Struggling New York choose truck instead of apartment

NEW YORK — Their home is a purple bread truck in Brooklyn, parked between a hearse and a yellow Volkswagen bug. The 100-square-foot pad is outfitted with bamboo floors, solar power and a full-size bed.

The two artists who live here do so without a toilet or kitchen. When temperatures plummet outside, their seltzer water and soy milk freeze. They cook vegetable mini-pizzas on a wood-burning stove and shower at a nearby gym. They access the Internet on a laptop hooked up to a hand-held Treo phone that serves as a modem.

Angel Hess, a photographer, and his girlfriend, Theresa Magario, a poet and sculptor, came to New York from small towns to live big dreams. They met, fell in love and fretted over paying rent in a city where a 400-square-foot apartment can run $2,100 a month or more.

Hess, 28, couldn't afford more than $600, and Magario, 24, could pay even less. Both had bounced from room to room, living with random roommates found online.

"I was stressed out," said Hess, who also makes jewelry. "I said I'm not going to waste the money anymore. I started thinking about getting a house in another location, but I still couldn't get loans. Then I started thinking about trucks and train cars and containers — just unusual things that could be a house."

Hess found the 1953 Ford truck on eBay for $2,500. It was in Eureka, Calif. He saved for three months then bought a plane ticket for $400 to pick it up. It would become his ultimate art project. Hess painted purple53.com — his Web site that details the truck renovation — on its right side, next to the portrait of a fast-food drive-through restaurant.

It was his first time driving a stick shift. On the way back to New York, Hess stopped off to see family and friends in Arizona and Arkansas. His father helped him tear out the rotten wood in the back of the truck and replace it with oak. Hess carved a skylight in the roof.

His family didn't really understand his mobile real-estate investment.

"Why don't you buy a car, or get an apartment, or get an RV?" asked his father, Larry Hess, 58. "He's always been very creative, you know, as a kid. But this one was pretty strange."

Fits the neighborhood

The couple parked the truck on North 11th Street in the Williamsburg neighborhood. It seemed the perfect place for their bohemian lifestyle. Home to more than 60 art galleries, Williamsburg is a hipster haven of poetry readings, indie music shows, street murals and overnight draw-a-thons where dozens of artists sketch to live music as nude models pose.

At first, life for Hess and Magario inside the truck was awkward. The roof and windows leaked when it rained, and frigid wind blew through the walls. Drunken barhoppers and homeless people urinated on the tires. Hess woke up one night to the hissing sound of spray-paint defacing his home. He pounded the wall until the startled taggers ran away.

Twice a week, street-cleaning trucks rolled down the block at 3 a.m. Hess woke up to move the truck across the street, then moved it back after the cleaning crews finished. He fell back asleep, only to be awoken by garbage trucks.

After two months, Hess decided to rent a spot down the block for $200 a month in a gravel parking lot, and life became calmer. Now the couple's windshield looks out on multimillion-dollar condominium projects under way next door.

Hess told a nearby church about his living situation. The church gave him a thick down comforter and paid for a gym membership so he and Magario could take showers.

Hess installed solar panels, generators and giant batteries for electricity. He carved a hole in the ceiling for the chimney of the wood-burning stove that he bought for $250 online. He put in three layers of insulation.

How they got here

Hess had moved to New York three years earlier without a word to his family. He left Arizona, where he attended Collins College, earning a degree in visual and graphic arts. When his father found out, he couldn't believe his shy son, who loved fossils and suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, had made such a move.

Hess wanted to photograph dancers and performers for magazines and press kits, and he figured New York — home of The Juilliard School of performing arts — was the place to start.

He gets by on $600 monthly Social Security checks he receives because of his anxiety disorder. He said he earns less than $1,000 a year taking photographs, because he takes most portraits for free.

Magario had moved to New York from Webster, Mass. When Hess posted an ad online for an unpaid photography assistant, Magario, who had been working as a waitress, answered it. Hess and Magario became friends, then roommates. In the beginning it was a relationship of necessity, she said. "I didn't really want to go back and live with my parents."

The young woman with the boyish haircut soon was drawn to Hess. He was introverted and adventurous, like her.

"I could tell he had ideas in his head," she said, "about doing something crazy."

Hess posted updates on the truck and welcomed donations on his Web site and on craigslist. Bloggers picked up on his story. One called him the "Hipster of the Year." Others called him an idiot.

Among the comments:

• "williamsburg is so cliche. and if you cant afford that, go home!"

• "If he wants to achieve the ultimate in hipsterdom, he'll have to drive cross-country and stay in a different Wal-Mart parking lot every night — ironically, of course."

• "Angel is going through his meta phase. Art is life is art and so on and so forth ... until he finds out that hunk won't pass emissions."

Feeling offended, Hess read all of the comments to Magario. She told him: "People are mean."

They went back to fixing up the Ford.