THIS is news? It actually started when artists got driven out of Soho in the late 1970's and pushed out from there.
Manhattan is a city of the One Per Cent pretty much right now, except for people who have special living conditions or bought places years and years ago. The same has been happening in Brooklyn for ages...Park Slope might as well be Manhattan, for instance.
Art & Design
Buddy, Can You Spare a Studio?
Rising Rents Leave New York Artists Out in the Cold
Artists
have wedged their canvases and supplies into their apartments. Others
are working in hurricane-torn basements or in temporary, borrowed
spaces. As their creative spaces have shrunk, so, too, has their art —
if, that is, they still make art.
It’s been over six months since some four dozen artists lost their studios
in Industry City, a sprawling factory complex on the Brooklyn
waterfront. Many had spent decades hopping from studio to studio, from
borough to borough. But according to interviews with over two dozen of
the displaced, that practice of alighting in new, ungentrified
neighborhoods has, at least for them, ground to something of a halt,
hampered by a common refrain in New York: Rents are rising too fast.
Being
studioless, some have put their art careers aside. Others have begun to
ask: If they can’t afford gritty, unglamorous Industry City, then
where?
“All
I can see is going further out, then having to move again,” said
Richard Castellana, a 73-year-old painter who has moved studios 10 times
in 40 years. “I just can’t take it anymore.”
Such
displacement extends back decades, with many of the city’s hippest
neighborhoods having once been desolate wastelands that New York’s
artists painted, sculpted and photographed back to life.
But
Industry City is not in SoHo, or even Greenpoint or Bushwick in
Brooklyn. It’s in Sunset Park, a still-struggling immigrant neighborhood
south of Green-Wood Cemetery, a few express stops from Manhattan.
Traces of hipsterfication are scant. Those who lost spaces there
wondered how many affordable frontiers were left.
1 mile
Red Hook
Gowanus
PROSPECT EXPWY.
Upper
New York
Bay
Industry City
GREEN-WOOD
CEMETERY
Sunset
Park
BROOKLYN
Industry City
“Nobody
has any hopes about being able to rent affordable spaces,” said Tamara
Zahaykevich, 43, who helped start the Artist Studio Affordability
Project to sound the alarm on dwindling spaces. “On top of that, my
community is so dispersed now.”
Artists,
curators and city officials note that there are less costly communities
that still draw artists, among them Mott Haven in the Bronx, Ridgewood
in Queens and St. George on Staten Island. But for many, those sites are
too remote, and even then, the pickings are often slim. Landlords are
wont to mete out short-term leases. Competition with small industry is
high.
“Finding stable, affordable space anywhere in the five boroughs is increasingly hard,” Paul Parkhill, who heads Spaceworks,
a nonprofit group that seeks to build affordable studios, wrote in an
email. “This also impacts small industrial businesses. Outer borough
commercial and industrial space is very tight.”
As
a result, artists and curators say, the city’s artists are more widely
scattered than ever, and increasingly doubling up and using their
apartments as work spaces. “I used to spend a day in Williamsburg on six
or seven studio visits,” said Manon Slome, chief curator for No Longer
Empty, which puts site-specific installations in otherwise vacant
spaces. “Now, I’m really jumping all over the place, going further out
and into more and more residential areas.”
Working
at home has its benefits — convenience and lower costs — but there are
drawbacks, artists said. Their work often changes: Mr. Castellana, for
one, now works out of his Chelsea apartment, and has had to scale down
his art. Spaces become too cramped to show pieces. There is less
interaction with other artists as well as curators and buyers, who might
have otherwise come by for studio tours.
Jose
Arenas was one of dozens who had found space at the New York Art
Residency and Studios Foundation, a nonprofit that rented a floor of
Industry City and divvied it up into studios. “Open studios brought
people into my studio space, which is something I miss working
individually at home," said Mr. Arenas, 42, who lost his Industry City
studio and is working out of the apartment he shares with his wife and
daughter in South Park Slope. "I don’t have that same sense of
community.”
In
those remote old Industry City buildings overlooking New York Harbor,
gentrification seemed far away. But then Industry City was bought by a
partnership that included Jamestown Properties, a private developer that
wants to turn the area into a hub for light manufacturing, technology,
fashion, design and art. It is renovating and modernizing the buildings,
said Andrew Kimball, chief executive of Industry City.
The
Art Residency and Studios Foundation said that, a year ago, Industry
City wanted to hike its rent as much as 40 percent, and that after
consulting with its artists, it decided to leave. While Industry City
retained a sizable base of artists — Mr. Kimball said they make up a
quarter of the tenants — many of those on the foundation’s floor and in
other spaces said they could no longer afford studios there, because
their rent would jump several hundred dollars a month.
Their
margins were already thin. Many who lost their spaces were in their
40s, 50s and 60s, midcareer artists who also held other jobs to support
themselves and their art. Ms. Zahaykevich works as a bookkeeper. Mr.
Castellana, the septuagenarian, is a former social sciences professor
who now teaches art. Mr. Arenas teaches part time at Parsons the New
School for Design.
Michael
Paul Britto, 45, works as a community coordinator at the city’s
Education Department. When he lost his studio in the foundation’s space,
he had to stop mentoring high school students there as part of an art
program separate from his job.
For
many, paying for another studio was suddenly out of reach. Ms.
Zahaykevich said that until about four years ago, studios rented for $1 a
square foot a month in Sunset Park. Now, listings can be triple that, even for shared spaces.
Michael Solomon, 56, a glass-mosaic artist who moved from Philadelphia
in 2011 to care for his parents, found that he was also priced out of
Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens.
The only affordable spot was in Patchogue on Long Island — too far away.
He ended up relocating his studio to the hurricane-damaged basement of
his family’s home in the Rockaways, in Queens. “Everything’s out of
whack,” he said.
Even
Mr. Britto, who lives in the Bronx, has had trouble finding studio
space close to home. “Everything is so expensive, it’s almost like
renting another apartment,” he said. He works out of his apartment,
creating silk-screen works in his bathroom, but has abandoned larger
pieces because of space constraints and the mess.
Richard
Tsao, 59, another Industry City refugee, has had to abandon his work
outright. He floods his paintings, sloshing buckets of pigment and water
on them as they lie on the floor, and spent $20,000 waterproofing his
studios to prevent leaks.
“The question is whether I can spend that kind of money again only to move again in three years,” he said. “I can’t.”
Part
of the problem might simply be increased demand. For all the concerns
about creative flight, the number of New Yorkers who identified
themselves as artists, writers or photographers grew to 124,000 in 2010
from 108,000 in 2000, according to the United States census, figures
that the city considers conservative.
Few
deny the squeeze on affordable studios, and in 2011, the city’s
Cultural Affairs Department helped found Spaceworks. Mr. Parkhill, its
head, queried a wide swath of artists about studio affordability and
found that most could pay $250 to $400 a month. His organization aims to
secure long leases on underoccupied buildings and rent out spaces in
that range. Though much of its work is in the planning stage, a pilot
program in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn drew 55 applications for two
spots.
Other
organizations are advocating for city help in securing spaces, or
trying to buy buildings for permanent studios. But for now, former
Industry City artists who managed to find studios are wondering where
they might land next.
Kevin
Noble, 61, a photographer, found a studio in Red Hook after losing his
space. It is his sixth studio in 34 years; with every move, he said, the
spaces grow smaller, and the hope of staying in one spot further dims.
“I’m not setting down roots,” he said. “I just feel the same things are
going to happen again.”
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