InLiquid Articles - A Space Tragedy

2001: A Space Tragedy

by Joan K. Smith

On the difficulty of finding -- and keeping -- studio space in Philadelphia

this article originally appeared in the February 15, 2001 issue of the Philadelphia City Paper. Reproduced with permission.

Tony Visco is tired of being chased from neighborhood to neighborhood. He’s not a fugitive on the run, merely an artist trying to get — and keep — an affordable studio space in Philadelphia.

Visco, who teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, was one of several artists evicted in the late ’80s from studios on Jeweler’s Row when the properties were sold to New York investors. After floating and searching for a few years, he thought he’d finally found a great situation in 1997 at 640 N. Broad Street, a building with two floors of well-lit, good-size (450- to 1000-square feet), non-live-in studios. Although the building lacked certain amenities like reliable bathrooms and adequate heat, the price was right (in Visco’s case, only $350 a month), it was near public transit and a cooperative creative atmosphere thrived, with sculptors, actors and dancers among its approximately 50 tenants. Visco’s studio was large enough that he was regularly able to hold an open atelier with a number of fellow artists, including Deborah Caiola, Kate Brockman, Josh Hinchey, and New York artists Dony McManus and Sayka Kakumi.

Then, shortly before Christmas, every tenant got a present: a letter from the building’s New York owner, the Chetrit Group, stating that they had until Jan. 15 to clear out. Rumor spread that the building would be renovated and converted to luxury rental units, in keeping with the trend on that section of North Broad Street.

The Chetrit Group did not return repeated calls as of press time.

"It was a nightmare," says sculptor John Murphy, "trying to contact people to rent from during the holidays, plus a flood of other artists suddenly looking for the same type of space all at the same time."

Murphy was one of the lucky ones. He doesn’t need to rely on public transportation, so he was able to search off the beaten track, locating a large studio space in a mixed-use factory building on Allegheny Avenue. Others, like sculptor Phoebe Adams, simply couldn’t move everything out by the 15th and got a bit of a break in the form of a one-month extension.

This community of artists has now dispersed throughout the city. Visco misses his atelier sessions, which enabled the artists to share model expenses and interact. "Now we are kind of scattered, and although a few little subgroups have started, it’s a shame we can’t all work under one roof together again. It seems once you get it together then it falls apart."

Ironically, a situation that was a victory for many artists — the defeat of the proposed Chinatown stadium site — may have played a role in 640’s mass eviction. Murphy’s theory is that all the media attention given to the neighborhood during the stadium issue brought to light its quiet, but large and thriving, artist population. And, as everyone knows, today’s scrappy artist community is often tomorrow’s gentrified hip locale.

"Suddenly people were paying attention to it as an economically viable area, a hot new place to develop," says Murphy.

Visco feels real estate speculators take unfair advantage of artists, using them to "babysit" their raw, often unsafe property until the neighborhood achieves enough desirability to make renovations financially feasible. "Anyone can put an ad in the paper and call something ‘artists’ space’ — it means nothing. It’s the lowest possible rental…"

He continues, "Philadelphia is a fun place for New York realtors.…They just come in and do whatever they can get away with."

What made matters worse for Visco is that he had not only paid rent through the end of January, but had placed a deposit on an adjacent studio, and the management company has neither paid him back nor returned his phone calls.

So where do artists looking for affordable space go? Some of the former 640 tenants found spaces in South Kensington, or just east of Broad near Callowhill, although rents in both of these areas are already climbing. Some, like Visco, packed everything into their homes and are still looking for another workspace. Steve Donegan, an artist and the manager of a studio building at 915 Spring Garden Street, got a number of calls from displaced tenants, but he had no vacancies to offer.

"It was rough for them," says Donegan. "Three years at a studio is not a very long time, especially because many of those people put a lot of work into improving the spaces. And they aren’t likely to find anything nearly as cheap and as large unless they move into a different neighborhood."

Although Donegan sympathizes with the evicted artists from 640, he also understands the business angle. "If you had recently dumped money on a building, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to rent it out to artists. People don’t realize you can’t pour a lot of money into a building and still rent it out cheap." He says that a major reason that his building has endured as artist studios since 1981 is because it has been under the same ownership, Penn Dion, for close to 40 years. Because it’s not a recent investment, the financial stakes are low for the owner, and its current use as a studio building, as opposed to higher-maintenance residential units, makes economic sense.

Artist ownership of buildings seems to provide some security. In 1996, teacher/ multi-media artist Vida, along with partners dancer/ musician/ jewelry maker David Forlano and jewelry maker Steven Ford, jumped at the opportunity to purchase the factory compound — now dubbed "Sharktown" — in South Kensington where they’d kept studios for several years. They formed a corporation to which they and about 15 other artist tenants pay rent. "Doing what we did really insures that we have a place," Vida says, then adds, half jokingly, "unless, of course, we were to decide to sell."

John Murphy thinks the key to keeping a long-term studio is not to rent in an identifiable artist building or neighborhood, where it’s only a matter of time before the ever-accelerating cycle of gentrification catches up. He feels he now has a secure situation: his studio is in a functioning, mixed-use building in an industrial zone, where business is conducted on a daily basis, thus making a conversion highly unlikely. Though he doesn’t have the same sense of an art community, he feels safely removed from that perpetual dance played out between artists and developers.

Joan K. Smith is an artist, freelance writer, and Associate Director of InLiquid.com
Reproduced courtesy of the Philadelphia City Paper

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