Photos: Breakfast at AJ's digs at MCAD

As you might guess, having breakfast in the cafeteria of Minneapolis College of Art and Design could be a lonesome affair.

MCAD students tend to sleep late, so apparently most eat breakfast at home, which is either off-campus or in one of the college's seven apartment blocks.

So I figured I'd have breakfast MCAD style: in someone's apartment. Senior and resident assistant AJ Warnick cooked me up a couple of eggs, veggie-sausage patties and some fried potatoes and showed me his place.

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MPR Photo / Alex Friedrich

Solitude for all

He lives alone in an older one-bedroom, fully self-contained apartment that seems like what you might find in Uptown. The building is apparently from the 1920s, so it's nothing fancy, but it has some character: arched entrance-ways, hardwood floors, old-time charm. Other apartments are in buildings constructed later, into the 1970s, and have one, two or three bedrooms.

Why apartments instead of dorms? No answer yet, though it seems to me they might offer artists a bit more independence or solitude than residence halls. (Hey, it fits the stereotype.)

Just under a third or so of of the student body live in the apartments at any one time, though Warnick said most MCAD students tend to live there at some point or other during their college careers.

AJ says the more intimate atmosphere of the school allows him to supervise students a little more loosely than he would at, say, Kansas State. Sure, students hang out and a party a little bit in their dorm rooms. And you'll hear music and chatter if you walk through campus at night.

But in a campus this urban, he says, the hard-core partying goes on nearby in bars and off-campus apartments.

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