A real estate deal that exploits local artists in order to prop up downtown property values… Grand plans for a downtown arts district that go nowhere… Historic Richmond landmarks taken over by developers… “Street level” artists sent packing by the city while insiders get sweetheart deals…
If you think I’m talking about CenterStage, think again.
Nearly a quarter century ago, Richmond’s arts controversy centered around Richmond’s Masonic Temple building, erected in 1888 and situated across the street from the Empire Theatre on Broad Street. Today, this venerable R-Town landmark has been converted into a conference center with accompanying apartments and businesses. But, once, it was the vibrant and creative heart of Richmond’s visual arts scene.
Welcome to our new “Richmond Arts Flashback” series. In honor of the Cultural Action Plan that is currently being developed by the city’s arts companies and the consulting company WolfBrown, Save Richmond will be taking a look back over the next few weeks — sometimes a long and quite painful look back — at Richmond’s fractured, sometimes-contentious, often-controversial relationship with its artists and grassroots arts community.
In this first installment, we present a feature article written in 1984 for the now-defunct magazine, Commonwealth, by writer Jeannette M. Knapp. The title is “Salvage Work: After the Arts District Bomb.”
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll say to yourself: “How can a place that claims to value history keep making the same mistakes over and over again.”
Please note the optimistic paragraph about visual artists fleeing to Shockoe Bottom and finally finding a so-called safe haven — as we know, the Shockoe Bottom Arts Center was later forced to re-locate to Petersburg, where many of Richmond’s former visual artists are now helping that neighboring city (ta-da!) revitalize its downtown. No one from city hall, or the local business community, lifted a finger to try and help them stay — they were too busy with new bigwig-led Broad Street revitalization schemes. And that’s where Save Richmond came in.
The more things change…
The article begins:
What started as a new frontier for the arts in Richmond ended up as a cultural Hiroshima for a significant block of Broad Street. The Empire Theatre has been closed since January. Nearby buildings are boarded up and covered with posters warning of a Second Coming. Across the street, the doors to the Masonic Temple building, once the center for much of the influential art activity in the city, are padlocked.
The Temple’s padlocked doors have been all too symbolic of the wall that went up between artists and art officials in Richmond in the aftermath of the Arts District debacle, which caused the eviction of over 20 artists from the Temple building to make way for the grand plan.
Until now, the artists have not talked publicly about the Temple building eviction. Now that they are talking, it becomes very clear that the Arts District bomb created more fallout than a block of empty buildings. It divided artists and arts officials, and the groups are just now patching things up.
When the city purchased the Temple building for $175,000 in 1981 and donated it to the Arts District Foundation, its primary interest was in stabilizing a blighted area of Broad Street. Already in place was the Empire Theatre complex, which had been used for dances, concerts and plays since 1977. The Temple building was to have been converted into a facility with studios, galleries, rehearsal space, workshops, offices, a theater and a performing arts high school. Lofts, apartments, restraurants and shops were envisioned in the old Richmond Dairy and adjacent properties. The Arts District would attract tourists and spur improvement of neighboring Jackson Ward, it was hoped. It fit perfectly into the city’s plan for downtown revitalization.
But instead of being incorporated into the Arts District, the 20-plus artists were forced out after a city inspector declared that their presence in the Temple building was a violation of city code.
It is likely the artists would have been forced out anyway. Revitalization to the city is gentrification to artists. Jerry Donato, a Virginia Commonwealth University faculty member and former Temple building occupant, remarks, “The Arts District was a real estate deal to bring up property values, and they were using artists to do it.” To say the artists felt used would be extreme understatement.
The artists fled Broad Street for new quarters, many in Shockoe Bottom, where they may be shielded, ironically, by lack of a flood wall. Developers who have followed their lead into other sections of the city — subsequently upping property values and forcing the artists out — aren’t likely to try to turn the unprotected Shockoe Bottom into another trendy Shockoe Slip.
The paranoia about dislocation is not a thin wash. “It’s like Soho,” explains artist Daniel Brisbane. “Artists discovered it and it was a great place to work in. Now it’s unaffordable, full of shops and restaurants. The same thing happened here. Artists discovered the Fan, the Bowers Coffee Building and the Masonic Temple building and were chased out by developers.”
Now there is no Arts District and the Temple building sits empty; the city is trying to sell it. The artists still lament its loss. Studios as large as 40 feet by 60 feet — enough space for several artists to share — could be had in the Temple building for as little as $108 a month. With 14-foot ceilings, artists had the important option of working with large canvases, says artist and former occupant Jane Sandelin.
The building certainly had its problems, but the artists seemed more than willing to trade comfort for the freedom of space. In the catalogue to an Anderson Gallery exhibit entitled, “Alumni of the Masonic Temple,” artist Glenda Miller Creamer comments: “Despite thirty degree temperatures in the winter, falling plaster, clogged toliets, derelicts and debris… it was a forum for the exchange of ideas.” And Holly Sears writes: “Inherent to the building was an atmosphere conductive to productivity as well as mutual support from fellow artists, a rare find outside of the academic circle in this city.”
For the artists, a final straw in the Arts District bungling was a perception that the Arts District Foundation was favoring performing artists over visual artists, because actors, musicians and dancers are capable of attracting paying audiences and generating more revenue than painters or sculptors. “The Masonic Temple was sold out from under the artists by the people who were supposed to be supporting them,” says David E. Thompson, an artist who now serves on the Board of Directors of the Arts Council.
Blanketing the entire controversy was a dispute over the very concept of the Arts District: The professional artists deplored the intended commercialization of the area and felt serious art could not be produced in a tourist trap. The Arts Council argues that the retail component was necessary to the economic viability of the district.
While it seemed the Arts Council had done everything right — researched the project, hired consultants, formed an independent foundation to implement its plans, secured a commitment from the city and funds from CSX Corporation — everything that could have gone wrong did.