[uplifting music]
[Chrissy] So this is Vanessa,
this here is Desus,
and then this is Charles.
This is me, Chrissy,
and here, set in here is Ann, the OG.
The building, it has really good cheekbones.
Everybody’s like, what a hot building, whatever.
But it’s really about the microorganism
that’s brewing inside of it
that has been completely cultivated by Ann.
So when you’re in the building, you’re part of her psyche.
[Ann] My name is Ann Ballentine,
and I bought this wonderful candy factory,
originally it was a candy factory, in 1979.
[Chrissy] This whole building is,
it’s almost like her artwork.
[Artist] As long as Ann’s here,
artists will be in this building,
there’s no doubt about it.
[Artist] I’ve had a studio here for 33 years.
[Artist] I’ve been here for 20 years.
[Artist] 31 years.
Having the opportunity to have a studio here
and be part of that story is a intangible value
that made a big contribution in a lot of people’s lives.
The artist that was in here is a friend of mine,
and he’s a Nigerian artist, and he said, you need a studio.
And I was like, yeah, but I can’t afford it.
I was working part-time, I was fresh outta school,
I was finding my way.
He said, look at it as an artist in residency,
and that was my plan.
I had enough, based on my calculations,
to be here for about maybe three and a half to five months,
give or take, depending on the kind of budget cuts I made.
It’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Here we are 20 plus years later and I’m still in this space.
[tranquil music]
I try not to be over the top, like keeping everything,
but it’s helpful to have stuff around for me.
It starts having like energy
or feeling like it needs to be,
and then like, oh, in a year I’ll use it.
Ann is…
I’m like cool with characters.
I really like characters,
so I’m a good fit for the building, I think.
I don’t know, we just like say things.
I like talking to her.
I mean, she’s like, we’re both kinda nutty,
or just say the thing that’s like, ah.
[Ann laughing]
I just always have all these different ideas
that I wake up with in the morning.
And the stained glass, I had bought a lot of stained glass.
I just love purple, I don’t know.
I just loved it always,
and never changed to any other color.
Let’s see. We’ll go in here, the living room.
I love it here.
This is where I first was standing over here
when I said, I love this,
and then I had no money and I’m like,
what are you stupid or something, what are you doing,
and I bought it.
The first time I came to the building
was when I was a junior at Pratt
and I was actually studying industrial design,
and my furniture teacher was Tim Richards,
and he’s still in the building.
And so, he had his whole class come and see his shop.
And I remember getting to the building,
the door opens, and I remember crossing the threshold,
like so creepy.
It’s like when you meet somebody
that you love and you’re like, and then I knew.
But here’s something really cute that happened.
Do you see? So this guy, if we go over to her studio,
it’s grown through the fucking wall and is coming down.
It’s like the symbol of like…
I can show you guys. It’s open.
Look at this.
It just did it on its own, you know?
You know, Ann is like a really great friend of mine.
I didn’t expect that to happen. I’m sorry.
She’s always just a person
that has been around when you need her, you know?
I get emotional about it because to have this space
and then to be able to stay here,
most of my friends, they’re in Dumbo,
and they all got kicked out.
So they were always in transition,
like where can I get to my studio and whatever.
And I’ve always just had this, I’ve had this place to go to,
and it’s all because of Ann.
Ann really was the one.
I mean, she kept on saying to me.
I remember her, she’d always say,
Oh, you and Kathy would get along really well.
Oh, you and Kathy.
You know Kathy downstairs.
Hello.
She took me around the building when I had just moved in
and showed me Kele’s space
while he was working in his studio,
and then we kept seeing each other
and that was what happened.
[bright music]
So my mom works with clay.
When I come in here, I just get new ideas for my art.
I started to do these pieces
that were about cause and effect relationships,
and this idea of like happenstance
and how other people affect each other.
[slow cello music]
I’ve been in the building five years, four or five years.
A friend of mine, the painter M P Landis,
had a studio here actually next door to where we are now,
and we were working on a stop animation film of his painting
that went along with my music.
[chaotic trumpet music]
Later, M P had kidney failure,
and I ended up being a match as a donor
and ended up donating my left kidney.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what to say.
Tom saved my life.
It’s like…
And he was so generous in the way he treated it
like another collaboration.
The 10 months that I was on dialysis,
I would go to the studio
and I barely had the energy to go up the steps,
but I just had to work.
It’s like the only thing that kinda kept me going.
It’s kind of like I needed to stay in touch
with my creative process
to understand why I’m still bothering
going through all this.
And when he left to move to Portland, Maine,
I inherited the space.
And I often say that I traded a kidney for this space,
and it was worth it.
I do know how to pick people somehow.
I do have intuitive things,
and I know what questions to ask.
I called the number and it was Ann,
and we had a conversation for about three hours.
I have never done a credit report
or any financials on anybody who’s rented here.
She was like, So like, well, what’s your sign?
I was like, Sagittarius?
She’s like, Hmm.
She’s like, Yeah, I have no room right now.
But you know, I think you could work on the third floor.
And I was like, okay.
One of the prerequisites, which I didn’t really know,
was, she wants you to love this space.
And she’s like, Hmm, unless you say those words.
So I was like, I love it, I want it.
They will look around and they will say, I love this.
And I always go back to the building when I said,
I love this.
I spent 27 years teaching middle school children
how to play with clay, and hopefully
express themselves creatively
and get some of their ya-yas out.
Like I used to tell the kids at school,
how often do you get to do something
and it is the only thing
that is out there in the world like it?
Even if it is derivative from something else,
this one is yours,
this is the one that you did.
So I try and combine the smooth and the rough,
and just playing with these organic shapes
and keeping myself out of trouble.
[slow quirky music]
There were years when I didn’t know what to do next
I made something of this building.
My happiest moments have been standing at the sink
and thinking, this looks like the painting,
other than vice versa, you know what I mean?
Ann is, when I talk about her,
I haven’t found the right word
to describe what she is for us.
Because if you say landlady, it just,
it has nothing to do with what she is for us.
Yoo-hoo.
Chrissy sometimes says fairy godmother,
which I think is probably the most appropriate thing,
because I cannot imagine what my adult life would have been
if I hadn’t met her.
I’m like, is she a benevolent mayor?
What is she? I don’t know, but it’s so many things.
[rousing music]
I asked my mother once,
if she had to describe me in one word, what would it be?
And this was, I was grown and everything.
And she said, Particular.
I was born in Virginia.
I didn’t realize that I was not supposed to be in Virginia.
Only later did I realize, what was I doing there?
And I got married after college,
and then we moved to New York
and he took a job on Wall Street.
And so, we got a divorce.
I didn’t really get child support, so it was hard.
You just keep working.
I can sell.
I was selling two houses a week.
In one year, I made over a hundred thousand dollars,
and this was the year that, I kept this New York magazine,
baseball players made a hundred thousand.
Jane Pauley, who was the co-host of the Today Show,
made a hundred thousand.
So, I was very good.
I believe I am.
Yes, I know I am the person
who has been in this building for the longest at this point.
I was in ninth grade when I decided
that I wanted to be an industrial designer.
And I lived in Puerto Rico, that’s where I was born.
Hammer and saw from my first toolkit,
which I got when I was five.
As the city changes, real estate values change
and developers come in.
So all of a sudden, the taxes just started jumping up.
It was just crazy, I mean, just crazy,
just thousands and thousands of dollars.
It would force her to either sell it,
or fetch much higher rents.
And I don’t pass the taxes along to people.
I could.
That’s what people do.
So Ann approached me and she said, can we go together
and put a group of people to go together
so people can attest?
We went to city hall for the hearing
with a lawyer in the finance department.
I think it was, I guess, in the end somewhat effective.
It did result in her being cut some kind of break.
Doesn’t sound like it was anything earth shattering,
but it helped,
and it actually in a way kinda got everyone even closer.
Because it’s sort of like,
now you feel like you’re kind of fighting for it.
It entails someone who’s not as money driven,
because you’re not gouging people for huge rents,
and it requires being determined to do that
over a long stretch of time.
[Kele] How the hell did you keep up with all of this,
walking around with like fire inspectors,
and dealing with the insurance?
And then you start to realize,
oh yeah, so Ann’s in her 80s.
My mother wouldn’t be doing this right now.
So it took me a little while to learn this,
’cause there’s no official bulletin board, you know?
But when I first moved in,
I would notice that Ann would come
and she would get all her groceries from the car,
and she would bring them in with her cart
and she would leave them downstairs.
And then I sort of realized at some point
that all of the tenants
on their way up to their various studios
would grab a bag and carry it up a flight of stairs,
or carry it up two flights of stairs,
or carry it up three.
And then, within a couple hours,
all of her groceries would be upstairs,
and it’s like this elevator system.
There was an elevator at some point,
but now there’s this kind of community elevator
that carries everything up.
Yeah. So Ann stopped me one day on my way in the door
and said, oh, I got these for everybody’s windows.
They’re called witch bowls,
and they’re supposed to be hung at the window
to keep the evil spirits out.
So for some reason I’m like,
oh my God, I love that.
I haven’t seen the other ones.
There’s one in every studio, right?
Everybody has one, yeah.
She can’t replace her elevator.
You know why she can’t replace her elevator?
Because she gives it all to the people here.
She doesn’t charge that much.
Once a person’s in, they’re in.
I mean, I took over from somebody
who was here for 25 years, and that was lucky.
So without her, who knows, you know?
So this to me is so peaceful.
You know, I used to, with the BQE,
when I first bought the building, it was very odd,
I used to go to the fire escape door
and I turned around like this
and I pretended that it was the ocean,
and I really thought it was the ocean.
It sounded like the ocean.
But now it doesn’t bother me anymore.
It’s like I sort of think it’s part of life.
I think that the Dalai Lama, they call the oceanic master,
and there’s this notion of like you’re on the sea
when you’re kind of in the zone, and it’s this great ocean,
and it’s this idea of floating
on this kind of infinite possibility.
This project here
is a waste of time.
But it may have potential.
[tranquil music]
[Ann] There’s so much love in this building.
That’s the thing about it all.
It’s not just like, oh, you need help?
It’s really like, I love you, do you need help?
It’s like, I love you. I love you, I love you.
How unusual is that,
that you have a building where everybody loves everybody?
I mean, come on.
[rousing music]
♪ You’ve been here before ♪
♪ You’ve opened the door ♪
♪ You walked straight on through ♪
♪ There’s something to do ♪
♪ And nothing is wrong if nothing is right ♪
♪ We’re happy now, and yes we practice magic ♪
