(Photos: Jesse Sposato)
Mika Tarkela and Danielle Conant began their journey like so many others before them. When they made the decision to move into a camper together, they agreed to do a trial run first. Tarkela, 40, a musician and graphic designer, told Conant, 27, a design assistant, they’d “do it for a year, and see how it went, just to prove that we could.” When the year was up, neither wanted to stop. This past June marked their two-year anniversary of living in a camper.
(Photos: Jesse Sposato)
The Bushwick Hotel has figured out something most bands only dream of: how to tour without having to pay for hotels or even sleep on friends’ couches like nearly all Brooklyn musicians do when on the road. How, you might be wondering? The Bushwick-based band (hence their name) decided to forego the whole tour van thing and went straight to an RV – RV Keitel, that is, sometimes referred to as Camper Van Beethoven. (The RV’s name is ever-evolving—the band jokes that when they go to San Francisco, they’ll call it RV Milk!)
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(Photo: Jesse Sposato)
If you’re a touring band playing a show in New York City, finding a quiet place to unwind and catch up on some alone time before your performance is not a simple task. Unless, of course, your show is at art space and residence Silent Barn. You see, Silent Barn has the Canned Ham, a 1972 Shasta “canned ham” style travel trailer that functions as part green room, part resident meeting spot and hangout.
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After being displaced from her SoHo shop in late 2010 by a landlord who wanted more in rent (Stella McCartney is housed there now) Tiffany Nicole McCrary had to think on her feet. “It literally came to me in an instant,” said the 34-year-old. Being from the South (specifically, Atlanta), where RVs are so common they blend into the scenery, the answer seemed obvious.
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I never noticed the fine print that appears on many of the “No Parking” signs (all?) posted by film studios, but the brightly colored laminated posters themselves had been decorating my neighborhood with an increasing frequency as shows like Girls and Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick found homes on the north side of Greenpoint.
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(Photo: Jesse Sposato)
In New York City, there are so many different kinds of apartments you can live in (doorman condos, cramped railroads, tiny studios, illegal lofts) and the same can be said about campers. Enter 33-year-old singer-songwriter and student Kate Devin, who, unlike any of our other Urban Campers, lives in a newish RV . . . that she finances!
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(Photo: Jesse Sposato)
Some people get stopped on the street because of the exotic dogs they walk, or the outrageous fashions they sport, but Greenpoint resident Austin Huq frequently gets stopped for his ice-cream-cone-like tan and brown ’82 Volkswagen Vanagon. With the license plate “Managon,” no less. (Get it?)
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Liam Moriarty, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer at a large Manhattan firm, doesn’t exactly seem, on paper at least, like the type to give up his Greenpoint apartment and trade it in for an RV. But that’s exactly what he did, this past summer. Then again, Moriarty isn’t your typical lawyer. He’s also worked as an archaeologist, and has had what he describes as “a bunch of odd jobs” before that, including groundskeeper at a monastery and writer for an Irish American magazine.
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A man and his van. [Photo: John (Tex) O’Connor]
(Photo: Jesse Sposato)
When I asked Ron, who’d like to remain last nameless as he looks for a new job, where his interest in collecting vintage RVs came from, he shrugged his shoulders as if the answer were obvious. “It’s a hobby. Everybody needs a hobby.” Ron, a 55-year-old handyman and musician who has called the East Village home on and off since the mid-eighties, joked, “I have a boat, a dog, two RVs, a band [Bluesco Band], all the things you can have if you don’t have a girlfriend!”
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