Call it the rape of Carnegie Hall.
For more than a century, there were 165 landmark stu dios atop the Midtown cultural center. Norman Mailer, Marlon Brando, Lucille Ball, Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe and other luminaries lived or worked there.
Today all but six of the studios’ residents (the few with rent control) have moved out, their colorful spaces turned into bland commercial offices.
The people who lived there — some for 40 years or more — and their battle to stop their evictions are chronicled in the documentary “Lost Bohemia,” directed by Josef Astor, who lived in one of the studios for 20 years.
He takes viewers on a poignant tour of the pre-office spaces, introducing their elderly inhabitants, including New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham.
Eccentric, 98-year-old Editta Sherman, a portrait fotog who moved into her studio in 1949, is defiant. “They’re waiting for me to go, but I’m going to outlive them all,” says the woman known as “the Duchess of Carnegie.”
In the end, however, she was forced to move — another victim of the never-ending struggle between art and commerce.