REAL WORLD, RED HOOK: Let the Shooting Begin!

Few NYC apartment dwellers can probably recollect being more nostalgic for the “bad old days” of the violence- and vice-ridden Brooklyn waterfront than when they heard MTV would be installing the The Real World’s ragtag cast of equal opportunity racist, sexist, and homophobic moppets in a renovated luxury apartment on Red Hook’s Pier 41. But walling off the drunken twenty-somethings in a relatively isolated NYC neighborhood and on a concrete slab jutting a hundred feet into the East River, is also acceptable—though less sporting—than seeing how they would fare as the most dangerous game of all.

Back in May, when MTV announced that the 21st season of The Real World’s cast would be unleashing their “meaningful conflict and powerful stories” upon an unspecified Brooklyn neighborhood, the ever-frisky Brooklyn blog-o-sphere just about seized from a heady mixture of joy, contempt, and sweet, sweet speculation. Executive producer, Jim Johnston tells the Times:

“Generally we don’t like to announce where we are. We like to work in complete anonymity when we can.”

The Smart Money had Williamsburg, where the neighborhood’s population of skinny-jeaned hipsters celebrate their own "meaningful conflicts" and "powerful stories" every day in the unending, unflatteringly edited episode of The Real World that is their real world. But the Smart Money would have lost. Like most NYC apartment hunters, however, not even MTV probably could have predicted exactly where they'd finally end up.

The first Brooklyn apartment show producers contracted for was a two-story, five bedroom, 6,000-square-foot penthouse in the 27-story art deco-style BellTel Lofts in Downtown Brooklyn. MTV’s Remote Control Blog refers to BelTel’s Downtown location as their “original Fort Green-ish digs,” but according to the Times, BelTel is Downtown, Old Skool:

“Not near downtown, like Brooklyn Heights, but downtown-downtown, hard by the state and federal courthouses, the city’s emergency-response command center and the rows of barber shops, check-cashing services, fast-food joints and vendors selling counterfeit DVDs, religious statues and floor soaps that promise to remove jinxes.”

But a spokesman for BellTel Lofts tells the Times that MTV can help rescue Downtown Brooklyn from all that:

“It’s a chance to market the kind of MTV lifestyle to people who want to live like this. People have a chance to live an MTV lifestyle. People who buy apartments in the building. We think this building will continue to gentrify Brooklyn, and certainly having MTV there will only accelerate that. We expect that it will increase property values.”

MTV lifestyle, indeed… According to the Brooklyn Paper, other than the addition of a Jacuzzi, many of the major renovations planned for the $6 million dollar Brooklyn apartment were intended to prevent cast members from interacting with and irritating the 100 families who already call BellTel home, such as a separate elevator for accessing their retro-fitted aerie.

But then came word from the Brownstoner that BellTel was unable to complete the necessary renovations on the duplex penthouse in time for cast members to move in and to begin shooting the show by mid-August, and later that day, the Real Deal reported that MTV packed up all of it’s film equipment and moved it to 116 Third Place, a beautiful, six-floor, five-unit brick building on a quiet leafy street in Carroll Gardens. According to Curbed:

“The real question is: will cranky Carroll Gardens residents greet Real World with pitchforks & torches if they try to set up shop on one of their quiet ‘place streets’?”

Yeeesss. Yes, they would.

And so, Children, under threat of fork and fire, the cast members of The Real World: Brooklyn now find themselves out on Pier 41 in Red Hook. And while most renters and buyers would be happy to find themselves in a luxury Brooklyn apartment in Red Hook at the end of the exhaustive NYC apartment search, it might be a little tough on our seven Real World exhibitionists. In their new palatial but isolated digs, only Ikea and the camera crew will hear them drunkenly scream about hook-ups in real time. Everyone else will have to wait for the 13 cruelly edited episodes that will begin airing in January, 2009.