When Anthony Rapp first saw his new pad for sale at the time, he was a little freaked out. “I said to my agent, ‘Hey, we should probably go take a look,’” said Mr. Rapp, who is best known for playing James “Renegade” Spivey in the hit television series “Rent.” The actor was then 21.
At the time, Mr. Rapp (now 44) was playing “a redhead almost totally against type” in the NBC show “Wings,” he said. To get the apartment’s perfect address (a former detective house), Mr. Rapp once dressed up as police commissioner Charlie Grimm, complete with a bulletproof vest and fake police gun, for Halloween.
When he put the place on the market, the first company he knew to approach was his old agent, Lynn O’Connor-Adams, who had passed away about two months earlier. Ms. O’Connor-Adams also represented Mr. Rapp’s then-girlfriend, DJ AM. They’d bought a house in Jamaica Estates in 2002, where Mr. Rapp was living and DJ AM DJ’ed parties there. They recently sold the house.
According to the listing, Mr. Rapp’s loft apartment, which has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, is beautiful. “The location is spectacular,” said Leslie Corbin, the associate broker of luxury sales at Sotheby’s. “It’s a block away from the subway.” And Ms. Corbin added, “We’re even hoping that someone who buys the apartment could incorporate Anthony’s personal experiences into a re-decorating exercise.”
According to Ms. Corbin, the home is on a quiet street with multiple parks on nearby city parks. It is located at 418 West 39th Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Mr. Rapp’s apartment is listed at $3.75 million.
The apartment has been dressed in dark blue, and has both an open floor plan and oak floors. Mr. Rapp also said his spacious bedroom included a giant built-in bookcase.
When we were in the building last week, to tour the place, we were greeted by a young son on the elevator, dressed in “high style” daddy jeans. But there are no furniture babies with the couple, and the ex-wife (Mr. Rapp and DJ AM divorced in 2012) lives elsewhere. The past was not pleasant, Mr. Rapp told us. “I was really drunk,” he said, though he offered it off as an “Irish thing.”
Another upstairs tenant who occupies the apartment is a single mother of a young child, Ms. Corbin told us. “I think it’s great that young families can continue to move into this building,” said Mr. Rapp. “Unfortunately the past had some challenges for a lot of the residents here.”
The price in which the home is listed has gone up in recent months. In August, it was going for $3.7 million. As of September 29, its price had been bumped up to $3.75 million.
