Michael Pitt: on Found Art and the Price of Coffee in Brooklyn
You’re originally from West Orange, NJ, right? How long have you been in Brooklyn?
I’ve been in Brooklyn maybe 12 years, 13 years. I moved from Jersey when I was a teenager. I came to New York and I lived in, initially, the cheapest place I could, which put me in Brooklyn with most of my friends, most everyone I knew. Now I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
Where have you lived in the borough?
I think the first neighborhood I lived in was Park Slope. I rented a room with a friend that was the size of this table. Then I moved to Myrtle Avenue and Flatbush. Then I moved right around the corner. I built a loft on Gold Street, and that’s where I lived for most of the time that I’ve lived in Brooklyn. Basically at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge.
I went through 9/11 there, which was pretty crazy, watching everyone walk over the bridge, seeing the smoke. That was my home for a good ten years. Then a development company bought my loft and a couple of other buildings to put up some condos, so I moved to Bed-Stuy.
n the glory days of the 1980s. It’s still a reasonably cheap place to live. There’s a lot going on in terms of art and music. Living there, do you feel that at all?
I mean, I wasn’t here in the 80s. I was here in the 90s. But I’ve been coming in and out since I could get on a bus. So I was probably 13 when I started coming to the East Village. And then when I was about 15 or 16 it was right when Giuliani was cleaning up the streets, so to speak, and they were sweeping the East Village. So I know that I didn’t see most of the change I hear my older friends talk about, but I still saw it change pretty fast.
In New York, pretty much everything is going on in Brooklyn. The art scene is there; the music scene is there; that’s where everything is at. So if you’re going to live in New York, I can’t really imagine living anywhere else. I paint and I make music and, you know, I’m an artist. So I like my space. I can’t live in a co-op.