(Getty Images)
THEN & NOW: Taylor Mead — at far left in Andy Warhol’s Factory Gang in ’68 — is holding out against a developer at his Lower East Side home. (
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He’s been defying the man for half a century. Now a beloved 88-year-old poet and pal of Andy Warhol is battling his millionaire landlord on the Lower East Side.
Taylor Mead is in a game of chicken with real-estate mogul Ben Shaoul, who bought his Ludlow Street building with other tenements last summer for $16.5 million and has begun converting them to market-rate apartments.
The Lower East Side legend’s tiny fifth-floor pad is filled with dust and cockroaches, and the building is now a noisy construction site — but he refuses to leave.
“The landlord’s not speaking to me, and I’m not speaking to him,” said Mead, who has lived at 163 Ludlow St. for 34 years and pays $380 a month for the rent-stabilized home.
“They’re trying to get me through the noise, but I’m getting used to it. I pretend it’s the ocean. It’s a tsunami.”
Workers hammer outside his door from 7 a.m. till the evening. Plaster falls from his walls and roaches crawl up his legs. The kitchen sink doesn’t work.
Mead’s friends suspect Shaoul wants the poet to evict himself.
“It’s going to kill him,” said Clayton Patterson, a neighborhood activist and longtime friend. “This is elderly abuse. It’s pretty Third World when you think about it.”
Mead is one of the last survivors of the Beat generation. He performed in several Warhol movies, including an hourlong silent film that starred only his buttocks.
He was the focus of a 2005 documentary and performed weekly at the Bowery Poetry Club for nearly a decade before it closed last year.
The old artist can barely stand. When he’s not watching “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Judge Judy” and sipping chocolate milk, he’s writing poems. He can only leave his apartment, a trek from the top floor, a few times a week.
Meanwhile, Shaoul, 35, has worn out his welcome in the Lower East Side and East Village, where his Magnum Real Estate Group controls a cluster of properties.
The trio he bought last summer — 163, 165 and 167 Ludlow St. — includes 51 residential units and three ground-floor stores.
Magnum declined to provide a rent range for the gut-renovated apartments, but two-bedrooms in the area go for as much as $7,500.
Last year, Shaoul booted residents of a low-income nursing home to build luxury condos. And one of his tenants was rescued from her East 12th Street apartment last summer after construction crews ripped out her staircase.
There are at least 40 open buildings violations for his Lower East Side and East Village properties.
A Magnum spokesman told The Post the conditions of Mead’s apartment were a long time in the making and said managers alerted him fixes were needed in January.
“[Mead] indicated he did not want any work or services in the apartment. Management has scheduled an appointment with him,” the spokesman said.
The raconteur admits the apartment was in disrepair before Shaoul came but denies avoiding fixes.
“[Shaoul] is out for profit. He doesn’t give a s–t about who I am,” he said. “It’s going to be hell.”