|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
At the press conference a few weeks ago announcing renewed life for a Star Store arts center, the guys who are going to make it all happen stood in the background smiling and beaming with confidence.
That’s because Jim Grace and Matt McArthur of the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston have done it all before. Repeatedly.
They have taken all sorts of buildings in center cities — among them a former wool warehouse in South Boston, a former fabric mill in Lowell, and a former Boys Club in Worcester — and made them into self-sustaining arts maker studios or retail and performance space.
Using the nonprofit model, the A&BC has financed the renovation of abandoned or little-used structures and done that financing primarily through private sector investment and grants, albeit with some supporting government assistance.
Grace and McArthur looked at the Star Store — two years empty since the career administrators from the state and the UMass system abruptly abandoned it — and saw a great opportunity. The A&BC guys were quick to say the building is largely in good shape, and that its redevelopment is more than a natural for the city’s large number of working artists.
Contrast that with UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Mark Fuller’s insistence that the building was in very bad shape and that state regulations would make it virtually impossible for the university to maintain it.
You can’t help comparing what these guys saw in the Star Store and the way that politician turned UMass president, Marty Meehan, and Chancellor Fuller saw it two years ago.
That’s when the UMass guys scooted out of New Bedford and the Star Store the first chance they had, shamelessly blaming Sen. Mark Montigny for holding back their funding, when the state senator had said all along it was the university’s for the asking. They just had to take ownership of the building where its graduate arts campus had been located the last 20 years. This even after the state had been willing to give the building to the university for $1, and at the sponsorship of Montigny, set aside at least $8 million in bonding to maintain it.
The school never attempted to access the money.
When it came to the Star Store, Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro laid out how UMass Dartmouth, the state Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, and owner Paul Downey declined, for some 20 years, to create and fund a vital maintenance account for the Star Store despite the state giving the parties millions to do just that. Shapiro found that all three failed to come up with a plan for conveying ownership of the building to the university, missing two separate deadlines for acquiring the structure.
I go into this recent background of UMass Dartmouth and the state as a way of explaining why the Mitchell administration’s June 2 announcement of a plan to save the Star Store as an arts center was greeted with such hope and celebration by so many. New Bedford artists and residents are just coming off a very bitter lesson about what very bad management can do.
Mayor Jon Mitchell has told me he was personally involved in the negotiations with building owner Downey and A&BC in facilitating the Star Store deal — which involved reducing well over a million dollars in back taxes to just over $400,000 — in order to convey the 125,000-square-foot building to the nonprofit arts and business group.
A&BC’s ownership of the Star Store and its plans to redevelop the structure as a protected artists’ facility were greeted with skepticism by some of those recently burned by UMass. But those who know the situation best greeted it as an enormous achievement.
Anis Beigzadeh, who along with fellow ceramics graduate student Fallon Navarro did so much to document UMass’s abdication of its responsibility, told The Light that she listened to the announcement that A&BC would now create a new arts center with her hands shaking.
“We’re getting back our home,” she told The Light’s Colin Hogan.
Navarro and Beigzadeh did yeoman’s work last year setting up an exhibition space on William Street (financed by former Mayor Scott Lang) so that UMass Dartmouth ceramics students could continue to exhibit their works in the struggling city they have come to love.
The university had abruptly, and without warning relocated the Star Store students to either a crowded on-campus building or a strip mall in Dartmouth for most of their activities.
The now-graduated Fallon and Beigzadeh have talked about going into business together downtown, maybe opening a studio or exhibition space. They have come to see the vibrant arts scene in New Bedford as home and want to stay here. For the time being, they are up in the Hatch Street Studios in the North End.
It’s been hard for the students who benefited from the expansive fourth-floor Star Store studios, with the nearby kilns and expansive views of the city, to see what the Star Store had become. “It was so painful to see it sitting there [empty],” Navarro told me. Of the vacant structure in the city’s heart, Navarro said, “You can always feel it.”
Navarro and Beigzadeh will be among the artists letting McArthur (who is managing the redevelopment) know about their ideas for the building. McArthur has said what the community wants is “really important” to A&BC understanding what will work and what won’t work.
What a difference between A&BC and UMass Dartmouth. Of the latter, everyone from the students to the mayor to Montigny’s office has said that university officials communicated little to nothing as they were making an irreversible decision to close the Star Store campus, a decision that has had such deleterious effects on both downtown New Bedford and the students who were halfway through their programs.
The whole purpose of the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston, on the other hand, is to empower artists and artist-related entities with an environment in which they can create and thrive in a manner that helps society. As everyone from Margo Saulnier of New Bedford Creative to Tony Sapienza of the Economic Development Council noted at the announcement, the quality of life produced by a thriving arts community is a key to the development of a region’s overall economy.
The Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston more than gets that.
“From legal services and human resources support to real estate programs and creative placemaking, our initiatives are aimed at maintaining and bolstering the vibrancy and diversity of the region,” is how A&BC describes its mission.
From the moment UMass Dartmouth walked away from its downtown New Bedford campus, A&BC has been involved in advising Navarro and Beigzadeh about how they could organize rallies to save it. It also put them in contact with volunteer lawyers to advise them of their legal options.
Both Grace and McArthur, transparent and easily accessible, gave me extensive interviews about their plans last week. They are clearly excited about the Star Store project and confident that they can do it.
I would contrast that with my own, and other reporters’, dealings with the UMass Dartmouth bureaucracy, where requests for information were often delayed or answered by narrow, lawyerly press statements. Chancellor Fuller never sat down and talked publicly with city leaders and the public at large about what the school was contemplating.
McArthur, who wore a T-shirt to the announcement that said “Artists Can’t Eat Exposure,” has become an expert on creating infrastructure for artists since he graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2009.
His initial business was The Record Company, a business designed to provide affordable community recording studios for musicians. Since that time he’s become an expert in construction and renovation of space for artists. It’s all about artistic communities for him.
After hearing what New Bedford artists and businesses want, McArthur said his goal is to develop a synergy between arts and business — be that retail, performance-based or some other venue — so that the building will be permanently financially viable.
It’s important to have things hanging on the walls, but it’s more than that,” he said. “If there’s not a lot of foot traffic, it’s not really doing its job.”
In that sense, things like events and performances subsidizing the costs to the artists to rent space is vital. “The thing we’re really focused on is getting as many people involved as possible,” he said.
McArthur talks as one who has that unusual combination of an artist’s view and a businessman’s.
He’s done the financing of these projects before, and the goal is to have a solid capital plan, he said. The “capital stack” is like a club sandwich, he explained, with private donations, grants, loans and things like government tax credits possibly playing a role.
“We’re not afraid of debt,” he said. “The only thing that is super important is that the capital stack is strong enough.
“It can’t be shaky,” he explained, because the artist spaces have to be permanently affordable to the community that has been shut out of the market-rate real estate economy.
Like McArthur, longtime A&BC executive director and attorney Jim Grace has been steeped in the intersection of the arts and business worlds since the beginning of his career. Grace started out with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (which now has an association with A&BC). He described himself as one of the “ambulance drivers for the arts.” His work has focused on protecting artists from the real estate and other costs that have spiraled out of control in recent decades.
“Artists were calling when they were actually losing their space,” he remembered. “Our feeling was, ‘How do we get ahead of it?’”
The way A&BC got ahead of it was borrowing the concept of a nonprofit land trust. As a nonprofit, A&BC could go into the business of securing properties and legally organizing them in a way that was affordable to the artists.
“This is meant to be a forever community,” Grace said, of the future of the Star Store as an arts center. It’s not going to change into something else as market conditions change in five years.
There are all kinds of ways to use these buildings in the arts, he said. Workforce development. Summer camps. There are so many ways these buildings get used beyond just for painters.
“My definition of the arts is that it is a community asset,” he said.
Bravo A&BC.
I wish UMass Dartmouth had thought about working with a private nonprofit group like this, or lobbying legislators for any legislative changes that might have helped them keep their arts school in New Bedford.
But they weren’t interested. They didn’t see the importance of having artists in downtown New Bedford as their responsibility.
This nonprofit business group could have taught the academic administrators a lesson on how to think outside the box.
Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
Hooray, it will be great to preserve StarStore. Beautiful building and a needed place for the arts. Glad the rich are giving back. We have never been able to effectively get $$ from them and certainly this will benefit all. The state is not a good money manager and certainly screwed up their efforts to save Star Store.
Thank you, Jack Spillane for continuing to cover this and hold UMASS Dartmouth accountable.
Thank you Jack Spillane. I’m sure that your continuing spotlight (sometimes penlight) on the Star store was pivotal in bringing life back to this glorious old building. On their own, most things deteriorate, with some grit, many things improve. Kudos to the Light for keeping the issue alive.
No tax dollars for the city’s operating budget a 5.4 million dollar Bldg. For 1$. Good deal? Not for the residents of New Bedford.
I’m a new subscriber, and I gotta say how impressed I am with this in-depth, straightforward reporting.
On the Bayside of our famous South Coast there’s a beautiful city called New Bedford !
Go there!
Helen DeGroot
As Executive Vice President of Montgomery Ward Properties Corporation in Chicago, during the 1980’s, I managed in excess of 54 million square feet of all types of real estate assets across the United States. Comments should be made about the Star Store’s architecture, since it is singular and unique. That design should be commented on by any architect who has an historic bent. The structure should be saved and repurposed. My comments about what UMASS did are not printable.