Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

35 Enter, Hammering: STURGIS WARNER IN THE EAST VILLAGE (November 8, 2009)

1 9 1 35 Enter, Hammering Sturgis Warner in the East Village NOVEMBER 8, 2009 Sturgis Warner, a theatrical director, in his fifth-floor walk-up opposite the Public Theater in the East Village. (Robert Stolarik for The New York Times) 1 9 2 Sturgis Warner’s fifth-floor walk-up opposite the Public Theater in the East Village is filled with amazing things. A bookcase made from a door hangs from the rafters. A washing machine tucked under the bed rolls over to the kitchen and plugs into the sink. But few contraptions are more ingenious than the bathroom that converts—cue the applause!—into a fully equipped darkroom where Mr. Warner, a longtime actor and theater director, used to process the pictures he took of his own productions. Blackout curtains unfurl as if by magic, a wooden table with a sink for washing prints lowers onto the tub, and an enlarger swings down from the ceiling, thanks to an intricate system of pulleys operated by 120-pound barbells. “It took a while to figure out,” says Mr. Warner, a rangy 59-year-old with intense blue eyes, a shock of silvery hair, and a plummy voice that befits one in his profession. “But from set building, I learned to solve problems. I learned creative solutions to dealing with small spaces. It was a fun project. Actually, it was more fun to build than to do darkroom work. I think I’m a better carpenter than darkroom guy.” Mr. Warner’s skills as a builder and designer of sets are indeed formidable , and those skills served him well when it came to confronting the challenges presented by his apartment, a high-ceilinged 700-square-foot space with a complicated history. The apartment sits like a red-brick hat atop Colonnade Row, a series of marble town houses on Lafayette Street fronted originally with 27 matching Corinthian columns. When Colonnade Row was erected in 1833, there were nine houses, and an address on this part of Lafayette Street represented the height of fashion. By 1903, however, only four houses remained, and a strip once considered the city’s most elegant was experiencing hard times. As a child growing up in Washington, D.C., Mr. Warner would never have predicted that he would end up in the heart of the East Village arts scene. As a teenager, he was the ultimate jock—no surprise for a kid who eventually shot up to 6-foot-9. “I wasn’t much of an intellectual in those days,” he admits. But in college he discovered theater, and he came to New York in 1973, moving into this apartment five years later when Bruce Mailman, the East Village entrepreneur who owned the building, made him an irresistible offer. “He told me he had an apartment he wanted me to move into but said it needed massive work,” E N T E R , H A M M E R I N g 1 9 3 Mr. Warner recalls. “He promised to give me cheap rent in return for renovation.” In coming to New York and finding cheap digs in the heart of the cultural action, Mr. Warner did something that was still relatively easy for creative artists to do back in the 1970s. Initially, the rent was just $250, remarkably low even then, for what Mr. Warner describes as “a wreck.” By 1982, the rent had bumped up to $350, and there it stayed until 1999, when Mr. Warner himself, grateful for the arrangement, raised it to $500. His motives were not entirely altruistic. Eight years earlier, a modest little production by three performance artists who called themselves Blue Man Group and flung around blue paint and shaving cream had moved into the Astor Place Theater, which was housed on the building’s ground floor. (The production would quickly develop from scrawny upstart to multinational behemoth, “the most exciting thing to happen in the American theater,” as USA Today summed up its success according to the poster on the façade of Mr. Warner’s building.) The year Mr. Warner voluntarily raised his own rent, the building was poised to be sold to the show’s producers, and he surmised that a slightly higher figure would make him look more attractive to a future landlord. Over the past three decades, Mr. Warner has transformed a ramshackle space whose walls were home to armies of...