Our Cool Place series brings you into cool places. For this inaugural edition, we’re visiting Bonnie and Wayde Harrison in their duplex apartment near the Brooklyn waterfront.
Bonnie moved to New York in 1961 from her hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, where she’d gone to art school and hung out in Dinkytown with a young Bob Dylan. He became her neighbor in Greenwich Village.
During her first year in New York City, Bonnie lived in seven different apartments, picking up temp jobs before landing a full-time gig as a theater costume designer.
In 1973, she left her Lower East Side tenement — which featured a bathtub in the living room, as well as coal deliveries hauled up to her stove each week — and moved into the Brooklyn apartment she still lives in 50 years later.
At that point, she was already working for Jim Henson, who’d seen her portfolio and put her in charge of the Muppet Workshop in 1972. While there, she created iconic characters, including Miss Piggy and Statler and Waldorf.
Bonnie Harrison moved into her Brooklyn apartment as a rental in 1973, before the building went co-op. In 1984, she and her partner Wayde bought the unit next door and combined them.
Ryan Kailath / Gothamist
The portrait by Alice Neel is of the couple’s late friend, the artist Joe Wilfer. Wayde’s cylindrical rubber-wrapped office was designed by Malcolm Holtzman.
Ryan Kailath / Gothamist
Bonnie says the two cantankerous old Muppets arguing on their balcony were inspired by the Yale Club in Manhattan.
“If I worked late, which was often, Jim would let me go home in a cab,” Bonnie said. “Every time I did that, I would go down Park Avenue around Grand Central and look into the Yale Club. And I had this vision of these two old men sitting there having their brandy and their cigars.”
The characters are named after two storied Midtown hotels — the Statler Hilton and the Waldorf Astoria.
The apartment is filled with art by their friends and acquaintances. The Chuck Close…
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