Don't Hate Them Because They Have Beautiful Living Quarters By Michael Rovner APRIL 21, 1997 — A building whose only residents are tall, young, slim, beautiful girls is bound to provoke speculation, which is exactly what happened with a boarding house called Magenta Marquez. “The neighbors would see the girls coming in and out all day long and at night,” says a former boarder, “limousines coming and picking us up, and coming home at five o’clock in the morning—at first, a lot of the neighbor people thought this was a house of prostitution.” While the girls do in a sense make a living with their bodies, they are not prostitutes. They’re models. Magenta Marquez, the city’s only model boarding house, was started two years ago by Carlos Almada and his 20-year-old fiancée, Frouke, a Next model. “It started because we know lots of models and we know owners of agencies socially,” Almada says. Together, the two have solved the housing problems of 25 competing agencies without offering the incentive of a commission or other compensation. “A lot of love went into this,” says Carlos Almada, “and the girls give it back to us.” After arriving in New York in 1982 with a degree in architecture, the Brazilian-Argentine mode forays into real estate and night clubs (he owned The Building) but ultimately distinguished himself among the downtown demimonde as a set designer at the Public Theater. These days, the most beautiful girls in the world consider themselves lucky to pay him $800 a month for a place in the former factory where he’s lived for a number of years. “We have the line below the top models,” Almada says. “They are on the cover of the magazines today, but they’re not the top models that we know. They will share a room.” For the fledgling models without friends or family to house them in New York, the private and semiprivate rooms at Magenta Marquez are a less expensive option than paying upward of $900 a month to be stacked like firewood with five other girls in a one bedroom apartment with only one bathroom. For obvious reasons, Almada decided against hanging a sign on his building. HE also insisted on certain rules, the most important of which is: NO male visitors allowed. It’s a rule he even follows himself, arranging to meet his friends on a nearby street corner. He violated it, however, for the purposed of this interview. Seating in his kitchen, which is decorated with paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others, he thumbed through two enormous guest registers. They’re filled with composite photos, affectionate farewell notes, inside jokes, numerous crayon portraits, the odd set of footprints in paint, and the forwarding addresses and phone numbers of nearly every model the place has housed. There are well over 100, an impressive number considering that Magenta Marquez has an approximate capacity of fifteen, and a number of models have stayed as long as three months at a time. “The only bad thing I’ve ever heard about him [Carlos Almada] is that he can be too fatherly, but what would you expect from a young girl who’s told to be home at a reasonable hour?” says agency owner Irene Marie. But his willingness to do just about anything for his tenants is what’s chiefly responsible for his success in importing pensione-style model accommodations. Says Almada, “It’s more than renting a room to somebody, it’s more like a family thing. We mother them.” Unlike most other landlords, he’s unruffled by late-night phone calls from former tenants in need of immediate relationship counseling. Karen Ferrari says, “I call him every day. I’m like, ‘Ha-low? Carlito!’” Ferrari adds, “When I moved out and got an apartment, Carlos and his girlfriend brought me a mattress and put it in. And when I got evicted, they helped me move my stuff out.” On one occasion, Almada and Frouke stayed up until dawn helping one tenant decide to check into rehab. His biggest problem so far? “They were breaking all the phones,” Almada says, laughing. “So I replaced them with steel-based ones! In my opinion, they have arguments with their boyfriends and they hang up hard.”

© NEW YORK MAGAZINE 1997

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