What Was Happening Inside That 7th Avenue/11th Street Storefront All Those Years

For decades, the storefront at the corner of 7th Avenue and 11th Street stood shuttered, until one day recently the security gates disappeared, large windows were revealed, and a new restaurant announced it was coming soon. But what had been going on inside there all that time?

Turns out, some pretty amazing art was being made.

When the building at 367 7th Avenue went on the market in 2013, we got a little peek inside, and the listing noted the space had been used as an art studio. But the details are even more interesting than we could have imagined, as The New York Times uncovered.

Leo J. Bates bought the building in 1978, and lived in apartment above the storefront with his wife. Neighbors may have seen him around the area — one tells the Times, “He was like a regular fixture on the corner,” — or known him as a landlord who rented out apartments in this and other buildings he purchased over the years. But inside the high-ceilinged retail space he was something else, an artist who ultimately painted about 400 works, but who’d last sold any of them the year he moved here from Manhattan, using the money from the sale to buy the building.

“How would I describe it to a blind person?” his wife Ellen said of his work to the Times. “I would give them a pyramid or a triangle or a branch and say, try to imagine hundreds of these on a wall.”

The tale of his life in the art scene in New York City in the ’70s, from gallery shows to state grants to solo exhibitions and then, ultimately, to the obscurity he churned away in at this corner studio, is incredible, as are the tidbits about his never wanting to rent the storefront out, despite constant requests. Bates passed away in 2013, at which point he and his wife had been living in Connecticut, and so she put the building on the market — and brought all those hundreds of paintings up to the new home, a lifetime of work that had changed dramatically when he moved to Brooklyn, and grew from there, sadly never to be discovered again by the art world.

Go give the story a read, and don’t forget it when you first sit down to eat a meal in the new restaurant, or the next time you wonder about a curious local character.