Sometimes (lots of the times), landlords who rent (relatively) cheap places can be difficult to get ahold of. And usually that's a bad thing. But in Bushwick, an artist and art history grad student have decided to use their absentee landlord to their advantage and turn the $833/month shipping container they're renting, which they have named "Where," into your Midwestern mother's nightmare of what Brooklyn is like. "The keys are in a lockbox attached to the door. The code for the lockbox is 0824. Our address is: 1397 Myrtle Ave. Unit 4, Brooklyn NY. Enjoy," reads the ad that they posted to Facebook, Craigslist, Reddit, distributed in pizza parlors, and left next to ATMs. What has ensued is basically what you'd expect: a bunch of weird art shit.
The proprietors, Lucy Hunter and Raphael Lyon, know that what has been happening to the room — graffiti, shows, a surprising amount of body painting — is probably against some of the rules, whatever the rules are, but they're not convinced that it's illegal. "You're allowed to give your friends keys to open your apartment. No money is being traded. It's hard to pinpoint what is illegal." Hunter told The New Yorker. "Even if someone wanted to burn it down, it's not going to spread anywhere, because it's only a metal box. It's no more dangerous than Airbnb."
· A Free Place in Bushwick [The New Yorker]
· Where [Facebook]
· Quasi-Legal Brooklyn 'Studio' Opens to All, 'Art' Ensues [Curbed National]
· Oh, Bushwick [Curbed]