Duchamp Upstairs, Casa Moneo Downstairs

Where Immigrant Kitchens and Avant‑Garde Experiments Shared an Address

New York’s cultural history isn’t lofty. It’s stacked, lived‑in, ordinary. Credit: Diana Perez

In New York, the avant-garde doesn’t float in some abstract downtown ether. It lives in the same buildings as everyone else, stacked on top of bodegas, nail salons, and restaurants, sharing walls, floors, scents, and the occasional bodega cat. The city’s cultural history is less a constellation and more a walk-up.

One of the quiet joys of deep research is stumbling onto encounters that look improbable until you scratch the surface and realize they were literally neighbors. Every grocery, restaurant, and pizza shop is a mystery begging to be solved, and my first steps are almost always the same: a dive into the Department of Buildings, followed by a few strategic searches through the New York Public Library and Google. Suddenly the past starts rearranging itself.

Case in point: La Casa Moneo. For the uninitiated, I’ve been reminiscing about this store that supplied ingredients for countless meals for Spaniards and Latinos in New York for decades, including my family. La Casa Moneo wasn’t just a Spanish grocery; it was a lifeline for people who crossed an ocean or a continent and hungered for a taste of home. And because in New York the mundane and the monumental share the same address, the shop also happened to sit directly beneath the studio of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century: Marcel Duchamp.

Inside Duchamp’s 3F studio at 210 West 14th Street, where he built Étant donnés in secret. Courtesy of the Duchamp Research Portal.

From 1942 through 1968, Duchamp quietly worked in a studio upstairs from La Casa Moneo at 210 West 14th Street. After surprising the art world in 1923 by announcing he would stop working to take up competitive chess (because, of course), he began building Étant donnés, an assemblage masterpiece that remained unknown until his death in 1968. Today, it’s in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Certificates of Occupancy in the Department of Buildings’ Building Information System (BIS) indicate that the top floor contained three furnished rooms. Before Duchamp moved in, the building had already housed another artist, Pompeo Coppini, who, along with his wife, Elizabeth di Barbieri, refurbished the structure. They removed the original stoop and placed the entrance beside the new storefront and ground-floor studio. Above that, on the second and third floors, was their duplex home, while the top floor held the three furnished rooms. Today, a sculpture of an artist patiently painting at an easel still stands above the entrance, a quiet marker of the building’s creative lineage.

Tympanum above the entrance at 210 West 14th Street. Credit: Diana Perez.

It’s unclear whether Duchamp rented all three rooms, but a 1943 receipt specifies a payment of $35 for the “top studio.” On the back, the agent, Paul D. Beudy, noted an additional $35 held in the bank for the following month’s rent. Then as now, you still had to prove you could pay.

Rent receipt for Duchamp’s top‑floor studio at 210 West 14th Street, dated October 1, 1943. Courtesy of the Duchamp Research Portal.

Discoveries like these are the ones that delight the researcher in me. You think, “Really?” only for the question to evolve into the answer, “Really.” What Duchamp built upstairs and what families cooked downstairs were never as far apart as they seemed. New York stacks its stories that way, bodegas below, avant‑garde experiments above, all of it quietly sharing the same address.