Nora Deligter ☰
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    • Editorial
        • The Hancock Is the Party House of Bed-Stuy (New York Magazine)

There’s all of this shock and surprise that we don’t charge people to live there

Young people on a staircase wear revealing clothing and record themselves on microphone and video camera.
Joe Kerwin hosting a Halloween party. Photo: Christopher Petrus

In June, it was mud wrestling in the backyard — onlookers cheered La Loca as she wrestled Bang Girl down to the ground in a sludge-filled inflatable pool. Before that, in February, 300 people had huddled on the coldest night of the year for Ion Pack podcaster and musician Curtis Pawley’s house show. Recently, on a Sunday in mid-October, a Serbian gamelan group played their metallophones for a crowd of city planners, medical students, photographers, architects, artists, and models in the parlor room.

The Hancock is a landmarked ten-bedroom Victorian mansion in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was built for a water-meter magnate; by the time Claudia Moran made a $7,500 down payment on the house in 1986, it was an uninhabitable ruin. In 2018, it was purchased for $6,275,000 — the most expensive sale for a single-family home in the history of Bed-Stuy. The buyer, a Georgian hotelier, splits his time between Tbilisi and New York and made it a home for a group of rotating Georgian artists and family members, who live there rent free — his wife, Nini Nebieridze, and their two children among them.

Historical photograph of the mansion’s facade
The mansion dates to 1887. Photo: Courtesy of the Hancock
Two children on the mansion’s stoop stare into the camera with their middle fingers raised.
Nebieridze’s kids on the stoop. Photo: Nini Nebieridze

“There’s all of this shock and surprise that we don’t charge people to live there,” Nebieridze says. “But in Georgia, no one pays rent. We don’t have this ‘roommate’ thing. Our friends are struggling artists — why would we make them pay money they don’t have?”

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