CULTURE      CRITIQUE      MUSIC      FASHION      ART

Love, Sex and Rock & Roll, Dimes Square dystopia,  the Man Upstairs?…

SAY LESS



Photos by Kaden Bard Dawson

Words by Danielle Gadus

11.28.24



“I want to be a part of it. I want to be here.”

Noah Berghammer: a man of many hats. An embodiment of the multi-hyphenate, downtown ‘creative’ who seems to have their toe in a million boiling pots all at once. Noah operates as a writer / producer / musician / photographer / and most recently, gallery owner with his storefront community space Priv.y - an extension of Priv.y creative agency and production company.

Our interview was less of a sit-down conversation and more of an attention deficit stream of consciousness while navigating hectic downtown streets. We leave Noah’s studio and fall down the narrow Chinatown stairwell onto the bustling corner of Forsyth and Grand, magical coordinates in which you can encounter a vast spectrum of human life/dynamics/emotion and almost certainly run into a couple friends.

Noah is moving fast, and I mean fast. We’re heading to the Chinese Mexican deli on Broome Street to grab a bodega coffee and light for his cigarette. Already three steps behind the man, we fight to keep up with his pace - both on the sidewalk and in dialogue. 


Within minutes we dive into:

→ the underground

→ renaissance

→ getting sweaty / smoking cigs inside

→ rock revival

→ recognizing poetry

→ New York in the 70s

→ New York in the 90s

→ being a fan of your friends


Having moved to the Big Apple just two short years ago, Noah seems to have found a groove in his role of fostering and building the sort of scene he once desired to taste. He explains how participation is the number one thing to community build.



“One thing I’m really proud of is that I’ve been relentless out in the world trying to make meaningful connections with people that I am inspired by… that I feel are integral in my life and, I think that other people can call it corny or social feeding, but I just love hearing stories and how they got to where they are and what inspires art.


I don’t really give a fuck about art in the largest form - I care about the people making the art more and I always have.”



At some point in the evening, with just an acoustic guitar and an unabashed voice, Noah blesses us with an impromptu performance of a song he’d written called Seward Park. He sings, “I wish I had a million dollars and nothing to do.” A self-proclaimed pessimistic view of how people often paint the downtown creative scene today: just privileged ‘cool’ kids sharing tallboys in the park. The melody and sequence of events are truly an early-aughts, HBO series, wet dream fantasy soaked with an OG Matt and Kim flavor.

This perspective is what shaped the view of New York City for so many of us who grew up elsewhere, in some place far far away called the Midwest. It fueled the illusion of a fantasy land downtown as a creative mecca of the world. But the experience of coming to encounter this Holy Land for yourself goes deeper than any screenwriter could contain.




We chat with Noah about his many hats, how these varied creative modalities fuel each other, and his life journey at large.

Q: Let's talk about Downtown / Dimes Square… We’ve said the word Dimes like 8 times in conversation already. [For those out there unfamiliar with the location, Dimes Square is a microneighborhood between the Lower East Side and Chinatown in New York that references the Dimes Deli and Restaurant, which is located at the intersection of Canal Street and Division Street.] What does this geographic description mean to you?

A: I live on [redacted] street which means basically that I have a straight line from apartment to gallery to studio, [...] my entire life consists of 7 square blocks, and I find it very… contrary to how most people find this neighborhood, I find it has a neighborhood feel in a real way.

I grew up in the Midwest and moved here two years ago […] I made a commitment that being downtown is everything to me. So much of my envisionment of New York and being an artist was, like, it took place here. The people who are from here, there’s a reason that they’ve stayed. You can’t kill it. It’s gonna ebb it’s gonna flow, it is just how it is, there's never gonna be a moment when it’s not New York.




Q: How do you respond to the critiques of change?
A: Even in this idea that it was better back then… said fucking who??

Every moment, every time has its goods and its bads. I can’t go back and live in the 70s in New York. I can live in 2024 in New York and I can hopefully instigate some semblance of good art, good music, good taste, good people, and I truly believe [...] if you’re paying attention, if you go see shows and you go dance with people you love and you go drink at your bar that you get to choose, you see it all.

People love to say “Clubs were so much better, nightlife was so much better…” then start a fuckin new club! You get to be in the driver's seat of that. New York is so great because it cuts the bullshit; it’s not just surface level.




Q: “Dimes” generates so much different energy than when you’re saying ‘the lower’ ‘the Lower East Side’ ‘the triangle’ ‘two bridges.’ Dimes is not just geographic. It’s social, it’s a conversation. How do you respond to the connotation both online and IRL?
A: I discovered Dimes Square 5 months before I was able to move to New York. I would take the train in the city once or twice a week and just get coffees with people or whatever. Through that, I knew enough people where I started to give a stimulus of what's going on in the cool parts of New York.

I started following Matt Weinberger, he had like no followers at the time but he was featured in this Cut article, Brock Colyar wrote it. [Brock] used to have this column in the New York Magazine called ‘Are U Coming’ like I'm going out are you coming? It was this post-Covid revival of New York nightlife. It was this whole kind of thing, he followed around the Cobra Snake on a night out, I remember reading this article like oh my God I missed it.

I remember being in Minneapolis being like, “Fuck, oh my God, I missed the whole Dimes Square-ian renaissance!” And so I started asking those questions, maybe the “moment” had passed but now there's infrastructure. I don’t care if I'm post-Dimes, I still wanna be part of this downtown thing. There's this thing of: Where do you go after the opening? Where do artists hang out? I wanted to say something or I didn't know, I just really wanted to be here.




Q: There’s a lot of negative criticism of this infrastructure. How are you working within it to generate positive community outcomes, specifically with Priv.y?

A:  [I think that there can be] this outside out view that I don't care or this is just a temporary project… What’s true is that I have a lot of self-belief, I have a lot of really talented people around me. When you are driven and you have vision and you have things that you wanna do, getting people to believe in that narrative is easier than one might imagine.

Like, I don't come from money. My parents are working-class people from Wisconsin, and they’re still working. I grew up with 5 older brothers and sisters. But, I’ve always been a workhorse. I’ve always put a lot of time and effort into just doing the thing. When you do the thing long enough, people start to hear that THAT’S your vision. I had a guy who was literally one of my best friends, who constantly heard me talk about the vision of Priv.y, talk about my ideas. When we started to outgrow the studio space, he listened to me talk about expanding.

Initially, it was like maybe it’s not a gallery, maybe it’s a cafe, maybe it’s a speakeasy, but going to Serving the People [a non-profit organization and platform for creative inquiry and experimentation that hosts weekly community meetings in New York,  Los Angeles, London, Milan, Barcelona, Seattle, Paris, and Toronto with a forthcoming chapter in Phoenix, Arizona(!)] and hearing artists talk about the studio and the gallery, it seemed like the most malleable, blankest slate... Maybe that's what matters, being a blank slate.

I went to this buddies’ who works in finance. I said I have money, but I don't have nearly enough money to be a sexy candidate to anybody giving a storefront in lower Manhattan. The amount of shit I had to provide to these places to even get a meeting was crazy. I went up to him and was like, “I wanna do this thing, you work in private equity in investing, how do I pitch investors?” I studied business in college so I have some understanding of finance but I still needed direction. He took like a week and got to this place where he was like, “I wanna invest.”

This is someone who heard me for two full years, every time we would get dinner, say: “this is what progress I’m making… this is what Priv.y is… this is what my community is.” He took it upon himself to say, “I wanna be a part of this. What Priv.y really is an extension of you. I believe in you whether this gallery or whatever this thing works.”

That was the moment I was like fuck this is for real now. I can't settle down and stop working. I was doing well as a director / photographer and doing production all of a sudden, now I have other people's money and expectations - it’s really when I started taking myself seriously. It felt like wait this is fucking big time.



Q: How do you sustain yourself juggling so many projects and responsibilities in the air at once?

A: My ADHD is a huge help. I started to realize I can use it as a superpower as opposed to an inhibiting factor. I realized I can do 11 different projects at the same time and nobody actually knows when they are getting done. How I sustain myself is also through the work, like I am so inspired by what I am doing, I feel so much purpose. It’s this idea that every time I’m getting something new out there, every time I’m meeting someone new, I’m finding ways to like express myself... I’m like this is so fucking exciting, how could I stop?

Granted, though, I started to realize it’s actually not sustainable to work at the pace at which I was working: not eating, not sleeping, and not even realizing it. Like, this is fucking amazing…. and like I'm gonna have a heart attack. All my friends were like Noah you’ve gotta slow down, I was like ohh, right. Maybe I do. So it’s finding this balance.

But my work and my life are truly the same. If I'm throwing an event until 2 in the morning and I have a meeting the next day at 9am, it just is that way. And a lot of my deals get made at the bar or concepts get done at openings or shows. It’s all of the time, and it's all of the time honestly by accord; I'm choosing to do this. It’s really hard to turn it off when everything you do, you do it then you see a direct positive impact on a community.  Like if I can pay someone’s rent by getting them a job it’s the fucking coolest thing. So it’s like I never really get to turn my phone off or not work… I'm always doing that thing.  




Q: I’m curious about how you move in this world notorious for making late-night deals over key bumps and filled with seedy personalities. You're very much not that and very open about your faith. Could you say more about this?

A: So my dad is Jewish and my mother was Catholic. We were raised Catholic because that's where the best schools and the best sports were. K - 8th grade in Catholic School, I just never felt like I fit in. I felt like I'm a part of this other thing [faith at large], but I don't feel like I fit in in the church. I feel close to God but not to places where God is supposed to be.

A lot of my origin story with my faith was feeling like an outcast. I was quite a trouble maker. I grew up really fast, I was like… fucking skateboarding, swearing and having sex and hanging out with older kids. I was literally 12 thinking like “I'm going to hell!” There's no way that God could be that way! Then I grew up and started to realize: I get to choose how I have a faith base and I actually get to read and figure it out. I went to college and plugged into this really great church. I realized this is real sustainability, this isn't judgment, this isn't condemnation, this is love that is just love.

When I started to realize that God is just love, I realized that I can move differently, I wanna be an athlete, I wanna be an artist. These aren’t places where people perceive that God is always existing. My business partner who actually invested in Priv.y, we connected through church. I realized there were so many people who were like “How Christian are you?” I started to realize that’s not what God cares about at all. I don’t look at deals made over key bumps like pffff, I look at it like oh that’s my friend.

I got a great piece of advice: I had a close friend that said “Don’t feel like you need to be the brightest light in the room, let people notice you being different and let them ask why. What are you doing that’s different? That’s not using drugs to get by to keep this pace. It’s your life you’ve gotta live it, you’ve gotta live it healthfully.”

… there's actually a whole part of the Bible that’s actually telling you to have good sex. The idea that He's some terrible villain who wants to watch you rot in hell?! No no no – it’s not true. I can just be this guy who is an artist, who does go to the bar, who is around Dimes Square, who is at these parties and I can just be different; I can just do my own thing. Because in New York and in this world you’ve always been able to do your thing. Whether or not people think it’s cool, totally up to them.

But, I feel comfortable in my own skin that I can be who I wanna be because my foundation is there. I'm not an insecure person and I'm not insecure in my faith.



Q: Tell us more about your most recent project in relation to supporting the downtown creative community.
A: I want to do that in a way that’s sustainable. If Priv.y is there forever, people come and go. We may have 300 people there for a gallery opening, then 12 people there for a sound bath, And I love the idea of operating beyond the scene. So I was thinking to myself, how do I make a space that every time I go there, I feel that I’m a part of a community? I'm a part of this thing being built. That’s what I try to give to people. People who are coming to Priv.y are people that I know and that I love, like these people are not strangers. So much of Dimes Square is like people just coming for the hype. My community, I want to be beyond the hype.

The white wall space can be poetry readings, it can be live music, I want it to be all of the things that I love and host all of that. I don’t take this lightly, knowing the Hester street that came before me is important, and even like [working with] Leisure Center, the guys next store, that’s community. I don’t see having a space where I have a space lightly, it’s a huge responsibility.