchess of Carnegie Hall, and to generations of musicians, writers, actors and others in the rent-regulated warrens above the landmark music hall in midtown, Sherman was the long-reigning matriarch of a colony that percolated with singing, dancing and literary life.

To anyone who has ever imagined coming to New York and making it big after a few hardships, the dream begins with finding an affordable place to live, preferably in Manhattan, at, say, under $200 a month. To Sherman, the fantasy appeared in a newspaper ad in 1949.

“New York, it says: Live and work in Carnegie Hall,” Sherman recalled in an interview with the website The Awl when she turned 100. “And I thought, ‘Well, I don’t understand that. I mean, if they have music there, why would they want people living there?’ And my husband said, ‘Well, we’ll go and see them about it.’”

There was indeed an apartment for rent above the fabled hall at West 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, one of the world’s great venues for classical, jazz and popular music. Several years after Andrew Carnegie completed it in 1891, he added two towers of 12 and 16 stories, with more than 100 studios to provide a haven for artists, writers and musicians and rental income for the concert enterprise downstairs.

Enrico Caruso made his first U.S. recording for the Victor Talking Machine Co. in 1904 in Studio 826, and the towers became a fountainhead of creativity: a home, working space and rehearsal studio for performers, artists and writers, among them Mark Twain, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Bronislava Nijinska, George Balanchine, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Katharine Hepburn.

Studio 1208 had originally been Carnegie’s office. A light-flooded expanse of open space with lofty ceilings, an enormous skylight and a view of Central Park, it was a hidden jewel of New York, for $150 a month.

Harold Sherman, his wife’s business manager, was ill with diabetes — he died five years later — but she was already supporting the family with her portrait photography. Sherman and her husband lived in California and Maryland early in their marriage. As he grew progressively more ill, Sherman turned her amateur photography into a profession.

The Shermans moved to New York in 1946 and had several studios before landing at Carnegie Hall.