Bushwick Estate

Jan 07, 2010 by Will Yakowicz

Welcome to Surreal Estate.

Walking along Thames Street in Bushwick is lonely and cold. But some things that seem to warm my heart are the five Boar’s Head delivery trucks waiting to be filled with delicious deli meats in a parking lot and a motorcycle repair shop that seems to be bad enough for any motorhead.

But this is not what I am looking for tonight. I am looking for a group of people that share everything. Literally. Behind one of the three unmarked doors on this street are 38 people who share a living space, food, ideas, money, clothes, throw some of the most underground parties in the city, and are a registered non-profit. I am looking for Surreal Estate, a three-floor labyrinthine loft. A modern day commune, a very cheap and “green” way to live off the city, or a place to party.

I choose the middle door and walk up wooden stairs and hear the thud thud thud of music. St. Ides bottles litter the hallway. On the wooden door, there’s no doorknob, but rather a circular hole with the words “Glory Hole” scribbled underneath. Unwillingly, I stick my finger through the glory hole and pull.

Freakin’ Freegans

The ideology of the commune is sharing. Sharing is a rule in America that almost every kid who went through kindergarten grew up learning, but very few actually obey. In Surreal Estate sharing is caring and they do it very well. All 38 residents contribute $500 a month, cook, clean, help with repairs, and help collect food. A pile of free stuff (clothes, accessories, lamps, air mattresses) is also in the common room to either add to or take from. Food is either bought from food Co-Ops or retrieved from any one of the 28 dumpsters the collective has mapped out around the city.

“We keep a balance of resources. We share money, space, and food, our living space here is a big metaphor for how the planet Earth works,” said Darrell a 33-year-old who used to work as a chemist for Johnson & Johnson and who has been helping run the collective for the past seven months.

The kitchen in the common room has two refrigerators, a lot of counter space, and large wooden shelves that are stacked with industrial sized bags of rice, flour, wheat, yeast, cereal, corn, and spices. The two high metal tables have two black trash bags filled with bagels, which attracts many hungry residents.

In the kitchen two Argentine girls are making empanadas. A couple other residents come to see what all the fuss is about. Lucy, a 24-year-old who has been living here for a year said she sees herself living this way for the rest of her life. She was looking for a cool and radical way to live and then she found Surreal Estate.

“Living here is all about saving resources and money and having a lesser impact on the world. It’s a way of supporting others and having them support you. I would not like to live alone,” said Lucy.

Guinea Pigs

The scene here is a big experiment. There are living quarters for everyone, two stages and venues for bands and deejays, two libraries, three kitchens, and a recording studio. Surreal Estate hosts yoga classes, feeds the homeless every week, and also host’s Bushwick’s Food not Bombs.

But how much can people share without going mental? How close can people become? How community minded can people be without losing themselves? There is as much public space as there is private. Everyone has separate rooms or lofts, or nooks throughout the three floors and you often hear people looking for one another to no avail.
But one thing is for certain: it is a multi-cultural atmosphere with bright people who want to do something different and important, find the boundaries of the human condition, as well as improve it by giving to the community. Robin Benton, a middle aged man who gave me a tour of the loft said Surreal Estate contributed $25,000 to charities last year.

“We are a no name non-profit that is trying to do the right thing. We are people who try to do things about things, if people are hungry we feed them,” said Benton.

Benton, a short Latino man wearing an inside out tie dye sweatshirt, said he was brought to the collective to help diversify it. The a year and a half ago it was mostly straight white males, and now there are African-Americans, Europeans, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians, and transgenders all living and working together to help Surreal Estate become a big and more influential community force.

“We are a big social experiment and a successful melting pot,” said Benton.

The experiment seems to be successful and the living quarters seems to be as close as close can be. In every room you can see bunches of people eating, reading, painting, and talking excitedly.

“There are population densities in this city that we go beyond. How close can people live together? We are probably the closest you can be,” said Darrell.

But other residents don’t think this is an experiment, but rather a natural way to live.

“This is the most natural way of living. Humans did not evolve to live in nuclear families. It is unhealthy without the extended family; people need contact. We all are one big extended family,” said Dan a middle-aged man with steel rimmed glasses and a bald head.

Collectivize for the future

Most residents believe collective living is the wave of the future. Why? I asked. Benton then asked if I ever read the newspaper. I said sometimes. Lucy said resources and food are beginning to dry up. Big farming is no longer going to work with the changes in the environment and the economy. The answer is to work together as a team and personalize food and resources.

“People will have to rely on other people to be able to live. The new wave is going to be what we are doing; collectivize and localize our food, resources, and tasks in order to live,” said Lucy.

The group is yearning for something new, not just the status quo, but something new within a world of pacifists inside a world of capitalism and corporations, which is America. The residents want to make their food, government, community, and money personal and distance themselves from impersonal federal government, racist legal systems, and prejudice social folkways and mores.

“This is a group of people in the middle-to-upper class, second-generational, I’m-too-tired-of-the-system,” Darrell said. “The residents here have realized things in their life are not going as planed and this is a way to make something happen with their lives.”