What Ms. Teichman and Mr. Fortus finally found, he said, was the last great deal in New York: one of the reconstituted apartments on Grand Street.

These apartments, built by and for garment workers -- one complex is even called Amalgamated, and you'll still find a mural of Roosevelt (F.D.R., that is) in a lobby -- shed their socialist links and hit the free market three years ago (that's what ''reconstituted'' means), rocketing up from a cap of up to $3,000 per room to as much as $450,000 for a two-bedroom.

Mr. Fortus paid $350,000 for his apartment -- nearly one-third the price of a similar Village two-bedroom. His monthly maintenance is $560.

Getting a musician through a co-op board is no joke. Getting a guitarist from a famous rock and roll band through is nearly impossible. Jacob Goldman, a broker whose entire bread and butter is the stock -- upward of 4,500 units -- of the Cooperative Village, chose Seward Park for his client, who had walked in off the street one day, because that complex's board president is a musician.

Mr. Goldman, a voluble lawyer and broker, said he was struck nearly speechless when he realized who Mr. Fortus was. ''I did a Yahoo search, and I started saying, 'I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy,' '' recalled Mr. Goldman, who is 32 and describes himself as a ''massive Guns N' Roses fan.''

''Anyway, to get him in the building, we had to work against the stereotype of the rock and roll musician,'' Mr. Goldman continued. ''You know, boa constrictors and wild parties and all. So we had his former neighbors and his super write letters about what a nice quiet guy Richard is. And for the meeting with the board, I suggested a long-sleeved shirt for those tattoos, and a suit, if he had one.'' As it happened, Mr. Fortus's suit was in Los Angeles, but it turned out that he and the board's president were members of the same union, Local 802.

Cooperative Village is a neighborhood unto itself, and Mr. Fortus and Ms. Teichman's tenancy represents the latest evolutionary wiggle in its history. The children of all those socialists fled the area to the suburbs in the 70's and 80's, but by the 1990's, young Orthodox Jewish families were moving in, relishing the connection to a specifically Jewish past.