“Adam Purple was an opinionated, sometimes cantankerous, freethinker who lived as a squatter on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, avoided commerce and considered real estate development to be a scourge….
…By nearly any measure, Mr. Purple — a dedicated ascetic who lived in an abandoned tenement, got water from a hydrant, read by candlelight and kept warm with a wood-burning stove — is an odd symbol for a 24-story hotel with “spalike bathrooms” and a terrace swimming pool.
…“The gentrification, the consumerism, it’s the opposite of everything he stood for,” said the photographer Harvey Wang, who began documenting Mr. Purple…in 1977. “It’s just appalling.”
…Patty Astor who ran the Fun Gallery in the 80’s “…said it … hurt to see a new symbol of affluence on the Lower East Side linked in any way to the neighborhood’s grittier past.
[she]…is among those depicted in that work, and she has objected to the use of her image and Mr. Purple’s to ‘validate and advertise‘ the hotel…..”
“They are trying to say that this new, manufactured reality is O.K.,” she said. “I’m saying not in my name.”