On one of the last remaining blocks that still feels like Little Italy, through any other doorway, up all the stairs to the top floor, a painter’s studio sits, frozen in amber, a portal back to a bygone Manhattan.
For half a century beginning in 1958, the painter Frank Herbert Mason used the fifth story of 385 Broome St. as his atelier, filling the cavernous, uninsulated floor-through loft with his life, work and memories from star-studded soirees.
When Frank — a legendary teacher, revered painter and ardent opponent of over-cleaning art — passed away in 2009, his widow, Anne, preserved the space just as he left it — as though Frank might again appear and take a brush to the canvas once more.
But this portal to a New York of yesteryear will soon close, for the landlord has recently raised the rent by about 25%, much more than Anne can afford, and now she and Frank’s beautiful relics must find new homes.
“There’s been no reason to change anything,” Anne Mason, 88, recently explained from beneath the skylight her late husband soldered into the ceiling over the course of two 1960s evenings, once on Chinese New Year, once on San Gennaro.
“There’s no way to recreate it.”
Anne met Frank in Italy, 1964, after she ran away from a job she hated in the midwest and got one working as a switchboard operator in Rome, where Frank happened upon her.
When she followed him back to New York, he’d been in the Broome St. space for eight years but wasn’t yet using it as a home, only a studio.
“I used to go down to the second floor to shower,” Anne smiled, the building having then been full of friendly artists but lacking plumbing, a kitchen or walls.
Members of the artistic elite would constantly pass through their 2,500-square-foot penthouse, getting their portraits painted by Frank, playing the grand piano ahead of performances at Carnegie, and using the Masons’ frequent salons as opportunities to network and fundraise.
“[Salvador] Dalí perched himself in front of a statue and [his wife] Gala hit everyone for money,” Anne recalled of one soiree in which the surrealist Spaniard’s wife was impressively savvy at canvassing the crowd for wealthy benefactors.
Starry-eyed apprentices, too, were a perpetual presence in the loft, as well as the building’s fourth floor, which for years Frank used for storage and an extension of his upstairs studio.
“Hundreds, maybe thousands of students came through here,” estimated one of those students, the painter John Varriano, who began visiting the apartment in 1989.
He remembers wild parties and long wintertime drawing sessions, everyone gathered around the pot-bellied stove for warmth.
“You felt you really connected to a lineage in this space,” Variano told The Post on a recent afternoon, an angel announcing the birth of Jesus’ behind him in one of Frank’s huge paintings.
“By being immersed in it, you felt you were part of it.”
Another student and Frank’s grandnephew, the video producer Scott Mason, studied under his uncle at the Art Students League before moving onto the building’s second floor in 2004, initially helping fix leaks and mop the stairs and then, after his uncle’s death, helping Anne keep up the place.
Scott’s rent was also recently raised exponentially, so he bought a house in Pittsburgh, where most of Frank’s artifacts will soon be moved to.
“It was heartbreaking to leave,” said Scott, who co-wrote a documentary about his grand uncle’s life.
Even after the apartment is soon brought into modernity, a little bit of Frank’s legacy will continue to live on downstairs, in New York City’s oldest Italian bakery, where three of his landscape paintings still hang, on permanent loan.
“Frank was bigger than life, an amazing character,” recalled Vince Zeccardi, the youngest generation of his family to run Caffe Roma since it first began slinging cannoli in 1891.
“I still miss him,” said 87-year-old Buddy Zeccardi, Vince’s father, who Frank would often chat with for hours over coffee and upstairs in the studio, where he loved to watch Frank mix his paints by hand.
“I was so sorry to see him go.”
As the unit’s lease on life runs out, Anne is unsure where she will go next — possibly to Pittsburgh — but is remarkably at peace with having to part with the apartment.
“This is not a practical place to be at my age,” she said, referring to the many stairs.
And besides, although her home of nearly six decades has managed to resist the ebb of time, it’s “a magic place,” a “carryover from another era” and she is only human.
“We change, we get older, and I think we’re happy if we adjust to it,” she told The Post.
“You can’t stay the same.”