Sidebar by Ed Quillen
Art – December 1994 – Colorado Central Magazine
Economists can tell us how a factory or store fits into the general economic picture, but it’s harder to assign a role to the “art industry” of studios and galleries.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1991 there were 208,000 Americans who fit the employment category of “painters, sculptors, craft-artists, and artist printmakers.”
That’s about 0.18 percent of the workforce, and it’s a minuscule fraction. America has more kindergarten teachers than artists of all types. Ambitious parents may feel consoled that a child is 3 times more likely to become a lawyer or realtor than a working artist.
However, there may be a strong economic link between artists and real estate prices. That’s the argument which geographer Neil Smith makes in his essay “New City, New Frontier” (included in Variations on a Theme Park, Michael Sorkin, editor, ISBN 0-374-52314-2, published in 1992 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Smith examines the process of urban gentrification — that is, the conversion of a low-life low-rent neighborhood into an upscale environment of classy restaurants and high-priced amenity-laden housing.
His analysis focuses on the lower east side of Manhattan, which seems about as remote as the moon from Central Colorado.
But follow his description, and you’ll see something familiar. Start with a neighborhood that mainstream society has more or less abandoned. It has a lot of drugs and derelicts, but rents are cheap.
Artists, especially ones operating on the cultural frontier of creativity, need cheap rent because their incomes fluctuate violently, and they require the lowest possible monthly overhead. So artists move into the neighborhood. They start fixing up their lofts, and they install galleries, all-night coffeehouses, off-beat bookstores, and the similar facilities of bohemian life.
This makes the streets safer, and the more adventurous upscale folks start to visit these crazy creative people — who, it turns out, aren’t so dangerous after all. And so they begin to invest in the area; they might even move in.
For an example closer to home than Alphabet City of Manhattan, look at lower downtown Denver — LoDo. Twenty years ago, it was a warehouse district of funky brick buildings inhabited by winos and a few artists, who supported one fine coffeehouse, Muddy Waters of the Platte.
Over the years, the artists’ efforts to create a comfortable place for themselves meant a few more restaurants, then a brew-pub, then some loft conversions — and now LoDo is the hottest spot on the Denver realty scene.
Move now to the downtown Salida of a recent memory, another scene of disinvestment by mainstream America, whose chain retailers were more interested in freeway-ramp shopping malls than in a small town’s downtown.
But the handsome old brick buildings had their charms. Artists like Chris Byars bought and restored buildings. The First Street Café opened and somehow thrived, even though everyone who knew anything about the local economy told Wayne and Darlene that the real action was on the highway.
Now there are galleries, a brew-pub, interesting new restaurants — and a push at gentrification, to discourage local “bums” from loafing on the park benches. It was okay for them to hang out a few years ago, when few well-heeled tourists wandered into downtown Salida, but now the park-bench idlers might offend potential customers.
On our small scale, this is precisely the same class warfare that Smith describes in New York.
In real-estate terms, galleries and artists represent a “transitional use.” They replace shuttered storefronts, but only temporarily. In a few years, they get priced out of the environment they created — and unless they bought into the real estate, they don’t share in the resulting profits. The next art scene will come from some other locale of low rents, and the process will continue elsewhere.
If Smith is right, then in 10 years or so, the once rundown Victorian centers of Salida and Buena Vista will be full of upscale boutiques, pricy restaurants, and speciality shops. The artists who made it happen, along with the next creative generation, will have moved on to other sleepy little mountain towns to start the process there.
— Ed Quillen
