The Copy Cat building might be the only place in the city where a professional dancing banana could feel at home.
In one apartment, a tire swing dangles between a drum set and a bar. In another, food salvaged from garbage bins fills the refrigerator and a bottle of turquoise hair dye sits in the bathroom.
Everywhere you look in the former factory in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District there are interesting things -- an old wheelchair, a maze of hand-built walls, an orange cat named Fettuccine -- and countless works of art.
"I consider it my own personal playground," says Carabella Sands, 21, the dancing banana in question, who retreats there after a long day luring customers to a Timonium smoothie stand.
For more than two decades, the five-story brick building near the intersection of Guilford and Mount Royal avenues in Baltimore has been a place for hundreds of artists to live, create art and hold concerts and gallery openings.
But life at the Copy Cat might soon change.
Mt. Vernon Properties is considering buying and renovating the building, doubling the number of apartments and increasing rents, says Robert Persaud, an adviser to the company. Current residents would not be able to stay during the extensive renovation, he says.
Charles Lankford, the building's owner for more than 30 years, says the deal with Persaud is far from final, noting that it might be hard to secure financing. He says he would like to find a partner to help him improve the building.
Tenants admit that the building is rundown -- some pass notes to neighbors through holes in the floor -- but they say they like the Copy Cat as it is. And they believe that their presence is vital to making the arts district thrive.
"We're all kind of experimenting and expressing ourselves in ways we wouldn't be if we didn't all live here together," says Brady Starr, a 26-year-old painter who lives with several roommates in an apartment, studio and gallery called "Page 5."
His upstairs neighbor, 20-year-old Michael Farley, is trying to organize tenants to buy the Copy Cat themselves, as artists at two nearby buildings have done.
"I love it, despite the inconvenience of the Middle Ages," says Farley, his cowboy boots clicking across the floor as he leads a visitor into two joined apartments he shares with seven people, a few cats, a dog, a dozen bicycles and a ghoulish figure made of cotton gauze.
In the kitchen, several twentysomethings talk around a large wooden table, a single light bulb casting shadows on their faces. Some smoke, tapping their cigarette ashes into a white goblet labeled "Holy Grail."
Farley, a sculpture major at Maryland Institute College of Art, sticks his head in the refrigerator and pulls out a pastry box. "Who wants Dumpster cake?" he asks, explaining that some residents pull expired, but edible, food from garbage bins behind grocery stores.
Many furnishings are salvaged from the trash or were left behind. In the largest room, a series of walls -- some curved, some set at sharp angles -- were built by previous tenants.
In the bathroom, a bottle of "Tripped Up Turquoise" hair dye sits on a shelf, and someone has scrawled, "Let's all be postmodern" on the side of the shower.
"My mom calls it 'the set of Rent,'" Farley says, referring to the '90s Broadway musical about struggling East Village artists.
The artists say they flourish in the building's laid-back, do-it-yourself atmosphere. Huge windows let in lots of light, and high-ceilinged loft-style spaces can be shared by many people, keeping rent within a starving artist's budget. The chipped paint, spotty utilities and hissing, cantankerous radiators add to the creative atmosphere, they say.
The boxy building was constructed in the 1890s as part of a factory complex for the Crown, Cork and Seal Co., the originators of the bottle cap. It is nicknamed the Copy Cat after a printing company billboard that long stood on its roof.
The building is showing its age. In one hallway, the ceiling sags around a pipe. Outside, a sea-green graffiti tag, as complicated as a Celtic knot, is painted on one wall. A gargoyle leers over the satellite dishes that sprout from windows like flat-topped mushrooms.
Persaud, of Mt. Vernon Properties, says that his company is studying whether it would be profitable to repair the building and renovate it and a sister property. They envision doubling the number of units in the building -- from 75 to 150 -- and renting for $700 to $950. Currently, residents who share the large spaces pay, on average, a couple of hundred dollars each per month.
"We feel we can do some good up there," says Persaud. "With careful investment and planning, that area has wonderful potential."
Lankford, 64, says he's proud that he's managed to keep the building going all these years, helping so many eclectic young artists.
"Some day I might write a book about it," Lankford says by phone from his Florida home.
For decades, the blocks around Penn Station languished, despite being sandwiched between the cultural hubs of Charles Village and Mount Vernon. Since being designated an arts district in 2004, several galleries, restaurants and nightclubs have opened, according to David Bielenberg, executive director of a nonprofit group that promotes the neighborhood.
Bielenberg and other community leaders are exploring housing options for the residents if the building is renovated.
"We're doing everything we can to let the current residents of the Copy Cat realize how important they are to the district," he says.
Joe McNeely, director of the Central Baltimore Partnership, says he is encouraging Persaud to renovate the buildings in sections so that the residents are not displaced. He admits that many residents won't be able to afford higher rents.
It's a familiar pattern, sometimes called the "SoHo effect," McNeely says, referring to the New York City neighborhood: Artists move into a rundown area and spruce it up, but then get priced out.
Whether or not the deal goes through, the building needs serious work. "Either some developer is going to buy it and do this or the building is going to deteriorate to a place where it's going to be closed," he says.
But residents worry that renovations will destroy the life they've built together.
At the space called Page 5, Starr, with a smudge of gray paint on his cheek, points out walls he and his roommates have built to section off a studio and gallery for shows and weekly figure drawing sessions. He absent-mindedly taps on a piano, awakening a family of mice nesting inside that begin to squeak fiercely.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, volunteers with a group called "Food Not Bombs" prepare vegetarian meals to give to homeless people.
Each living space has its own distinct character. On the top floor, Web designer Kevin Blackistone, 29, and his roommates frequently host parties and concerts in a loft that has a stage, drum set, sound system, tire swing and wheelchair. A spotted cat, named, appropriately, Natty Boh, stalks across a bar that the roommates built from scrap.
Downstairs, Farley and his friends rattle off some of what makes life in the Copy Cat unique: The canvas the roommates paint together. The transvestite prostitute on Guilford who offered to protect them from thugs. The time a resident's car was stolen and later found totaled with only a gold wig and a Bette Midler movie stolen.
The residents feel comfortable in the neighborhood, despite occasional muggings, broken car windows and huge alley rats. They look out for each other's safety, the same way they critique each other's art and share food.
Many former tenants say the happiest years of their youth were spent at the Copy Cat, says Lankford, the owner.
Or, as Farley says, "It's like Neverland but with more rats."
julie.scharper@baltsun.com