Apartment Envy: Defying the Norms in Midtown
VALERIE REISS
01/23/2001
2800 square feet, rent under $4000. 14-foot ceilings.
You probably don’t envy the apartment John Bonafede and his four roommates share. Yes, they’ve got 2,800 square feet in midtown with a wrap-around balcony and somewhat affordable rent. But all five share one bathroom and suffer both the fear of rent hikes and the side effects of 20-somethings cohabitating outside the set of “Friends.” Abandoned sofas border the living room, dirty dishes fill the sink and the refrigerator holds five half-full jars of mayonnaise. The sight would send Monica, the “Friends” character, screaming. But Bonafede, co-founding member of this unofficial artists’ collective and a 27-year-old decorative and fine-art painter says, “I’m more concerned with what can be done in here instead of to here.”
And what he does in the space is host open mic events. These draw 50-60 people, around 30 of whom perform. Attendees are mostly artists who have been financially exiled to Brooklyn—Manhattan rents being as friendly to artists as Bush is to the Alaskan wilderness. They do everything from performance art to spirited music jams to poetry readings. Sometimes the performances are the culmination of an artist’s work, and sometimes they’re a trial run of material intended for a larger audience. Fringe Festival performers have tested series here and one act included someone who later became a cast member of “Dawson’s Creek.” The shows are taped, broadcast live on the Web and distilled on Bonafede’s Web ‘zine, slowcrack.com.
These nights, anything goes. In one piece John’s ex-girlfriend put on a CD of progressively louder swarms of insects and set a microphone next to a boiling kettle on the stove. Plastic insects glued to her face, she wore an ill-fitting bridal-like dress and sat in a circle of sand, playing morose songs on a child’s piano. When the kettle began to whistle, the CD cut off and she served everyone tea. Another time, a drummer exceeded the 20-minute time limit when he solo-jammed for nearly an hour. He was asked not to return.
When John and his ex-roommate Jim Quaranta moved in four years ago, Times Square was Manhattan’s final frontier for artists seeking affordable live/work studio space. Initially “it was nasty, nasty,” Bonafede says. He, Quaranta and the three other roommates they immediately adopted to afford the place spent $20,000 building several tiny bedrooms, installing a kitchen and shower and creating the black-box theater.
The last of Bonafede’s original roommates recently moved out. “The newer people who are artists don’t quite understand the scope of the open mics … It’s a group effort to maintain something of this nature,” he says. Now, instead of monthly, they open their space once every two or three months.
Though Bonafede would like to “make millions selling my fine art,” he knows he probably can’t stay in the apartment forever. “Artists living in Manhattan are a dying breed … [affected by] real-estate inflation and the commercialization of every neighborhood,” he says. For now, though, the artists hang on to—and celebrate on ³ a final, gritty chunk of the island, outer-borough exile be damned.