Harold Krieger built a career — and a real-estate portfolio — off a sharp eye for beauty. He started out as a commercial illustrator, basing his drawings on photographs of his subjects, but became more and more interested in the photography itself, switching mediums just as magazines were cutting illustrators and printing more photos. He made a point to never turn down an assignment and started getting breaks in the 1960s. Over the next two decades, his news photos of blackened miners and gussied-up first ladies would run in Esquire and McCall’s while advertisers would pay to fly him to Paris to shoot models in bras and girdles or to Venice to photograph a Simmons mattress against a row of gondolas.
Krieger had grown up in New York City, the son of a grocer who was regularly going out of business and failing to make rent. He wanted stability and, early in his career — before shooting covers of Lady Bird Johnson, Woody Allen, and Eddie Murphy — decided to buy his first home; 57 West 9th Street made financial sense. It was a 22-foot-wide Federal-style brick townhouse in bohemian Greenwich Village, where he was sure to find renters. Meanwhile, he could live in a downstairs duplex with his wife, Geraldine Krieger, a painter who showed gestural abstractions at galleries across town. But first, they had to renovate, and to build out a kitchen they hired a cabinetmaker who was an old boyfriend of Eva Whatley, who worked in publishing at the time, but remembers coming over to help build a patio and lingering to talk to the Kriegers. They remained friends for decades. “There was a tremendous hospitality always that came really from Harold,” she said. “He had a dry manner, and a way of leaning back and very dryly saying something extremely provocative.”
Over the years, Krieger bought more houses: a vacation spot on Fire Island and another in East Hampton; a building on East 12th Street; and then another on East 31st Street — a mixed-use building that he turned into a studio and event space. It occupied two townhouses that had been gutted by a congregation of a Chinese Presbyterian church and combined to create a massive, light-filled worship space. (It now rents for $10,000 a day to Hollywood — recently playing an art-filled loft on the last season of And Just Like That …) And in the meantime, he and his family continued to live on the bottom two floors of the 9th Street house, while renting two units above. Over the years, their tenants included the actors Jason Robards and Didi Conn, best remembered for her role as Frenchy in Grease. On the top floors in a duplex with a private terrace was an art director who would take calls from his boss, Pierre Cardin, as his pure-bred Abyssinian cat wandered through the legs of his Mies van Der Rohe chairs. Downstairs, the Kriegers hosted friends from the gallery and magazine worlds, including artist Anita Steckel and designer Milton Glaser. Krieger was close enough to Alice Neel to commission a portrait of himself and his daughter and was known for mentoring his assistants, a group that included the photographer Peter Hujar. Shirley Glaser remembered Krieger as a “raconteur,” whose parties were only ever attended by what she called an “in crowd.” At one, she sat down next to a nice man and had a long conversation before learning his name: Andy Warhol.
When the Kriegers divorced, Harold moved out of West 9th Street. But he never sold the townhouse, using the rental income to float a retirement that coincided with the slashing of magazine budgets. He remarried a friend he had known for years, Roberta Russell, who was 18 years his junior and ready for a new adventure. She got her real-estate license, learning to write leases and check references, but found the work wasn’t easy. Property records show they had rented to film producers who were accused of bouncing checks and skipping court. The author Michael Wolff rented the garden unit, and tenants remembered how he would hold small parties in the backyard with intellectuals and leaders, and sometimes extend an invite.
The building remained friendly and free in a way that seemed to belong to an older version of the neighborhood, said Shaun Osher, a real-estate executive who took the art director’s former duplex on the top two floors. “Everything that’s great about the West Village is encapsulated in that house.” Osher had first come to New York as a student enraptured by jazz and had spent many nights wandering the neighborhood’s clubs. Years later, he was happy to have an actual terrace where he could practice saxophone. “Everyone was kind of cool about it,” he said. “You’d never have a neighbor shouting at you to shut up.” One floor down, the Hollywood costume designer Kirston Leigh Mann moved in with the art and books she had collected on shoots around the world, and turned a space with built-ins, a fireplace, and southern light into a refuge. “I was just like, I want to live in the prettiest apartment.” When the pandemic hit, Mann found herself reaching out to check on her former landlady. Harold had died in 2015, and Russell was living alone.
“I found some of the tenants very exciting,” said Russell. “They were people outside of the realm I would normally have access to.” After a career as a recruiter, Russell had gone back to school to study psychology and has written books on the subject. As tenants have moved in and out, she has found herself noticing what draws them there or what they choose to change. In many ways being a landlady has been yet another lesson in psychology. “You learn how people live,” she said.
