COLUMBUS AVENUE AND THE UPPER WEST SIDE
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview with Bill Bailey and Laurie Eichengreen

Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District
2019

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PREFACE

The following is a transcript of the first of two sessions of an oral history interview with Bill
Bailey (known as Bailey) and Laurie Eichengreen conducted by Leyla Vural on February 12,
2019. This interview is part of the Columbus Avenue and the Upper West Side Oral History
Project, sponsored by the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District.
Bailey (born in 1939) and Laurie Eichengreen (born in 1943) owned and ran Mythology, an art
project-cum-eclectic store, on Columbus Avenue from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s.
In this interview, Bailey and Eichengreen talk about their early lives and begin to tell the story of
Mythology. They describe how the space (at 370 Columbus Avenue) evolved from Bailey’s art
studio in 1970 into a salon/studio and, ultimately, a store where they sold an ever-changing
variety of books, art, tin toys, masks, and myriad unusual things. Bailey talks about naming the
space after Joseph Campbell’s ideas and about his silk-screening innovations. He describes a few
of the approximately 500 T-shirts he designed and printed, many for the mom-and-pop
businesses (like The Cultured Seed and Bicycle Renaissance) that were coming to Columbus
Avenue in the 1970s and ’80s. Eichengreen and Bailey tell the story of Mythology’s first awning
(a rainbow) and talk about designing the space to have a relationship with the street. They recall
some of the businesses that opened on Columbus Avenue—Sherman & Mixon, fashion designer
Koos Van Den Akker, Museum Café, Janovic, Charivari—and reminisce about the friendships
they formed as they learned how to run a business.
The interviewees have reviewed, edited, and approved this transcript. Readers should bear in
mind that this is a verbatim transcript of an interview and, therefore, does not read like a polished
piece of written work. Time codes have been included to make it easier for readers to match the
transcript with the audio recording of the interview. Time codes may, however, no longer be
completely accurate because of edits to the transcript. Where there are differences between the
transcript and the audio recording, the transcript is the final document of record.
The views expressed in this oral history interview are the interviewee’s alone and do not
necessarily reflect those of the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District.

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Interviewees: Bill Bailey and Laurie Eichengreen
Interviewer: Leyla Vural
Interview date: February 12, 2019
Session: 1 of 2
Location: New York, N.Y.
Vural: [00:00:00] Today is Tuesday, February 12th, 2019. This is Leyla Vural interviewing
Laurie Eichengreen and is it Bill Bailey?
Bailey: [00:00:08] Yes, but it’s Bailey most of the time.
Vural: [00:00:12] Okay, interviewing Laurie Eichengreen and Bailey in their home on West
Seventy-ninth Street for the Columbus Avenue and Upper West Side Oral History Project. And
thank you both so much for welcoming me into your home and spending the time with me today.
[00:00:28] So, oral histories tend to start by asking people about their childhood and their early
lives. So, could you each tell me where and when you were born and something about how you
grew up?
Eichengreen: [00:00:46] I grew up outside of Chicago. [Pauses, chokes up] I brought this hankie
because I get very emotional about things like this. I was born in 1943 and must say that I had a
pretty spectacular childhood. And I went to—had great friends, a lovely family, went to
wonderful schools. I went to Pine Manor College in Boston and transferred to Sarah Lawrence
[Sarah Lawrence College], where I met Bailey. [Chokes up] I didn’t expect to be—that I would
well up like this!
[00:02:00] Anyway, I found in meeting—actually Bailey and I met at a life-drawing class. He
took several women from Sarah Lawrence on a Wednesday evening and we went to the
Westchester Community Center and did drawing from a model, live model. And I ran into Bailey

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eight years later on the corner of Seventy-ninth and Broadway and said, “What are you doing
here?” He said, “Well, I’m living in the neighborhood.” And we eventually started seeing one
another.
[00:02:45] But I found that Bailey and I, at least from my point of view, had a very similar visual
sense of the world and it was always very exciting to be with him because we looked at things in
very—in different ways, but in ways that would be provocative to one another, so I thought.
[00:03:12] So, the store [referring to Mythology] I felt was—and it turned out to be—was a
visual engagement of our two interests. And it evolved. And initially—well, I’ll let Bailey start
with this because it really started as his art studio and I tend to be the more practical one—[I] felt
that it should pay for itself. Because we had my apartment and we had his apartment and we had
his art studio, which happened to be on Columbus Avenue. And he can tell you why he chose
that location.
[00:04:01] But the intention was, well, maybe if we had a few things that we could sell, we could
bring in some money to offset the rent. And we went away one weekend and I had a friend more
or less babysit for the store and he said, “You know, you have a lot of traffic here. You should
have some more things here.” Oh, really? And I could go on and talk more about what neophytes
we were in the idea of having a retail store. I don’t think we knew about retail. We didn’t know
about wholesale.
Bailey: [00:04:47] [Chuckles]
Eichengreen: [00:04:48] We—[chuckles] I was in the film business as an assistant director, and
a scenic artist had opened a store up the street called Sherman & Mixon and they asked us one

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weekend if we wanted to go to Atlantic City. Atlantic City? Why would you do that? “Well,
there’s the tabletop show where you buy. You buy merchandise there.” Really?
[00:05:26] So, John [Sherman] and Aris [Mixon] borrowed Mom’s [Mom’s Pies] station wagon
and we went to Atlantic City. Mom’s store, I believe, was on 92nd or 93rd, and they opened up a
whole new world to us, which [chuckles] was pretty amazing at that time.
Vural: [00:05:54] So, I’m going to ask you a little bit more about yourself. Were you—when
you were a kid, were you a visual kid?
Eichengreen: [00:06:15] I became a visual person when I was in high school. I drew. I painted
throughout high school. My studio, unfortunately, was relegated to the basement along with the
dog and my father’s workbench. It was not exactly a conducive place to work. I have a vision
right now of my working in the pantry, but it was always—my artwork was always looked at as a
way of my expressing my grief [chokes up] that my mother was dying.
[00:07:24] So in a way, my interest in art, very contrary to Bailey’s life, was not encouraged. My
mother had started collecting graphics and paintings and I was very interested in that. And there
was a—oh, I remember, there was a defiant moment in my life when my mother bought a
lithograph by [Joan] Miró—Figure with Stars—and I said, “I can do just as well,” and I then
proceeded to replicate that lithograph. And my mother just said, “That isn’t the point.” But art
became—and my interest in art was the primary focus in my developing years.
Vural: [00:09:00] Bailey, do you want to tell me a little bit about where and when you grew up
and what your life was like as a kid?

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Bailey: [00:09:07] Sure. I was born in a small mill town on the Allegheny River, part of the
greater Pittsburgh area, in 1939, and my parents and I lived there for about four or five years. It
was the end of the war years. And the thing I remember most about it as a little—as a baby,
really, was the air raid warning that occurred. And my dad was too old to be in the war, drafted
into the war, but he was the warden for the neighborhood. And sirens would go off. There was a
jail up on top of the hill. Pittsburgh is just hills down to rivers and on top of the hill was a
penitentiary of some kind and that siren would go off when there was an air raid, which then
would wake me up as a baby, and my dad would leave and go out and make sure no one had
lights on and all the shades were drawn and all that kind of stuff. So it was kind of a traumatic
situation more frequently than you’d imagine in those years.
[00:10:47] Then, about 1943, I think, somewhere around then, they moved to the suburbs, which
was really farmland that was beginning to be developed to be the real monster of suburban life.
And I grew up as the territory, the farm, became one of those areas. There were just four
houses—my parents bought one of the four houses, first four houses—and by the time I
graduated high school there, I had a paper route in that same area with about 150 customers. And
that had all been built in the time my parents moved in there.
[00:11:55] So, that’s—you know, I remember a victory garden that was at the end of the road
and it was in the farmer’s cornfield. He gave us an area to dig up and plant vegetables, etcetera. I
remember going there and working on that. And then I had a, you know, a regular and really nice
education, public school education, and in high school a terrific art teacher.
[00:12:38] And I was selected somewhere along the line, maybe I’m thinking junior high school,
maybe even a little before that, by the roving art teacher that went to all the public schools in our

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area to—I was selected, with another student, to go to downtown Pittsburgh, an area around Pitt
University [University of Pittsburgh], the Museum of Natural History. It was all [Andrew]
Carnegie money that built this—but to have art classes during the school year that were free on
Saturday morning and started at eight o’clock, when you had to be there. And it took an hour for
my dad to drive me there and get to those classes on time. But you were provided everything—
the crayons, the clipboard, a piece of eight-and-a-half by eleven paper—and you went to the
Carnegie Hall, a miniature of the one in New York City.
[00:14:06] So, it was a beautiful posh auditorium. And there were probably two hundred students
or so from this—collected from all the public schools in the Pittsburgh public school system.
And there are some famous writers that write about this experience, too, in their biographies or
stories. And you were given a class by our teacher, whose name was Fitzpatrick, and he would
do a chalk talk on the stage and it was always on a topic, like rain or music or anything he could
think of. And he’d do these great drawings explaining how you would create rain and what rain
was about, etcetera. And it was probably half an hour or so, forty minutes, and you took on one
side of the page notes and sketches from him, information from him, in pencil, and then the rest
of the class, which was another half an hour to an hour, was you turned the paper over and you
had a box of crayons and you made a drawing of rain. And if you were lucky, it was a lucky
week, there would be an organist there that would come up, you know, on the side of the stage
on one of those elevating organs and play rain music while you did drawings and so forth. So,
this was really an exciting, posh experience. You know, these red velveteen seats, etcetera.
[00:16:11] And the following week all of those drawings were looked at and like six were
selected as the best and you were given a call that you would be at the easel the following week.
And you went on stage with Fitzpatrick, and while he was giving the lecture you reproduced on a

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large board on an easel the same size as his the same drawing that you had done the week before.
So, there you were up on the stage doing a drawing. And then the biggest situation about that
was you had to at the mid-break come to the microphone and say who you were and how many
times you had been invited to the easel.
[00:17:18] So, it was like this whole additional experience of being on stage and having to speak
to an audience of your peers of two hundred. So, that was pretty exciting to do that. I remember
maybe five or six times being able to—being chosen and being able to do that.
[00:17:44] And from then on, art had always been a part of my existence and looking at it and
drawing and working with it. And I went on to Carnegie Tech [Carnegie Institute of Technology,
now Carnegie Mellon University], got a degree there in painting and design, and after that started
teaching painting and design—teaching an art class the way I thought an art class to high school
students should be taught, up at [The] Storm King School, which was up near West Point, on top
of a mountain, this idyllic place. And I taught there for about five or six years and then I married
a Sarah Lawrence girl that I had met going to the—going to drawing classes at Westchester
Center. We took a year off and bought a Volkswagen in Germany, which you could do then
inexpensively, and if you drove it a certain number of miles—and we took almost a year, and we
drove from Germany to Morocco and then from Morocco to Finland, stopping, of course,
everywhere along the way to see whatever art was there and, you know, make drawings and
paintings, etcetera.
[00:19:27] And came back to New York, actually came back to Pittsburgh, because we were
broke and I figured I could parlay the fact that I was a Pittsburgh boy, and went to the art classes
there, and I got like three different jobs teaching art history at different schools. And we lived

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there for about three or four years and then we came to New York and lived on Seventy-eighth
between Broadway and Amsterdam [Avenue].
[00:20:12] And then we broke up, and then for a few years I was just a rambling rogue. I had a
job that my cousin’s husband got me. He was working on Madison Avenue in a very high-end
custom frame business in the showroom selling the frames. And these were reproductions of the
history of Western art. Handmade, exquisite frames. And it was an unbelievable business, in that
the number of pieces of art that came in the door every day, and the quality of them, it was like
always handling the history of art for all the galleries and museums. And individual artists,
dealers, etcetera would come through the place and you’d be measuring and handling this stuff
and figuring out the frames with the client first. And a wonderful experience for about, I don’t
know, eight, ten—oh, no, it was longer than that—I must have been there fifteen years or so.
Eichengreen: [00:21:36] No.
Bailey: [00:21:38] No? Less? More? Anyhow, time to me is kind of a fluctuating situation—
Eichengreen: [00:21:50] [Chuckles]
Bailey: [00:21:51] —at best [chuckles]. But anyhow, there were extenuating circumstances.
They’re pretty gruesome, but the owner of the frame business, who had turned also the space into
an art gallery dealing with Mirós and [Pablo] Picassos and [Jean] Dubuffet prints, etcetera was
murdered over some art, Picasso art. And that sort of brought everything to a standstill. And I did
not want to become, although I was manager of the frame business, I did not want to take it on as
being the owner of it. I had always thought about being—having more time to do my own work.

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[00:22:51] And by that time I had acquired a lease on Columbus Avenue of a rather small three
hundred square foot space. I walked from Madison and [East] Seventy-eighth to my apartment at
Seventy-eighth on the West Side as often as I could. And I walked by Columbus Avenue and
there was a sign on a store: “For Rent.” And so I called the number and so forth and they said go
in and talk to the guy. And I went in. And the guy was selling wholesale candy and had these
very simple box—you know, you bought a box of Hershey’s chocolate bars at his price and then
you took them to your store, your bodega or whatever, and sold it at the retail price.
[00:24:03] So, I went in, talked to him—he put his teeth in his mouth and said—you know, “This
is the space. I can get out of here whenever you want it.” So, I talked to the people that owned
the building. We negotiated a rent, which was—I could handle easily with my job money.
[00:24:36] And so he moved out and I moved in and I spiffed the floor up a little bit and
repainted the place and made a nice studio workspace that looked at the south end of the
Museum of Natural History’s lawn and a little bit of the south end of the building. But I could
see all the way to Central Park, and the light coming in was fabulous—ground-floor light. And
gee, I just started to work, felt great, and that’s when I started to also silk screen. And I had silk
screened a lot prior to this. It was a way I liked to work, making prints. Silk screening T-shirts—
designing and screening T-shirts for local businesses, all the ones that were starting to turn up on
Columbus Avenue—and the pizza parlor and the Central Park police force and so forth—and had
kind of a booming business in that.
[00:25:49] And then I met Laurie at Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street and we got together and
we enjoyed one another and had a good time looking at things. And she was in the film business,

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but she was really fed up with the film business because at that time she was the first AD
[assistant director], so she was in charge of the—
Eichengreen: [00:26:18] You’re skipping [chuckles] a few years.
Bailey: [00:26:22] Er—
Eichengreen: [00:26:24] I met you when I actually was on—
Bailey: [00:26:27] Oh, yes, you were working—
Eichengreen: [00:26:28] —as my first—
Bailey: [00:26:28] —in the film business.
Eichengreen: [00:26:30] —my first film as a DGA [Directors Guild of America] trainee, I went
to Bridgeport, Connecticut to shoot The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
And we were on location for six days, and since Bailey lived close by and I was very interested
in plants and had many plants, I said, “You know, you’re close by. Could you please check and
water my plants a couple of times a week?”
Bailey: [00:27:08] No problem.
Eichengreen: [00:27:12] And I came back on the weekends and we saw one another. And I was
on location for eight weeks and when I came back in June, I realized Bailey was still in the
apartment and it was like three days later. And I said, “Excuse me, are you living here?”
Bailey: [00:27:38] [Chuckles] And I said, “Yes—”
Eichengreen: [00:27:41] I said, “Oh—

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Bailey: [00:27:41] “—as far as I know I am!”
Eichengreen: [00:27:45] Anyway, we’ve been living together ever since.
Vural: [00:27:48] When was that?
Eichengreen: [00:27:49] 1972.
Bailey: [00:27:54] So, here we are.
Eichengreen: [00:27:56] But I continued with the film business and with—I always considered
myself a silent partner because I was really in the film business, and I would help Bailey keep
records, whatever we needed to do. And it really wasn’t until 1982 that I became—or ’81—that I
became a full partner in the store.
Vural: [00:28:35] So, before we talk more about the store, I would love it if you both would
describe for me what New York City was like when you first got here and how it sort of
changed. So, it sounds like, Bailey, you were probably here first. Do you remember roughly what
year you came to New York to live?
Bailey: [00:29:02] Must have been early seventies.
Eichengreen: [00:29:08] No. For the first—
Vural: [00:29:11] When you were working in the art—in the framing and art shop?
Bailey: [00:29:16] Oh, right. Earlier. I’m not sure.
Eichengreen: [00:29:23] I know there was eight years difference—or I thought it was eight
years—from, well, ’64—it was more than that. No, eight years. ’64 to ’72 or ’71.

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Bailey: [00:29:44] Okay.
Vural: [00:29:46] So, Bailey, can you tell me—let’s assume it was the early sixties, sounds like.
And you came right to Seventy-eighth Street?
Eichengreen: [00:29:55] No, it was early seventies, or late sixties.
Bailey: [00:30:00] Yes, it was—
Eichengreen: [00:30:01] Late sixties.
Bailey: [00:30:01] —somewhere, say, 1970.
Vural: [00:30:04] Okay.
Bailey: [00:30:04] It was somewhere around there.
Eichengreen: [00:30:06] Because your first—your lease for the store started in 19—excuse
me—1970.
Bailey: [00:30:13] Oh, then I was here four years or five years before that. So, we’re talking
about ’65. Okay, so I was here in the mid-sixties.
Vural: [00:30:24] And right from the start you lived on Seventy-eighth Street on the West Side?
Bailey: [00:30:28] Right. That was the first apartment. Yes.
Vural: [00:30:31] So, do you have some memories of what the neighborhood was like when you
got here?
Bailey: [00:30:36] It was to my mind a nice location because of the subways at Seventy-ninth
and Broadway, and once I got the job at the frame business, an easy walk or a crosstown bus to

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Seventy-eighth and Madison. And so there wasn’t much interaction in the grittiness of the city,
although this was new to me, so the city was the city. I didn’t have anything to compare it with.
And it was thrilling to be in New York City because that’s where the art was and that’s where all
the museums and galleries and everything was going on—theater. All the arts were, you know,
blossoming.
[00:31:43] The only thing that stands out and kind of encapsulates what was also possible was
one night I came home fairly late. I was probably out dancing or went to a movie, whatever. It
was probably eleven to twelve o’clock. I was alone, and went into the vestibule of the apartment
building and was held up by three kids who had, later it turned out, plastic guns. But I didn’t
know they were plastic guns, and you still don’t, and they’re prolific all over the United States
these plastic—look exactly like the real thing—guns.
[00:32:43] So, I convinced them to just take my money and not my wallet, which they were
scared, obviously, and they wanted out of there as soon as possible. So, I gave them whatever
money I had and they ran away. Or I gave them the wallet and they took the money and threw
the wallet away. And they threw the guns, plastic guns, away. I called the police and, you know,
they came and did their recording, etcetera and that was that. And that was the—that’s the most
extreme downside event I think I’ve ever had in the city.
[00:33:32] So, I never had a really bad encounter with the city. It was always a great place to
exist in. And, yes, it was—I guess it was kind of run down, seedy, and not very refined and
upscale. You know, things were falling apart. And this was when the city had no money.
[00:34:13] And so, you know, the only other thing maybe was remembering when the garbage
collectors went on strike. So, there’d be—for weeks, there would be mounds of stinking garbage

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around. But otherwise, I mean, you just deal with that. That’s a big city and that’s what happens.
So, you know.
Vural: [00:34:37] Tell me about the mix of people that was in the neighborhood.
Bailey: [00:34:41] That was exciting because for the first time I walked on streets and there were
all these ethnic, differently looking people. They came from other parts of the world and they
were here and they were speaking languages from their parts of the world. So, it gave a buzz to
simply walking on the street, a wonderful experience and totally different than anything I had
ever encountered before. And I loved it. I loved the richness of it.
[00:35:26] And also this was hippy time and clothing was extravagant and kind of wonderful to
see what people put together. We would go to Central Park, around the fountain, where there
would be the kind of Sunday parade of everybody just hanging out in their crazy clothes, and
some music or whatever would go on. And then also I had never encountered orthodox Jews—to
an extent in Pittsburgh—and it was interesting to see the extreme contrast of their dress and
payoses [sidelocks]. And I think on Seventy-eighth Street there was a mikvah and there was also
a small group that had their own temple. And right next to the mikvah was—I forget his name,
but his theater of psychodrama, where you could go in and express yourself.
[00:37:03] Seventy-eighth Street was, you know, a pretty interesting street just for the diversity
in that one small block of the numbers—or the character of the activity that was going on.
Vural: [00:37:19] Which block was that?
Bailey: [00:37:20] It’s Seventy-eighth Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, so it’s a fairly
short block. It was also purported to have a house of ill repute on the block, but I never figured

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out where that was. But that was probably just rumor to add to the diversity of the block. But,
yes, pretty interesting place to be for me.
Vural: [00:37:53] And did you feel like the environment informed your art?
Bailey: [00:37:58] Well, definitely, because of the art environment. That informed my art more
than anything else. The pop art, the post-pop art. You know, Andy Warhol was a graduate of
Carnegie Mellon [Carnegie Mellon University], Carnegie Tech, where I was. He was about
eleven years ahead of me. There were still stories about him that the teachers could tell, and
basically he took the same courses and classes that I had taken. So—and, you know, there was
always the talk and excitement of what was happening at The Factory, which was a big deal
then.
[00:38:49] So, that was all influential. All the shows at MoMA [The Museum of Modern Art],
all—wouldn’t miss an opening at MoMA. Wouldn’t miss an opening at The Whitney [The
Whitney Museum of American Art]. And then all the galleries. There were, you know, hundreds
of galleries, which was a total new experience. And they had show openings every month and
you would go to the ones you wanted to see. So, that’s what really influenced me.
Vural: [00:39:17] So, tell me what—do you remember how it was that you ended up on the
Upper West Side?
Bailey: [00:39:22] Rent price. It was much less expensive on the Upper West Side than it was
almost anywhere else in the city. And I think—I can’t remember how many different apartments
that we looked at, but I don’t think it was that many. And the price was right. And I don’t
remember what that price was, but it was doable and it seemed like an interesting neighborhood
to be in, you know. Didn’t want—knew I didn’t want Upper East Side. It seemed too cold and

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stratospheric. And I knew after I got in the frame business—was shortly after I got that job in the
frame business that the Upper East Side was a totally different world. Between Fifth [Avenue],
Madison [Avenue], Park [Avenue], and Lexington [Avenue], that’s where all the art business—
that’s where the art hung on the walls that was shown in those galleries and museums, you know.
The loans, etcetera always were names from the Upper East Side, if not from somewhere else in
the world.
[00:41:07] So, yes, I always had a sketchbook going and I would make sketches on buses and
trains, etcetera, but my work in the studio was not figurative like that. One thing I did get
involved in, which was at a peak then, was art that was sent in the mail, called Mail Art, and it
consisted of sending messages—encoded or not encoded or whatever—to people kind of in a
group that was known to be working in this field. Like Ray Johnson was one of the best-known
in that. And the Fluxus group. There was a whole group who was involved in this anonymous art
being sent through the mail to anonymous people, to people you didn’t know.
[00:42:24] So, I remember doing that once a month. I would send twenty-five postcards first and
then envelopes later with things in them to anonymous people, have a return address, and often
there was returned mail to me in response to it. And it was in a way trying to short-circuit the
higher priced route of being an artist showing in galleries and having this elitist position of art.
And if you got something back, then obviously you communicated by the art you sent with
someone who responded. So that was nice. I have a big, thick, five-inch binder full of stuff that
came back from that.
Vural: [00:43:24] How did you pick the addresses of who you would write to?
Bailey: [00:43:28] Phone book.

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Vural: [00:43:31] Oh, man, I wish I’d gotten one of those!
Bailey: [00:43:32] [Chuckles] A lot of them were great. The postage was always—I used
postage that was related to the content of the message. Like I’d send things for Einstein’s
birthday, okay, and I’d make an image related to Einstein’s birthday. It was spray-painted,
whatever, or stencils, rubber stamps, etcetera, but then—
Eichengreen: [00:44:00] When I was—
Bailey: [00:44:01] —I’d always get—I’d buy from the Philatelic Division [of the US Postal
Service] uncanceled postage that related to Einstein.
Eichengreen: [00:44:15] When I was in the film business, Bailey would send me postcards.
Unfortunately, I don’t have them. But one of them, I remember, was that “She’s like a rainbow,”
[chokes up] and there were stamps, ROY-G-BIV [a mnemonic for the sequence of colors in the
rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet]—red—
Bailey: [00:44:39] Right. Across the top.
Eichengreen: [00:44:41] Right. And that was wonderful.
Vural: [00:44:44] Yes. So, tell me [addresses Eichengreen], what was New York like when you
got here?
Eichengreen: [00:44:50] I just came into the city from Sarah Lawrence and first roomed with a
woman who—we had taken an apartment on Fourteenth—near Fourteenth Street, on Little West
Twelfth Street, which was an artist’s studio, and we took a couple of apartments together. And
when I finally got my own apartment, it was a studio apartment on the Upper East Side with an
outdoor space. And I realized if I was going to survive in the city, I was going to need an outdoor

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19

space. But I didn’t realize that until after I moved to the West Side. And I moved to the West
Side because I wanted more space to do my own art. And I found—and I also was concerned
about the safety.
[00:45:57] So, I selected an apartment on Seventy-ninth and West End Avenue and I remember
thinking that this was an appropriate—this was the best apartment for me because I was right on
a wide street. And at that time the city, and especially the West Side, was a little dicey. But I
didn’t care for the atmosphere on the East Side, even though I was in Yorkville and I loved the
ethnic—ethnicity of that area. But I also was attracted to the West Side [chuckles] and just
people from Europe that you would hear and you would interact with. Even though I only had
one block to get to the subway—and that was very important that I had a very wide street.
[00:47:08] When I ran into Bailey, he said, “Come to my studio on Columbus Avenue,” and I’m
thinking I don’t know if I can go to Columbus Avenue, it’s a little dangerous over there.
Vural: [00:47:25] And was it dangerous, do you think, or was it your perception that it was
dangerous?
Eichengreen: [00:47:30] Oh, I think it was dangerous. When we first had the store, I remember
we had the hot dog vendors next door. We had Edith Nostalgia on the other side. We had an
awning. We sort of collected all of the winos under our awning, and I really couldn’t open the
gates, the iron gates, until after four o’clock in the afternoon. And there were murders at the
North Park Hotel—I believe that was its name—at Seventy-seventh and Columbus, on the
southeast corner. At that time, we were really only open on the weekends or an occasional
afternoon after four o’clock.

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

20

[00:48:28] And whenever we had problems in the store, the police always traced it back to
Amsterdam and Eightieth [Street]. And at that time, we were living at Seventy-ninth and
Amsterdam, so that was only a block away. But we were on a wide street and somehow—and in
a large building, and I think that was a comfort.
Vural: [00:49:02] So, and the store was at 370?
Eichengreen: [00:49:05] Correct.
Bailey: [00:49:06] Right.
Vural: [00:49:07] And what’s that between?
Eichengreen: [00:49:10] It was between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-seventh. We were actually
so close—I mean, and that was a wonderful thing was to be able to walk—later years—to walk
to work, and in later years to have an intercom between the store and this apartment.
Vural: [00:49:32] How did that work?
Eichengreen: [00:49:36] The magic of AT&T.
Vural: [00:49:40] So that you could talk to each if one was at home and one was at the shop?
Eichengreen: [00:49:43] And with our staff.
Vural: [00:49:45] So, tell me, so first it was your studio.
Bailey: [00:49:48] Right.
Vural: [00:49:49] And when—and then it sort of sounds like it sort of slowly morphed.
Bailey: [00:49:51] It morphed.

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21

Vural: [00:49:54] When did it get its name?
Bailey: [00:49:56] From the—as soon as I moved in, I called it Mythology, because I was a
Joseph Campbell––
Eichengreen: [00:50:06] Groupie.
Bailey: [00:50:07] ––Not just a groupie, but I mean I really read his books and I was really
enthralled with his approach to the world, and it was the first time that a person’s attitude made
sense to me, this way of looking at the world. And I remember going to—he also taught at Sarah
Lawrence, and Susan, the woman I married from Sarah Lawrence, had classes with him, was one
of his students, and he was actually at the celebration of that wedding. And I spent many an
evening going to his talks that he gave all over the city.
Eichengreen: [00:51:15] We did together.
Bailey: [00:51:16] Yes, right. And, I mean, he would talk to a radical Jesuit group in a tenement
building on 125th Street. And it was an open house kind of thing but there’d be fifty people there
or whatever, you know, in an apartment. And he also spoke to the Jungian Society at Lincoln
Center in one of the big halls, Alice Tully Hall. So, he had that kind of range of audience that he
would speak to often. It was in the basement of a church—I mean, it could be anywhere—but he
gave these lectures that would last an hour to an hour-and-a-half nonstop, with slides of what he
was talking about, etcetera, and they were mesmerizing.
[00:52:19] Later, there was the famous series, which is actually coming back now to PBS, of Bill
Moyers talking with Joseph Campbell. And, you know, that made him a national figure—the
concept of mythology—a national figure, by being on the PBS. It was unfortunate that—well,

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

22

it’s not unfortunate—it was great that that exposure happened, but it was quite different to look
at the TV programs than to go and listen to him for an hour-and-a half talk about whatever he
wanted to talk about. And it was so many things that you would walk out of one of his talks and
the world looked totally different to you [chuckles]. It’s almost like you had had your eyes and
mind changed to view things in a new way, in a fresh way.
[00:53:30] The Moyers-Campbell program is interesting, but it’s Campbell, then Moyers,
Campbell, then Moyers. When you went to the talks by him, it was all Campbell. There was no
break, no question and answer. It was just, you got the full—you got the full message, whatever
it was. And if you went to enough of them, it piled up in you. And you read the books. The
books are fabulous.
Vural: [00:54:11] So, when you opened your studio [Eichengreen gets up]—shall we take a
break?
Eichengreen: [00:54:19] I just want—
Bailey: [00:54:19] Sure.
Eichengreen: [00:54:20] Sure.
Vural: [00:54:20] Let’s take a little break.
[INTERRUPTION]
[WHILE LOOKING AT PHOTOS, ADS, AND PRESS RELATED TO THE STORE THAT
EICHENGREEN AND BAILEY HAVE SAVED]
Bailey: [00:54:25] [referring to a photo] This was a great find.

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

23

Vural: [00:54:28] The insect pin?
Bailey: [00:54:30] Yes, where the eyes—
Vural: [00:54:31] [Laughs]
Bailey: [00:54:31] —electronic eyes blinked all the time.
Vural: [00:54:34] Yes.
Bailey: [00:54:35] He was a very interesting artist from Europe somewhere, I don’t know where,
but he would come through and sell us those.
Vural: [00:54:47] [Reading the headline of a newspaper article] Mythology: The Legend on
Columbus: An Unconventional Retailer Whose Success is No Tall Tale. Nice. Do you have a
plan to give your papers to an archive?
Bailey: [00:55:04] No.
Vural: [00:55:05] So, one of the things I like to plant a little seed in your head is if you’re
interested, the curator from the New-York Historical Society—I told him that I would ask people
who I interview if they are interested in giving their papers, which could be literally paper but
also ephemera––
Bailey: [00:55:26] Yes, yes.
Vural: [00:55:27] —also stuff. And if you’re interested, I will connect you to him and you can
figure out together if that’s something you want to do and something that they have the capacity
to take. Because I think it would be really important for your, both of your, for your papers and
your, they call it ephemera—

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

24

Bailey: [00:55:47] History. Yes, right.
Vural: [00:55:49] —stuff to end up somewhere. Does that interest you? Should I try to connect
you?
Bailey: [00:55:56] Sure. It’s got to go somewhere. Might as well go where somebody
appreciates it—
Vural: [00:56:00] Yes.
Bailey: [00:56:00] —and they’ll keep track of it.
Vural: [00:56:04] [Looks at a photo that Eichengreen is showing and asks Bailey] Is this you?
Bailey: [00:56:05] No.
Eichengreen: [00:56:05] No, that’s actually a friend of ours.
Bailey: [00:56:08] We would have book-signing events and—
Vural: [00:56:09] So lovely.
Bailey: [00:56:10] —that was one of them.
Vural: [00:56:12] Wow.
Bailey: [00:56:13] And then these were our window displays.
Eichengreen: [00:56:15] I actually have here [showing a photo]—which is what I was wearing
when we were in Japan. We became the One Heart Temple. We needed to select a symbol.
Bailey: [00:56:28] So, we had happy coats made for people to wear—

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2
Eichengreen: [00:56:31] —wear in the store. I mean, for our staff.
Vural: [00:56:35] Ah-ha. And everyone wore one like this?
Eichengreen: [00:56:36] Yes.
Vural: [00:56:37] Oh, that is so nice.
Bailey: [00:56:37] And doesn’t that say Mythology?
Eichengreen: [00:56:38] Yes, Mythology New York.
Vural: [00:56:41] Oh, wow.
Eichengreen: [00:56:43] In Japanese.
Vural: [00:56:45] In Japanese. [Laughs] So, can I keep looking at this later?
Bailey: [00:56:48] Sure. No problem.
Vural: [00:56:51] It’s beautiful. Thank you. I’m going to leave it right here.
Eichengreen: [00:56:54] And this book here, just so you know, we had hired somebody to go
through—
Vural: [00:57:12] Oh, wow.
Bailey: [00:57:15] That’s a little more—
Eichengreen: [00:57:17] Bigger timeline.
Vural: [00:57:17] But it tells—
Bailey: [00:57:17] —formal.

25

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26

Eichengreen: [00:57:19] But very, very briefly.
Vural: [00:57:21] [Looking at a photo of the storefront] So, and is this intentionally the gay flag
colors?
Bailey: [00:57:27] No.
Eichengreen: [00:57:27] No.
Bailey: [00:57:28] That was the rainbow.
Vural: [00:57:32] Right. So it doesn’t have anything to do—?
Eichengreen: [00:57:34] No, not at all.
Bailey: [00:57:35] But it was before that was adopted.
Eichengreen: [00:57:37] Way back. Predates that.
Bailey: [00:57:38] Right, predates that.
Eichengreen: [00:57:40] And it predates Stonewall.
Vural: [00:57:41] Right.
Bailey: [00:57:44] Because the rainbow was also part of the hippy—
Vural: [00:57:48] Sure, right.
Bailey: [00:57:49] —signature, so to speak. And it also related to the Rolling Stones song She’s
Like a Rainbow, which was popular at that time. So, you know.
Vural: [00:58:05] So, that was your—and when did you get the awning?

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

27

Eichengreen: [00:58:11] ’73.
Bailey: [00:58:11] When we opened. Right.
Eichengreen: [00:58:13] About ’73, ’74.
Bailey: [00:58:15] Right.
Vural: [00:58:17] So, you know what, let’s sit back down and we’ll go back to—
Eichengreen: [00:58:23] Oh, here, exactly. This is—it was in ’70, it was in ’74. Because this is
done by date, so this is ’74. And this is—
Vural: [00:58:41] When the awning—
Eichengreen: [00:58:42] —came about.
[INTERRUPTION]
Vural: [00:58:48] So nice.
Eichengreen: [00:58:48] And I remember Polly Dufresne saying in the eighties: “Guys, you’ve
got to drop that rainbow thing.”
Bailey: [00:58:59] [Chuckles]
Vural: [00:59:06] Here. Okay, let’s see. So, can you tell me sort of the evolution of how you
went from being a studio to being what Barbara Adler [the executive director of the Columbus
Avenue Business Improvement District from 1999-2019 and a lifelong Upper West Sider] says
was her favorite store on the street?

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

28

Bailey: [00:59:30] [Chuckles] Well, it basically started to be partly a commercial space when I
was printing T-shirts and selling them.
Vural: [00:59:48] How did that come to be?
Bailey: [00:59:55] Well, I think I did some T-shirts for my family and friends that were
almost—were like one-offs, you know, just goofy shirts to put on. But it was a period when Tshirts were really hot, as though they’re not hot now, but they were. You know, new, fresh, an
advertising device that was starting to take hold.
[01:00:31] And I had, as I told you, done silk screening since college and I liked the medium.
And I had done it when I taught school, and I taught my students how to screen print so that they
could print posters, etcetera for events at the high school. And in the summers, I would do
projects for myself where I would screen print an edition of images. And I also did posters for
the film society in Cornwall, New York that had, you know, Shoot the Piano Player. Every
month they had a different foreign film, the Bergman films, etcetera. So, I just for fun made up a
poster that went up around town. And so I’d always use the medium. So, I’m not sure.
Eichengreen: [01:01:37] What about the bug shirt?
Bailey: [01:01:39] Yes, I made a bug shirt [chuckles] just where every insect on the shirt is
different. It’s in black line. That I made, I don’t know, maybe twenty or twenty-five of to give to
friends and family as a kind of a goof to wear. And I guess I printed up enough to have also in
the store of that. I don’t remember. I think there’s one still around in our files. We have a file of
all the shirts we ever made and there’s, what, five hundred?

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29

Eichengreen: [01:02:32] Easily, I think. That was partly my job was that I made––unfortunately
[chuckles], I made copies of all of Bailey’s postcards and put them together in a notebook and
unfortunately they have faded to almost obscurity––but I also collected one of every shirt that we
printed and kept a file cabinet of—whether it was of our own designs or they were commercial
establishments.
Vural: [01:03:18] [to Eichengreen] You’re really an archivist.
Eichengreen: [01:03:20] Well, I was for Bailey.
Bailey: [01:03:22] Yes, yes. She’s good at it. She tracks it down, keeps it posted and listed.
Vural: [01:03:32] So, tell me, Laurie, it sounds like you thought that the space could be more
formally a store.
Bailey: [01:03:45] Laurie first of all wanted it to be a salon.
Eichengreen: [01:03:51] [Laughs] That is true!
Bailey: [01:03:53] And we had—I had there a—what was the name of that company? Work
Bench or somebody. The Door Store was around then and they made—from regular doors, they
put legs on them and made sofas and beds that you could put a cushion on, etcetera. I had a bed
to crash on that was a door with legs, and then we put pillows behind that and it became a place
to sit and talk, and people—
Eichengreen: [01:04:33] That is very true.
Bailey: [01:04:34] —wandered by and, you know—

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30

Eichengreen: [01:04:36] I really thought of it as a salon and as a place that people would come
and meet.
Bailey: [01:04:47] ––drop in. Friends would drop in.
Eichengreen: [01:04:49] Maybe buy a T-shirt. And I remember—I don’t know who we were
talking to who said, “Guys, if this is going to be a store, you’ve got to take the couches out. It
can’t exist like this.” I was stubborn. I said, no, that is the whole reason for the store, so we could
interact with the neighborhood. Then I was proven wrong. I was proven wrong that you couldn’t
have a retail store and have—
Bailey: [01:05:25] ––a salon.
Eichengreen: [01:05:25] —a salon at the same time.
Bailey: [01:05:28] But it went on for quite a while in morphing from the salon sensibility and
workspace studio sensibility, which existed with the salon, and a front showcase that had some
stuff in it.
Eichengreen: [01:05:52] It didn’t even—we didn’t have a showcase at that time. You had the
two tables from Newburgh.
Bailey: [01:05:56] Oh, right.
Eichengreen: [01:05:58] And then behind—
Bailey: [01:06:01] Beautiful flat tables, but formica tops. Simple.
Eichengreen: [01:06:05] And in the next space were the Door Store couches and then behind
that was Bailey’s work table that had wheels of rubber stamps and all of his paints. And

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

31

somewhere along the line—I think his name was Mario Rivoli—who came in and he, this was
much, much later, but he said, and I don’t know whether he came in as a store consultant—but
he said, “You know, it’s really so great to see the whole process, to see you working here in the
space.” And we maintained that because we always wanted the interaction with the street. I
mean, I remember—
Bailey: [01:06:59] And the customers.
Eichengreen: [01:07:00] Well, and the customers. And I remember one of the things that I did
early on was just to sweep in front of the store and meet whoever was passing by.
Vural: [01:07:15] How did it work in the early morphing days when it was a salon with some
things for sale and an artist at work? How did people come in? And did they stay? And could
you talk and work at the same time? Or Laurie, were you there and interacting with people?
What would an evening that you were open actually be like?
Eichengreen: [01:07:43] It would be an afternoon. I would say like a Saturday afternoon. Mind
you, in those early days you would not want to be open at night.
Bailey: [01:07:55] Yes, impossible.
Eichengreen: [01:07:56] Columbus Avenue was a little dicey at that point.
Bailey: [01:08:00] Well, more than a little. Columbus Avenue morphed along with us in
becoming more—what do they say?—gentrified and started to bring in stores that were owned
by individuals and had ideas of making a store unique and an experience. And they gradually
took over the empty spaces that were there because the rents were still very reasonable. And it

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

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became a community of, you know, a variety of individuals doing business in their own way,
like the Sherman & Mixon people who were early on.
Eichengreen: [01:09:03] What about—you should tell her about Koos [Van Den Akker].
Bailey: [01:09:06] Oh, yes. One of the earliest experiences when it was still a studio for me, I
would sometimes at the end of the working time, I would work after the frame business, I’d just
walk across the park, go straight to the studio and do two or three hours of work. And then
sometimes I would walk down Columbus Avenue a few blocks and there was a famous bar
called Tap-a-Keg and it was kind of a rough-and-ready spot but you could get a beer.
[01:09:56] And suddenly, on the way down there, in the block before Tap-a-Keg, a space became
transformed from being empty to having a gorgeous fabric wall on one side of it and a platform
up above, where a guy was at a sewing machine all the time, making the garments that were on a
rack underneath his ledge. And this was Koos Van Den Akker, who I just couldn’t resist—about
the third time I walked by, I banged on the door and I said—he came down, opened the door––I
said, “I can’t stand it that somebody works longer and more hours than I do and I’d like to get to
know you. Can I buy you a beer?” [Chuckles] And he said sure. And he just walked out and
locked the door and we went and had a beer and we were friends from then on.
[01:11:11] That was typical of, you know, the kinds of entrepreneurs—and he had come from
his—he came from—
Eichengreen: [01:11:25] Well, he came via Paris.
Bailey: [01:11:29] Yes, from Paris, but his home was in Holland.
Eichengreen: [01:11:31] Den Hague.

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33

Bailey: [01:11:32] Den Hague.
Eichengreen: [01:11:35] Because that was on his label.
Bailey: [01:11:36] Right, and he came with a sewing machine and a few dollars and some
fabrics and worked on the streets making clothing, with a little rack, until he had enough money
to open—to rent that store. Then he became famous. Then he was on Madison Avenue. He had a
huge career. But he was always a friend of ours, which was a nice thing that could happen on the
street, just because people worked there and they had their own hours and their own way of
working. And he made absolutely gorgeous stuff, just fantastic.
Vural: [01:12:28] Tell me about another shop in the area, where you got to know the owner.
Bailey: [01:12:37] Well, there was the flower—
Eichengreen: [01:12:41] The Museum Café—
Bailey: [01:12:43] Yes, Museum Café—
Eichengreen: [01:12:44] —with Michael Weinstein.
Bailey: [01:12:44] —was right on the corner of our block, at the southern corner, at Seventyseventh, and just by nature of it being a restaurant café and an early one in the neighborhood—
Eichengreen: [01:13:02] But Michael and wife at the time, Cheryl, was very interested in the
store. And then she eventually worked for us. I guess she may have been one of our first
managers or key salesperson.
Bailey: [01:13:21] Uh-hum. And she had this wonderful—

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

34

Eichengreen: [01:13:24] [Laughs]
Bailey: [01:13:25] —English—
Eichengreen: [01:13:26] Australian.
Bailey: [01:13:27] Australian accent.
Eichengreen: [01:13:30] Schedule [says “shedule”].
Bailey: [01:13:31] Yes [laughs], which was very nice to have in the store, to just have this little
twist of English accent.
Eichengreen: [01:13:42] But we actually got to know Cheryl first and then we got to know
Michael, and later did projects with Michael after we closed the store.
Bailey: [01:13:53] But Michael was opening restaurants around the city and he was really a
business entrepreneur. And he had a partner—
Eichengreen: [01:14:03] Ernie.
Bailey: [01:14:03] —Ernie, and they were opening around the West Side, too.
Eichengreen: [01:14:09] But the Museum Café was their first venue, Michael’s first restaurant
venue.
Bailey: [01:14:14] Right. And he was very kind in giving us business advice, because we didn’t
have business backgrounds or know, as we said, wholesale from retail or things like that. And as
it got bigger and a full-time store and running business and so forth, there were things we needed

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

35

to know, and we could go to Michael and get advice and he was great that way. So, that’s
another involvement with another—a person on the street.
[01:14:52] And then there was the flower store.
Eichengreen: [01:14:52] I was going to say, we got to know John Elari and Neil [Wolince]—I
forget Neil’s last name—of The Cultured Seed and they were compatriots on the avenue. I mean,
they were—
Bailey: [01:15:12] And they were a florist shop.
Eichengreen: [01:15:13] Right.
Bailey: [01:15:14] And they had a really particular look and a way of putting together flowers
that nobody else had, you know, and they made a statement. And just the name, The Cultured
Seed. And I remember doing the T-shirt for them and it was like six colors on a blue shirt.
Eichengreen: [01:15:35] Yellow.
Bailey: [01:15:36] Yellow shirt. Whatever.
Eichengreen: [01:15:38] [Laughs]
Bailey: [01:15:40] It was, you know, it was a really wonderful shirt.
Eichengreen: [01:15:46] One of the—it’s very nice to see that Bicycle Renaissance is still on
the avenue. And Bailey designed that shirt, that image.

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2

36

Bailey: [01:15:59] And if you walk by, they have on the window the design that I made for that
company. It’s changed hands several times but they’ve kept the image, which—and we did
multiple printings of the T-shirt for them.
Eichengreen: [01:16:20] We also did—you made a wonderful design for Janovic.
Bailey: [01:16:27] Oh, yes, that was the—one of the Janovics lived on Seventy-seventh Street.
Eichengreen: [01:16:35] Evan Janovic.
Bailey: [01:16:38] —across from the back of the museum, and knew the store and knew we
printed T-shirts, and came in one time and said he would like to have us design and print a Tshirt for them.
[01:16:55] So, that was a hit T-shirt. We had multiple requests from them because it sold, or they
gave them away, you know, for years. But it was a tilted paint can with “Janovic” printed on it
and coming out of the paint can was a rainbow of color. And it had—at the bottom was like drips
of all this paint. And I had figured out a way to make a rainbow pull of the silk screen on the
shirt with one pull of the squeegee by getting mustard tubes and filling each tube with the color
of the rainbow and squeezing an amount along the squeegee and then pulling it with one pull.
And it got all the colors at one time and they sort of blended into each other. And then you could
control the amount each time with another squeeze depending on how much was needed. That
was a big hit and a breakthrough in terms of screen printing for Mythology because then it
became something we could use as a device, which Cultured Seed actually had a rainbow in it.
And remember, this is still the old rainbow of the hippy days.

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Eichengreen: [01:18:45] But later on we became—there was a wonderful blending of
friendships with other shopkeepers. And I remember that Charivari had a store at 81st and
Columbus. And we had just come back from Japan. We were taken to Japan in 1976 to show a
particular company how we silk screen and we more or less were a promotion in a trade show for
them, and we brought a casket of our designs.
Bailey: [01:19:31] Yes, we made a wooden box that was about the size of a casket. We put all
our paints, our inks in it, our squeegees—
Eichengreen: [01:19:44] Silk screen.
Bailey: [01:19:46] —silk screens of designs we had made for the store, and shipped it over there.
Eichengreen: [01:19:54] And we were in Japan for eight weeks, but the point of my story is that
while we were in Japan, we met an artist by the name [chokes up] of Tadanori Yokoo.
Bailey: [01:20:10] [Chuckles]
Eichengreen: [01:20:15] And they mentioned the Weisers [Selma, Barbara, and Jon, owners of
Charivari] because Tadanori Yokoo was a very exciting artist who was doing posters for various
Japanese department stores. And at that time the Weisers had five stores on the Upper West Side.
But one day they asked us: “We would like you to introduce us to Tadanori Yokoo.” And here
we were a very, still a very small store, but we became the go-between for the Weisers and
Yokoo-san. And he then in fact did a poster for Charivari at 81st and Columbus. I don’t know—I
haven’t seen—I don’t remember the poster.
Bailey: [01:21:16] I’m sure we have a copy somewhere.
Eichengreen: [01:21:19] No, I don’t think so actually.

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Bailey: [01:21:20] No, maybe not.
Eichengreen: [01:21:22] But anyway, I mean, just the extent of friendships, business friendship,
but also very—our personal friendships.
Bailey: [01:21:29] Yokoo became a friend. We haven’t seen him in years now, but at one point,
when he was becoming famous internationally, we—I had already collected his work, early
work, and then he was in the city and he was here. We had a fourth of July party or something
here—
Eichengreen: [01:22:00] Right.
Bailey: [01:22:01] —and he came. And we kept in touch kind of loosely, and we sold his posters
in the store. Then eventually through another friend, who married a Japanese photographer and
was a model, we were able to visit Yokoo in his studio in Japan, which was outside of Tokyo,
and she became the go-between—
Eichengreen: [01:22:37] For us.
Bailey: [01:22:37] —for us and him. And in that relationship then we were able to not only buy
posters from him in his studio, but also set up an arrangement where the printer that he was using
would send us samples of new work that they were printing of his and we could order from them
posters sent to us and show them in the store and sell them in the store. So, it became a longlasting engagement with Yokoo.
[01:23:27] And we now just did an inventory of them and we have about a hundred, a little over
a hundred, of those posters, all of them different, from that association. So, that’s one of the
kinds of things that made the store unique. And the people that bought those posters were

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designers and artists that knew of him, but didn’t have any way of getting one to put up or have
around them in their studios or homes or whatever.
Vural: [01:24:06] So, it sounds to me like there were people coming to the store to buy the
unusual things that sort of a more everyday person could afford to buy as a special thing, like
the—I don’t know what it costs, but maybe the bug with the lights.
Bailey: [01:24:25] The blinking eyes, right.
Vural: [01:24:27] And then there was also, for lack of a better term, kind of high art that other
artists would recognize as—
Bailey: [01:24:37] Ah-hum.
Eichengreen: [01:24:38] I think one of my—
Bailey: [01:24:38] And collectors. I mean, we had—also at this time, we were buying art that we
found that was through dealers that was particularly tuned to the store. And we’d buy it for
ourselves, but then if we had an event in the store or a particular theme was going on, it would
end up going over there, we’d put a price on it, hoping that no one would buy it, we’d make it
fairly high, and they’d disappear. You know, somebody would buy it and then we didn’t have it
anymore [chuckles].
Eichengreen: [01:25:26] I think that one of my favorite sales was a lithograph by Ed [Edward]
Ruscha that said “I’m amazed” and there were a thousand bugs—
Bailey: [01:25:42] Flies.

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Eichengreen: [01:25:43] —flies swarming over the words “I’m amazed.” And this was quite a
large silk screen—
Bailey: [01:25:53] Yes, it was big.
Eichengreen: [01:25:53] —and many colors. Anyway, I think at that time, I think the sale was
like $1,200, which for us that was a very large amount. In addition, as I was writing up the sale,
they wanted three ants for a quarter. So, we here we had a sale for $1,200 with three ants for a
quarter. And that was the high and low of the store.
Vural: [01:26:23] That must have been fun.
Bailey: [01:26:24] Yes, that was—one of the concepts was high and low and it was your
definition what was high and what was low, whether it was just price or whether it was character,
quality, or whatever. But we had that range there.
Eichengreen: [01:26:48] And I think we also were very egalitarian, so that we really wanted
people to have a visual experience. And I know that people they thought of us as a knickknack
store, but the philosophy behind the store was so much wider.
Bailey: [01:27:10] Oh, and the reason it was called Mythology for me as an artist space
transferred to the store as a retail space because the things we sold were all visual. There was
nothing abstract. Everything was made from somebody looking at something in the world and
then making it, like the insect with the blinking eyes. And it became collective unconscious
thinking about what an insect looks like. And we had that one, which was expensive, but we also
had plastic flies that looked totally realistic that were fifty cents. So, you could have that insect

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on your lapel for a few hundred dollars and you could also have some flies that you could take to
somebody’s house and scatter them around.
Eichengreen: [01:28:23] Pennies, Bailey [chuckles]. They were pennies.
Bailey: [01:28:27] Pennies? What do you mean?
Eichengreen: [01:28:28] The flies cost—you know, we sold them for pennies [chuckles].
Bailey: [01:28:35] Yes, well. Whatever.
Vural: [01:28:36] So, can you tell me a little bit more about Joseph Campbell and the collective
unconscious? I do know it a little bit, but it would be really great to have you express what about
his ideas spoke to you and how that translated into the space.
Bailey: [01:28:55] Well, the principle of collective unconscious images is more Jungian than
Campbellian, but it doesn’t matter, they overlapped and they actually saw the world pretty much
the same. But it just meant that the image that someone makes for a product is usually done by
an anonymous worker in a shop or a factory and they, like the cartoonists, combine this concept
of a pig into something that can be manufactured. It might be a tin toy that has a sound—you
wind it up and it oinks and maybe it walks. Or it could be a beautifully shaped piggybank that is
spray-painted, like you get at Coney Island where you do the ring-toss or whatever. Or it could
be a book about a piggy that went to market or whatever.
[01:30:30] And we could put a number of piggies together on a table and have a whole sense of
piggies. There’s a piggy chef that we still have, which is, oh, about eight inches tall, made of tin,
made in Japan, and has a whole chef’s outfit on, holds a frying pan in one hand and there is an

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egg that’s separate, but beautifully painted, that he flips in the air after you wind him up, or it
may be battery-operated, I don’t know. But we had—that could be on the table, too.
[01:31:26] And they’re all interpretations of a pig. I mean, we could have piggy erasers. You
know, as long it was an image that somebody conceived from their knowledge and their ideas of
what a pig is, and a kind of perfect pig in a way, then it became suitable for us to buy and have in
the store. If it was a crummy pig—and crummy is, you know, a matter of taste—it wouldn’t
get—we wouldn’t buy it, we wouldn’t put it in the store. If it was poorly made, if it just didn’t
have any real character or emphasis of quality of a pig, we wouldn’t buy it, wouldn’t make it to
the store.
Vural: [01:32:20] So, you had an aesthetic sort of a standard that things either—
Bailey: [01:32:24] Yes, exactly.
Vural: [01:32:25] —lived up to or didn’t.
Bailey: [01:32:26] Exactly. And that’s in a sense I think one of the things that made the store,
and the two of us would vet an item to be sold in the store.
Vural: [01:32:40] So, what was it like to be both life partners and business partners?
Eichengreen: [01:32:48] I think I should let Bailey say that—answer that question [laughs].
Bailey: [01:32:52] [Chuckles] It was a way of life. We worked together intensely, although we
had separate activities in the store. Laurie was much better at keeping track of things and what
was going on and I enjoyed the selling and demonstrating new things that we had or just having
conversations with people about collective unconscious thinking and, you know, how it rules the
store and why these things are here, etcetera.

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[01:33:37] And also the store morphed in seasons, like all the stores do, with Valentine’s Day
and, you know, any of the major selling days. But we’d try and keep it subtler and less in-yourface what was going on and have stranger stuff for Valentine’s Day. But we also celebrated the
Day of the Dead with a huge window of skeletons and things like that and we had a lot of
merchandise that was made in Mexico with Day of the Dead characters, skeletons, hand-painted.
Eichengreen: [01:34:25] But to answer your question more directly, Bailey had his domain and
I had my domain and then we really interacted on the aesthetic of the store.
Bailey: [00:34:38] And we travelled together and we had buying trips, and they were based on
going to an event in a country where the mythology of the country and the events that were in the
back history of the country were on display. And it could be usually a festival of some kind. But
we went to Sri Lanka under the second full moon to watch a paratha in which there were
elephants dragging like circus carts behind them on which were built displays of different deities,
etcetera. That was all night for that.
Eichengreen: [01:35:44] But we came home with masks and various artifacts from that trip,
which enriched the store.
Bailey: [01:35:52] Yes, we had an exhibition of masks from Sri Lanka. We sent out a postcard.
So, that would be an event that we’d have, and would change the whole character of the store
with all these strange masks from Sri Lanka that most people never knew existed and had never
seen. And they were for sale. You could actually buy them.
Vural: [01:36:22] So, I’m aware of the time. It’s 12:30. I’m wondering should we stop and I’ll
come back another day or take a break and keep going or what’s good for you?

Bailey and Eichengreen – Session 1 of 2
Bailey: [01:36:32] 12:30. I have to be—
Eichengreen: [01:36:38] Well, you have to be someplace at 2.
Bailey: [01:36:39] At 2. And I have to leave at 1:45, and I have to eat before I go there.
Eichengreen: [01:36:46] Okay. Shall we go for another half hour?
Bailey: [01:36:48] What time is it now?
Vural: [01:36:50] It’s 12:30.
Eichengreen: [01:36:50] 12:30.
Vural: [01:36:52] What do you think?
Eichengreen: [01:36:54] Or is that too tight for you?
Bailey: [01:36:54] That’s too tight.
Vural: [01:36:55] Yes. I think maybe we should say thank you and stop—
Eichengreen: [01:37:00] Fine.
Vural: [01:37:01] —and make a date for another—
Bailey: [01:37:02] Okay.
Vural: [01:36:03] I’d like to hear lots more.
Bailey: [01:37:05] [Laughs] We can talk a lot, can’t we?! We’ve got a lot to talk about!
Vural: [01:37:09] You’re great.

44

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[END OF SESSION]

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