It is mind boggling that Erik Foss is not a douchebag. By any measure of his peers, Foss has all the qualifications for a master's degree in Asshole; He is equal parts mega-cool bar owner, exclusive gallerist, rising fine artist, and owner of a phone book that, if dropped into the wrong hands, would force every dirty rockstar, fashion model, and celebrity artist below fourteenth street to change their numbers. It's an intoxicating cocktail of power positions.
On paper, Foss conjures images of narcissistic excess, debauchery, and flash. A too-cool-for-you type who spends his time passing judgement and coke mirrors between successful pretty people.
Instead, on the day of our interview, Erik is wearing one of the same three pairs of jeans I've seen him in for the last four years, dirty and paint splattered, sipping a fresh squeezed juice outside of a health food store on Ludlow street, and in a characteristically pragmatic fashion statement, he is using a well worked in shopping bag for a carry-all. "This thing is great!" he grins. "I've got a digital camera in there, keys, a cell phone, a book, and Carlo McCormick's fuckin' dog food.' As surprised as anyone might be by the last ingredient, it goes understood that he would be carrying around the dog chow in his plastic man-purse of one of New York's best known art writers. That's just the kind of guy he is.
Standing six foot four and littered with tattoos, Erik Foss cuts a lanky, long-torsoed silhouette. These days he wears his jet black hair in a strict side part, or whisked straight back. He favors skinny jeans and black leather ankle boots, eyes often obscured behind a requisite pair of ray-bans floating above a warm, goofy smile. Judging a book by it's cover, his appearance is an amalgam of generations, equal parts 1910 and right here and now, a touch of nazi Germany, with a dollop of blue collar America. According to his birth certificate, however, he was born in Chicago, Illinois, some thirty odd years ago. His mother was a strict catholic, and a professional housewife, and his father a retired marine. Needless to say, flexibility was not their strongest trait, and the senior Foss' controlling hand soon reached too far. Upon his parents' split during Erik's adolescence, he and his mother moved to a trailer park in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was raised. Eventually, hemmed in by his mother's religious devotion and the meager offerings of the family's locale, he left for wilder shores, leaving behind all things Jesus and protected, arriving in New York on Halloween 1996, dead broke.
The East Village of the 90's was a different animal than it is today. It had bad breath and a mean bite - equal parts addict and freak. Today, at a glance, downtown is all corn bred farm boy and greasy yuppie, a side effect of a lethal bout of NYU infection, of which symptoms include obsessive Ugg wearing and $12 cocktails. Everything has been contaminated except a few filthy holdouts to which creatives and natives flock, where sparkly strap tops and flip flops are turned away at the door. Eight years ago, sensing the impending cultural apocalypse in the neighborhood, Foss hatched a plan. With his partner David Schwartz, a deceptively intimidating Yin to Foss’ Yang, the pair decided to open a bar and a gallery to cater to their people: open minded artist types, alternative, strange people, people who had to work to become what they are. But the dream was not without obstacle: the partners were penniless. As he explains it, “when poor people want to start a business, they don’t know rich people, yet when poor people walk into a bank asking for a loan, they call security.”
