When Anthony Rapp signed on to play Mark Cohen in the off-Broadway and then original Broadway productions of Jonathan Larson’s iconic musical “Rent,” in the mid-1990s, he was already an experienced young singer and actor eking it out in New York’s then still somewhat gritty and bohemian East Village, the same neighborhood in which the musical is set.
Since then, Rapp has gone on to a busy career both on stage and in front of film and television cameras — he currently portrays Paul Staments on “Star Trek: Discovery,” the first openly gay character in “Star Trek” history — and, though they took a hit during the pandemic, rents in the still bohemian if somewhat less gritty East Village have skyrocketed. (According to Realtor.com, the median price for an East Village rental apartment is almost $4,000 per month, more than 2.5-times the national median rent of almost $1,500 per month.)
Rapp, however, hasn’t rented or even lived in the East Village since 1998, when he hightailed it from his rental apartment on a plum, tree-lined block of East 10th Street to a 1,200-square-foot loft in the neighboring Noho neighborhood that tax records show he bought for $375,000. The loft popped up for sale a few months ago at $1.95 million — it’s currently in contract to be sold for an unknown amount — and Rapp and his longtime partner and fiancé Ken Ithiphol have just upgraded their residential circumstances, as first sniffed out by the eagle-eyed property gossips at the NY Post, with the $3.573 million purchase of a three-bedroom and three-bath condo in a full-service luxury building in the southwest quadrant of the nowadays still bohemian if remarkably expensive East Village.
Measuring about 1,500 square feet, the condo isn’t especially big, but it is jam-packed with top-end materials and creature comforts: white oak floorboards, Italian oak cabinetry, an integrated Sonos audio system, triple-pane windows to dampen the city’s constant…