BTMFBA: Baltimore and the Area 405 Studio

Big buildings that are cheap are great for arts uses.  Baltimore, because of its past as an industrial city and its relatively weak real estate market, has a great number of old large buildings that have been converted to arts uses.  

Sometimes it's done by traditional real estate operators desperate for a use, other times by arts-focused foundations ("Motor House arts center to anchor Station North neighborhood," Sun) or people interested in the arts.  

The Motor House facility was developed by the Deutsch Foundation through the conversion of the "ground up" and funky "Loads of Fun" arts building, which had been privately owned and was up for sale.

Saving Baltimore Clayworks.  Baltimore has, at least once, rallied to maintain an arts facility that had closed, Baltimore Clayworks (""Baltimore Clayworks to reopen with new board, old debt," Sun).  The thing is that was a one-off, and a more structural approach was not developed.  And 

The Jubilee Baltimore CDC is focused on housing production more generally, but has developed at least two live/work buildings for artists.

Haniel Wides, director of education and shop services, moves equipment in the woodworking section of the Station North tool library. Tue., June 22, 2021. (Karl Merton Ferron/The Baltimore Sun)

Area 405 building likely to become housing.  The Baltimore Sun reports ("Amid potential sale of Area 405, artist community in Baltimore’s Station North fears being priced out") on an arts facility, Area 405, that faces closure because the building is for sale. 

Area 405 is a large building, mostly home to fabrication activities, and the Station North Tool Library, a community tool library with an inventory of more than 3,000 items.

Now that the area has stabilized and plans for expanding Penn Station and building around it are finally moving forward after many starts and stops ("Developers aim to begin construction this spring on Penn Station improvements," Baltimore Fishbowl) there is competition for buildings that can be redeveloped into housing.  This is one.  The real estate firm listing the property suggests it become "Oliver Street Lofts."

BTMFBA.  At the end of the day, if the building's use as an arts and culture-related facility isn't assured, ideally through ownership, there is no protection and representation of artists interests.

As I wrote in "Arts, culture districts, and revitalization," (2009, updated in 2019):

real estate development interests have their own interests apart from artists, and ... artists and arts organizations need to be conscious of what those interests are, harvest what they can from them, but never stop representing their own interests first and foremost.

In short, if you want to keep buildings operating for culture uses, "buy the m*f* building already."  BTMFBA is my response to the many articles over the years about artist displacement.  

-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators," 2018
-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review," 2016
-- "BMFBTA revisited: nonprofits and facilities planning and acquisition," 2016
-- "BTMFBA: artists and Los Angeles," 2017
-- "BTMFBA Chronicles: Seattle coffee shop raises money to buy its building," 2018
-- "Dateline Los Angeles: BTMFBA & Transformational Projects Action Planning & arts-related community development corporation as an implementation mechanism to own property," 2018

Key to a program for buying buildings to maintain arts uses:

1.  Create an arts-focused community development agency that can buy, hold, and operate cultural facilities and/or housing/live-work spaces (this may be complemented by a government arts agency more focused on owning and operating larger scale more traditional arts facilities like theater buildings)

2.  Create an arts and culture plan with an element on facilities and scenario planning for dealing with financial exigency and facilities needs of institutions large and small, whether or not they are affiliated with the city or county.

3.  Create a fund and/or funding relationships that can be tapped quickly, as needed.

Baltimore is a cultural arts programming leader, but still doesn't focus on arts use preservation.  .

While Baltimore is a first mover in many elements of arts and culture planning, having: 

• an arts school (MICA) and conservatory (Peabody, now part of Johns Hopkins)
• saving various cultural buildings and assets
• free entry to the Walters and Baltimore Fine Arts Museums 
• a variety of other museums
• waterfront and cultural uses in the Inner Harbor
• the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts as the city's cultural agency
• three arts and entertainment districts, including Station North
• a strong historic preservation movement
• with the core of the city is designated as a National Heritage Area 

they haven't taken the next step and created an initiative focused on preserving less formal arts and culture uses like the Area 405 building, which is located in Station North.

Is a little bit of help better than none?  According to the article, the Central Baltimore Partnership is interested in getting involved, with the aim of preserving some of the space for arts uses, and converting the rest of the building to housing.

I guess that's a better than nothing response.  

My recommendation: Better yet would be to preserve the entire building for arts uses, figuring that over time, arts uses will continue to be crowded out by the market.  

Baltimore has many large foundations, including Abell, Casey, and Weinberg, capable of stepping in ("Impact investors are launching a $25M program to provide capital in Baltimore’s underinvested neighborhoods," Technical.ly).  

Abell Foundation does a fair amount of "portfolio" and proactive investing in buildings and programs (Program Related Investments), and this would be easy for them to do, comparable to how Detroit foundations stepped in to save the Detroit Institute of Arts when the city declared bankruptcy and trustees wanted to sell off art ("ONE YEAR LATER: REFLECTING ON DETROIT’S PHILANTHROPY-DRIVEN “GRAND BARGAIN”," National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy).

WRT seeking foundation support for culture uses building acquisition, using arguments about the economic impact of the arts and culture, its relationship to community quality of life, and arts, stem education, etc., seems like it would be a no brainer.

But this is also an illustration of my point that you need to build these kinds of relationships in advance of desperate need.  In Detroit, the Kresge Foundation had been making big investments in community assets for decades.  They were already primed to step in if the city's leading cultural institution faced being dissolved.  

Similarly, in Philadelphia, when the Jefferson Medical College aimed to sell the famous painting, "The Gross Clinic" by Thomas Eakins, area arts institutions stepped in to buy it, although the cost, $68 million, was considerable, and they ended up selling some art works in order to raise the funds.

A more local Philadelphia story is the attempt to save the Woodmere Mansion in the Germantown  neighborhood ("Woodmere mobilizes to acquire, save historic Germantown Ave. home," Chestnut Local)

Even billionaires sometimes fail to pull off such feats, despite their resources, such as with DC area investor and philanthropist Stewart Bainum, of the family that created Choice Hotels ("Tribune Publishing cuts off negotiations with white knight investor Stewart Bainum Jr., clearing the way for an Alden takeover," Poynter Institute).

That's why building such funding relationships in advance is so important.

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Station North arts district has been a great success.  Station North is anchored by the University of Baltimore, Maryland Institute College of Arts (MICA), Penn Station, light rail service, and the Lyric Performing Arts Center, and has a great CDC, Jubilee Housing of Baltimore, which has done some live/work housing redevelopments for artists, it hasn't created a planning initiative focused on maintaining arts and cultural uses.

It's a good example of balancing arts as production and arts as consumption (Montgomery, J. “Cultural Quarters as Mechanisms for Urban Regeneration. Part 1: Conceptualising Cultural Quarters.” Planning, Practice & Research, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 293–306, November 2003).  Buildings like Area 405 and Motor House are about supports arts as production.

From an "anchor events" standpoint ("The layering effect: how the building blocks of an integrated public realm set the stage for community building and Silver Spring, Maryland as an example" and "Events as drivers of activity for traditional commercial districts | Holiday edition"), Baltimore's massive summer art fair, Artscape, is held in Station North.

Unfortunately, given the complexity of the event, Artscape will not be held this year, even though now with more widespread vaccination, public and outdoor events are beginning to return ("Baltimore needs the uplifting return of special events, concerts and festivals," Sun).

Ferris Wheel at Artscape, Penn Station and Charles Street in the background.

Year by year, the improvements brought about by the initiative have been impressive.  

One key difference are the colleges, especially MICA.  This makes a big difference, leading to a greater velocity of success compared to the cities other districts, even though they have great anchors as well, but not to the scale of MICA.

A few years ago, MICA joined with Johns Hopkins to renovate the Parkway Theatre, which includes the Maryland Film Society, programming, and academic programs related to film.

I also have a piece suggesting that it was a missed opportunity for Morgan State University when constructing a new building for their architecture and planning school to Station North to not have relocated that school to Station North ("Morgan State University should move their architecture and planning school to Downtown/Station North Arts District").

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Another good article by John Montgomery:

"Making a City: Urbanity, Vitality and Urban Design," Journal of Urban Design, 3:1 (1998)