A week after the September 11 terror attacks, Lat Naylor closed on his Bolton Hill townhouse. In February, he moved from San Francisco, struggling with a long-distance divorce, a change of career, and a lack of funds. Built in the 1870s, the building had been cut into a warren of tiny student apartments, then laid vacant for a few years with a leaky roof.
“The place was trashed, but I didn’t have enough knowledge to know how trashed it was,” he told me over coffee at his rough-hewn kitchen table. “I was depressed, I had a 220 pound dog, there was very little electricity, and there was no heat. It changed from somewhere I was going to live to my mid-life crisis sculpture project.”