Rundown and Cluttered, a Sacred Space for Music Prepares to Move

Four-fifty West 41st Street, a rundown blue-tiled former warehouse by the Lincoln Tunnel, is the unimpressive sort of city architecture that you walk by without noticing. A shaky elevator ride up to the sixth floor, and the rooms behind the white door hold a trove of bland metal desks overflowing with papers and office plants growing down a shelf of books.

There are dusty carpets, a broken toilet, a stained brown couch and no potable water. But to musicologists professional and amateur, this is sacred space: home of the cryptically named Association for Cultural Equity, better known as the Alan Lomax archive for the folklorist who traveled to the Soviet Union, Haiti, the Deep South and points across the globe to preserve musical traditions on tape, film and paper.

Now the association is moving to smaller digs across town, at a building on 25th Street and First Avenue that, like the 41st Street building, is part of the Hunter College campus. As it prepares to relocate in June, the association is shedding some of its scruffier assets in a rolling eBay auction.

The new offices will be sleeker and far more organized. And while Lomax’s beat-up office guitar, Tandberg tape recorder and Steenbeck film editing table have gone on the auction block, the archive’s continuing effort to digitize its holdings assures the preservation and dissemination of the historic recordings and books. The items being sold, the association says, are relatively insignificant pieces of Lomax’s legacy and not worth preserving with the rest of the archive, much of which has gone to the Library of Congress.

Association for Cultural Equity Alan Lomax in 1942.

Still, said the archive’s curator, Nathan Salsburg, something will be lost in the move: a physical connection to the man who recorded Woody Guthrie and Muddy Waters, and the feel of being a guest in Lomax’s overflowing living room, which he schlepped with him around the city to various apartments until his death in 2002.

“It’s almost a shantytown feel,” Mr. Salsburg said the other day, “perfect for Alan’s work.”

Tacked on the wall are photos of Italian tuna fishermen singing and Mississippi Fred McDowell on the porch of a sharecropper’s shack. A visitor may hear an Uzbek folk ensemble or a prison chain-gang chant. Overstuffed filing cabinets painted powder blue, Lomax’s favorite color, are marked with typewritten notes like “ideas unrealized” or scrawled with names of countries. Shelves groan under the weight of old 78 rpm records.

By the brown couch sits a blue electric typewriter. A cache of Debbie Gibson LPs testifies to the breadth of Lomax’s curiosity.

Matthew Barton, who toiled for long hours in the space as Lomax’s assistant, remembered lonely moments surrounded by tapes and records.

“Then I realized I wasn’t alone,” said Mr. Barton, now a curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress. “I had the whole world for company at this place.”

Lomax recorded New York, too. The archive holds his tape of a street performer “hamboning” a version of “Jingle Bells” by rhythmically slapping his arms and legs, as well as letters from New York friends, like Woody Guthrie, who wrote to tell Lomax of his son Arlo’s first 13 steps in their home on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island.

Anna Lomax Wood, the association’s president and Lomax’s daughter, said that when she is in the office, “I still feel him there.”

Still, she said her father would be proud that the archives are now reaching more people online than ever before. His life, she said, was a constant state of migration as he found bigger and bigger spaces to hold his archives. This will be the first time he won’t go with them.