Community revitalization initiatives for smaller communities | marginal attraction of people and commerce even in small amounts makes a difference

Sometimes I'm quick to judge revitalization initiatives as not particularly wide ranging.  But the fact of the matter is that many commercial districts can benefit positively from marginal increases in demand, visitorship and spending even from small projects.

For example Fargo North Dakota has doubled its downtown population over the past 25 years ("St. Cloud aims to revitalize downtown by ‘copying what Fargo did’," Minneapolis Star-Tribune) and Winona, Minnesota, by refocusing its use of its riverfront, has created an arts district ("How an industrial city along the Mississippi River transformed itself into an arts town," MST)

1.  "Glenview buying former Signode campus to control redevelopment," Crain's Chicago Business.  I've often made the point that an RFP isn't a plan, that it is a solicitation for proposals from organizations which may or may not have good ideas.  

Starting with a plan is better than an RFP, it shapes the proposals and what is acceptable, based on an already developed community consensus.

Glenview takes this a step further--maybe a plan would have been enough?--and bought a large vacant industrial property, totaling 56-acres, to be able to shape how it is developed.

Similarly, Monroeville, Pennsylvania considered buying the local failed shopping mall.  Instead, Walmart bought it and is likely to build a retail facility there.

en Sjaaheim, Silas Dingman and Brady Skahen, members of the pop-punk band F-18, perform at B-Side Indie Music Cafe in downtown St. Cloud last month. The performance was part of a night of punk music put on through Project 37, an all-ages and sober music program. (Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

2.  "This central Minnesota city is taking a true punk-rock approach to revive its downtown," Minneapolis Star-Tribune.  It probably won't spur the creation of the next Prince, or the ground up punk rock movement in DC in the 1970s sparked by the teen band, which morphed into Fugazi, but if cities like Austin, Chicago and Seattle have developed programs to support their music industry and the presentation of like music, why not St. Cloud?  From the article:

For years, officials here have been trying to enliven a lackluster downtown beset with empty storefronts, hollowed-out offices and nearly empty sidewalks.

Now some punk rockers are striking a chord. They, along with other musicians and artists, are stepping up in ways beyond what officials have done, adding cultural attractions and events. A new all-ages music venue that opened this past summer — the B-Side Indie Music Cafe — has already established itself as a gathering spot, jumping with punk rock kids one night, with singer-songwriters another.

In the works next door is a community arts space run by the Wirth Center for the Performing Arts. And in the future? Leaders dream of an arts magnet school or art museum.

“I have a three-part plan to revitalize downtown into an arts district,” said James Newman, executive director of the Wirth Center, which has provided music lessons in central Minnesota for more than four decades. “Downtown has so much potential, and I think an arts focus would be a great thing to bring people in.”

... Already sprinkled throughout downtown St. Cloud are several arts spots, including the Paramount Center for the Arts — which hosts musicals, plays and concerts, as well as art classes — and Pioneer Place on Fifth, which offers music and local radio theater. There are also stages at the Red Carpet Nightclub and an intimate venue at Gnarly Bard Theater, which opened last year.

The question is how much of this ends up being focused on people in-market, shifting their interests from something else to music, versus could St. Cloud, 65 miles from Minneapolis, develop as a destination on music?   From the article:

The planned hub is part of a trend playing out across the state as cities work to revamp downtowns with arts and experiences as retail stores struggle to stay open and offices shutter as more employees work from home.

In Winona, leaders have turned the southeastern river city into an arts destination with a concert hall and art gallery expected to open in the next year, as well as prominent festivals celebrating Shakespeare and Beethoven. In Detroit Lakes, an installation of giant wooden trolls brings people to its downtown and then sends them on an adventure to nearby parks and trails. And in Anoka, folks are invited to explore its downtown’s concerts, farmers markets and businesses with a drink in hand as part of the state’s first social district.

It's a reverse of the more typical flow of rural-suburban residents to the city to join a music ecosystem.

-- "Arts as production: The rock music ecosystem in West Seattle," 2022
-- "Ground up (guerrilla) art #2: community halls and music (among other things)," 2011
-- "Under threat: Austin's music industry as an element of the city's cultural ecosystem and economy," 2016 
-- "Leveraging music for cultural and economic development: part one, opera," 2017
-- "Leveraging music as cultural heritage for economic development: part two, popular music," 2017
-- "NBC4 asks if DC can become a concert capital like Nashville, Austin, and New Orleans?," 2019
-- ""Arts district planning" in Arlington County | Many communities don't know the difference between arts as production and arts as consumption," 2021 
-- "Another example of why local culture plans need to include an element on retail/dealing with for profit elements of the cultural ecosystem: Nashville's Tubb Record Shop," 2022

Baek Jae-ho, head coach of the Sangdong High School baseball team.Photographer: SeongJoon Cho for Bloomberg

3.  "High School Baseball Brought a Dying Korean Town Back to Life," Bloomberg.  The rural declining mining town of Sangdong came up with a program to attract new residents, by creating a first-in-class high school baseball program.  From the article:

That passion for the game inspired Cho Yun-hee and Kim Kyung-soo, 1986 graduates of Sangdong High. As part of a group discussing the future of their alma mater, they spearheaded an effort to attract students, mulling and rejecting proposals such as creating a training program for the energy and mining industries. Then in 2022, they hit upon an ambitious plan. The school would offer free baseball training, plus lodging and food for out-of-area students.

But with an estimated cost of 500 million won ($350,000) a year, the proposal wasn’t an easy sell. Opponents viewed the expense as ludicrous for a decaying community, and even supporters questioned whether a ghost town like Sangdong could lure transplants from dynamic parts of the country.

... Baek had his reputation and a straightforward pitch to prospective students: Get top-level training and a chance at the pro leagues for free. That’s a strong combination in a country where team membership fees and private coaching can cost more than 3 million won a month. The school provides equipment, free lunches and helps pay for other meals. There are now 38 students in the program, two short of a full roster after two players were expelled for smoking (the school has a strict one-strike-and-out policy).

Since the program started, population has inched up over 1,000, new businesses are opening and new housing is being constructed.

The long-vacant Palace Theater in downtown Gary. A blueprint for reversing the city’s fortunes proposes using the restored theater as the heart of a new arts district. Photographer: Zach Mortice/Bloomberg CityLab

4.  Smaller but better?  "Can Anyone Save Gary, Indiana?," Bloomberg.  Gary is about 30 miles from Chicago, and has transit service to and from the South Shore Line, the last US interurban commuter railroad service.

Gary was a steel town.  As US Steel faltered but also reduced employment through capital investment, so did the city--US Steel once had 30,000 employees, now 4,000 (remember too the job multiplier effect which is between 3x and 4x, so that's potentially a loss of 104,000 jobs total.  The city has over 7,000 abandoned buildings.

From the article:

The city’s population also peaked in the ’60s, at about 170,000; today fewer than 70,000 live there. Roughly 80% of Gary residents are Black and a third live below the poverty line — about three times the state average.

Especially downtown, the impact of the exodus is shocking. Most of the land within a several-block radius of City Hall — 5th and Broadway, the center of town — is a bleak patchwork of cleared lots and abandoned commercial buildings. It’s the kind of decay only seen when there was once a rapid and focused public investment in infrastructure, followed by immediate wholesale neglect.

But according to a new study by Notre Dame’s Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative, the failure of mega-scaled landmark buildings like the Genesis Center — a typical gambit for struggling cities — isn’t just an indicator of flailing industrial economies. Instead, the size and form of these developments are themselves the primary culprits.

“When you’re in a state of physical collapse, it doesn’t make any sense to build one big building, because what you need to do is take whatever demand exists and spread it out in smaller buildings, so you can actually find a way to illustrate to people that this change has come,” says Stefanos Polyzoides, dean of Notre Dame’s architecture school, which houses the Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative. “One building accommodating a change is not urbanism. It’s architecture.”

This is an excellent point about many small projects having more impact than a single large project.  So Gary is working to engage multiple small developers, and focusing on rebuilding the public realm in the core of the city, and focusing development on the commercial core, and in neighborhoods that are somewhat stabilized but have vacant lots perfect for infill buildings, zoning changes and some money from the state, which seriously restricted the city's ability to generate property tax revenues through various legislative initiatives.  From the article:

But if the city is going to depend on small business owners for its downtown renaissance, there are resources it needs to offer, he says, like business management training. “A lot of times, mom-and-pop business owners jump in the water and learn how to swim while we’re in the water,” he says. “If we’d had avenues for training, then a lot of businesses that had not made it might be able to make it.”

Jane Jacobs was not in favor of large projects at the expense of smaller, which is discussed in the book Cities: Back from the Edge. 

Elkhart still has a thriving downtown.

5.  Elkhart, Indiana.  The Notre Dame program is also working with Elkhart, and the article contrasts revitalization there versus Gary.  

Elkhart has had more success because of a strong philanthropic community, a lesser problem in terms of abandoned buildings, better capitalized locally-based businesses, and a stronger industrial base, centered on RV manufacturing.  From the article:

Working with other family-owned businesses, as well as the public sector and philanthropic support, Weaver has seen $250 million invested over the last six years in Elkhart’s River District, a mixed-use live-work neighborhood at the confluence of the Elkhart and St. Joseph Rivers. 

So far, the effort has produced hundreds of new residents, a 1.5-mile riverwalk, five parks, and 40 new businesses; a new and lively urban place. “The only way I’ve seen this successfully executed is to slowly build confidence by incremental development,” Weaver says. “I think what Notre Dame has set up is a playbook for communities to think about redevelopment in a way that’s hyperlocal to them.”

Notably, the equity invested is from the community itself, he says. “Nobody is coming to save Elkhart,” says Weaver.

"Hotel Elkhart Named Top Restoration Project in Indiana," HospitalityNet.

Investing in yourself, rather than seeking a savior from outside pushing a large project is key.  From the article:

In some ways, Elkhart is in a different boat than Gary: It has a strong philanthropic community and an intact industrial base.

It’s home to Patrick Industries, which is the leading manufacturer of the ever popular RVs.

Weaver’s ability to finance urban development is closely tied into this dynamic. His firm also develops industrial facilities, and Weaver says the returns for building a “a big dumb box” can be 20%. For his civic work in the River District, it’s paltry 3%.

And he’s not sure building quality urban places outside of major metropolitan areas is going to be an attractive investment for investors any time soon. “I don’t know that we’ll ever be in a situation where the best outcome for the community is the best outcome for the developer in the short term,” he says. “There’s a conflict. I think it’s very difficult to build buildings that enhance civic pride, that put the community first, and provide a short-term superior return.”

While the article discusses structural racism as an issue in Gary, which is majority black at 72% of the population, it doesn't discuss how Elkhart is 62% white.  

This gives the city an easier path forward than Gary ("Elkhart looks to spark downtown revitalization with $40M amphitheater," Inside Indiana Business, "Elkhart officials approve 2 development projects to reimagine city," WNDU TV," "Elkhart," BusinessView). 

Gary's waterfront.  Despite the decline of the steel industry generally, and the reduction in workforce at the US Steelworks in Gary by 70%+, the Gary Steelworks is still the largest steel plant in the world.

Another advantage is that while Gary has the shore of Lake Michigan as an asset, it's occupied in part by US Steel, while Elkhart is able to leverage its riverfront ("Revitalization of the Elkhart River District," Landscape Architecture). 

In a way the comparison between the cities is unfair, in that Elkhart never really crashed the way that Gary did.  According to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, most of Elkhart's downtown is historically intact, and designated.   

Elkhart County is the number-one tourist destination in the state, primarily because of the Heritage Trail, a 90-mile journey through Amish farms, shops, small towns, and urban areas. Free CDs guide visitors past Elkhart’s 1924 Elco Theatre, the Midwest Museum of American Art, and the RV Hall of Fame and Museum.

Elkhart River

 Another attraction in Elkhart is the National New York Central Railroad Museum, which highlights the importance of railroads to the city’s and the country’s development. Elkhart was a vital link between East and West during the country’s growth, and the city is a natural home for this museum, since its rail yard is among America’s largest. The museum includes a replicated stationmaster’s office and a restored 100-year-old freight house complex containing displays and hands-on exhibits.

That makes a difference.  It reminds me of Pontiac Michigan, a majority black city in a county, Oakland that is majority white.  But the County didn't realize it had an obligation to assist the city in substantive revitalization.

-- "Pontiac Michigan: a lagging African American city in one of the nation's wealthiest counties," 2022

Marginal increases in population can have an extranormal impact.  

6.  The above-mentioned downtown residential development program in Fargo, North Dakota (Downtown in Focus Action Plan, Fargo Core Neighborhoods Master Plan).

Block 6 Apartments, Campbell Properties, Fargo, North Dakota.

7.  Tulsa's Remote program to attract "work from home" tech workers by providing small relocation grants ("The economic benefits of paying workers to move," Bloomberg).

8.  Paducah's artist recruitment program, which has helped to revitalize neighborhoods near downtown, attracting artists and businesses, in part because of Paducah's Interstate highway connections to other Midwestern cities with summer art fairs where artists sell their goods ("In Paducah, Artists Create Something From Nothing," NPR). 

The Mississippi Crossings development on the Mississippi River in Champlin. (Leila Navidi/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

9.  Champlin Minnesota's riverfront revitalization ("Twin Cities suburb turns forgotten Mississippi riverfront into a key attraction," MST).  The city has worked to leverage its riverfront since the late 1990s and it has taken 20+ years of steady effort to come to fruition.

(Stillwater, in the far suburbs of Minneapolis worries about overtourism, "Scenic Stillwater draws festive crowds. How much tourism is too much?," "Remade Stillwater riverfront could bring new parks, boat launch, picnic space and fishing piers," MST).

10. "A mountain-bike boom brought growing pains. But these mining towns now embrace their new identity," Crosby and Ironton, on the decline with the close of mines, shift their economies to outdoor recreation and tourism ("Iron Range to spend $5 million on mountain biking trails," MST, 2018).

James Brainard, the mayor of Carmel, Ind., poses before the last of the buildings filling up City Center.Alan Greenblatt/Governing

11.  Creating a center in suburban towns.  Not revitalization per se, but "vitalization" of otherwise residentially focused communities ("Twin Cities suburbs seek destination status with new downtown plans," "St. Louis Park’s West End bucks the trend with one of area’s lowest vacancy rates," MST).

Carmel, Indiana, a traditional suburb of Indianapolis, realized it needed to create a downtown to spur growth ("Meet the Mayor Who Totally Transformed His City," Governing Magazine, "‘How Did I End Up in Indiana?’ Welcome to the Internet’s Favorite Small City," Wall Street Journal).  From the WSJ:

“What I heard when I went door to door in May 1995 for my first election was this yearn for a traditional city,” he said.

At the time, zoning laws prevented the integration of residential and commercial development. Over the next three decades, Brainard said, Carmel has been revitalized in large part through zoning changes and tax increment financing, which allowed the city to build infrastructure with bonds backed by the projected tax revenue of future real estate. 

Carmel has built several multimillion-dollar, mixed-use developments along its central corridor with townhomes, apartments, boutique shops and restaurants. An Arts & Design district with galleries and showrooms now sits in place of the city’s original downtown area. 

It connects to the City Center development, which is home to a 151,000-square-foot concert hall and the Carmel Christkindlmarkt holiday market. These developments are connected by the Monon Greenway, which can be walked or cycled and is part of the 27-mile Monon Trail that runs to downtown Indianapolis, according to Brainard. He has also implemented a network of over 150 roundabouts as an alternative to signal lights, in an attempt to move traffic more efficiently, increase walkability and minimize car accidents.

It's been very successful, so another suburb, Fishers, is doing the same thing ("How Fishers is bringing people out of cul-de-sacs," "New 'urban village' is the latest development in Nickel Plate District south of 116th Street," Indianapolis Star), "Fishers announces plans for $122.5M in new downtown developments," Indianapolis Business Journal).

12. Rural "company" towns invest locally to attract workers.  The Wall Street Journal reports on Pella, Iowa, the home of Pella Windows ("Facing Labor Shortages, Pella Reinvents the Company Town in Rural Iowa").  

Pella Corp. has offices and manufacturing plants in more than 30 cities across the U.S. and Canada. But one of the toughest jobs, say executives at this closely held maker of windows and doors, is convincing workers to locate here in its hometown, a rural city of about 10,000 residents 45 miles southeast of Des Moines.

The company and its controlling shareholders—members of the founding Kuyper family and its descendants—set out to change that. They have spent tens of millions of dollars in the past three years on housing, child-care centers, restaurants and an indoor entertainment center, among other things, to retain and attract new workers. More spending is on the way.

“We just didn’t have the amenities that people we were trying to recruit would expect,” says Chief Executive Tim Yaggi, noting that the manufacturer competes with major cities for talent.

I think that Kohler in Wisconsin is another example.  And ironically, Andersen Windows in Wisconsin.

Somalis in Minneapolis.  

13.  Immigrants moving to languishing communities ("Immigrants as in-migrants and community revitalization") such as 

• the Somalis to Minneapolis-St. Paul ("Somalis finding their place in Minnesota," CNN)
• Latinos to Iowa ("This Iowa meatpacking town didn’t always welcome immigrants. Then the high school started a mariachi band.," Des Moines Register) and many other places ("$11M Plaza de Sol development will bring food hall, small business incubator to St. Paul’s East Side," MST)
• Portuguese and Brazilians to East Coast towns
• Haitians in Ohio don't eat cats and dogs ("An Ohio City Faces a Future Without Haitian Workers," New York Times, "Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up," Guardian)
• Cape Verdeans in Boston, etc.

Threat to immigration as a revitalization augur.  This is under threat though because of the Trump Administration's anti-immigrant agenda ("The Bay Area’s ‘Little Kabul’ once welcomed Afghan refugees. Federal cuts are changing that," San Francisco Chronicle, "'Now, there is fear everywhere’: How Trump’s immigration crackdown has permeated R.I.’s smallest city, home to a big Latino population," Boston Globe, "Chicago ICE Raids Keep Customers at Home in City’s Latino Retail District," Bloomberg, "Minnesota’s Ecuadorian community is flourishing, but its future is uncertain," Sahan Journal).  From Bloomberg:

For Marco Rodriguez of Dulcelandia (Spanish for “candy land”), the raids are a double whammy. Costs for the family business he runs had already gone up by at least 25% due to tariffs, he said, and now the raids are keeping shoppers away during a peak season. Sales across his four shops in Chicago are down more than 50% this year. 

“On the corridor itself, all businesses have been affected, everyone’s feeling it,” Rodriguez said in an interview Wednesday at the chain’s shop in Little Village. “We’ve seen a drop, especially during these times, these last couple weeks, with what’s going on.”

... Fear of raids in Little Village’s two-mile retail corridor led to foot traffic falling by as much as 30% compared with the prior weekend, according to Jennifer Aguilar, who heads the local chamber of commerce. That’s exacerbating financial troubles for the 400 or so businesses in the area, she said.

Cultural planning and for profit assets: Philadelphia's Wanamaker (Macy's) Department Store Organ

Wanamaker Grand Court organist Peter Richard Conte at the console of the organ at Macy’s in Center City, June 22, 2021. TYGER WILLIAMS / Staff Photographer

Philadelphia's Wanamaker Department Store installed one of the largest organs in the world, and it has been regularly played.  

After many mergers, the store ended up as a Macy's with part of the building sold off for non-retail functions.

Over the past few months Macy's has been closing more stores, including a preponderance of stores located in Downtowns.  The Philadelphia store will close Sunday.  There will be a gala concert on the Saturday before the closure of the Macy's ("The Wanamaker Organ is closing out the Macy’s era with a grand, daylong series of concerts," Philadelphia Inquirer).

The property owner for the rest of the building has bought the Macy's space.  While they will be keeping the organ, there is no disclosed plan of yet on how to use it.  

What happens to the Wanamaker Organ after Macy’s closes isn’t settled. It has been a reliable feature of Philadelphia musical life for decades, played in twice-daily recitals six days a week. TF Cornerstone, which owns part of the Wanamaker Building and is expected to soon acquire the rest of it, has said it will keep the massive instrument, whose components are tucked away in various parts of the building. It is often cited as the largest fully functioning pipe organ in the world.

“We are committed to the preservation of the organ and ensuring it remains a cherished part of the space,” said the company in a January statement. But whether that means it will be played regularly and given the visibility it has had in the past isn’t clear.

I have a number of entries about taking a more expansive approach to community cultural planning, ranging from keeping an eye on higher education art programs that might be threatened with closure ("Revisiting entries: Should community culture master plans include elements on higher education arts programs?"), to various types of music, local radio ("Community radio as an element of local cultural planning"), the history of local music, retail ("Cultural plans should have an element on culture-related retail"), etc.

L. Curt Mangel III, curator of the Wanamaker Organ at Macy's, with some of the organ's 28,482 pipes, April 29, 2013. Photo: David Maialetti.

In historic preservation, it's rare but possible to designate interiors as public landmarks, and one such place is the Grand Court and the Wanamaker Organ.  From "Is the Wanamaker Organ safe? And what does ‘safe’ mean?" (PI).:

Moreover, architecturally and socially, there’s more at stake than just the organ. The Wanamaker Grand Court may be privately owned, but it has long functioned as a public square. It is as much a public right-of-way as the Reading Terminal, Elfreth’s Alley, or Independence Hall. Any building owner or developer violates the terms of this tradition at their own risk. So it makes sense that, in 2017, the Grand Court was granted a spot on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. 

“When you stand in the Grand Court, just about everything you see that is attached to the building is protected,” says Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, which filed the 2017 nomination.

But saving a cultural resource versus maintaining its use/providing access to the public is something else entirely, when it is an interior feature of a for profit building.  Building the process for access worthy of inclusion within a community cultural plan.

But the strongest case for the organ might not rest on preservation or nostalgia. It’s about creating a lively future for this important urban linchpin. The ornate Wanamaker Grand Court is vast and impressive — 150 feet high, or about the same height as the Kimmel Center glass dome. To hear the organ there is to feel it, so strong are the vibrations. The combination of sound and sights creates a sense of awe that’s not unlike a cathedral. It is our Notre-Dame.

And it’s inherently more inclusive than a cathedral. It’s a precious community gathering space and a place for rediscovering what it means to stand elbow to elbow in a crowd and feel part of something bigger. That something is powerfully humanizing.

If you think this exaggerates what one department store organ can achieve, recall Opera Philadelphia’s visit in 2010, when hundreds of choristers showed up in the store and surrounded shoppers with the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah with organ accompaniment. The YouTube ...video still gives me chills, and others must agree. It has been viewed 9.6 million times.

... That experience sits at one end of the scale — big, public, brimming with a sense of commonweal. At the other end is the personal, like the impact of walking into the store at noon expecting sheets on sale and instead tearing up to a 10-minute organ transcription from Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier.

... There’s something particularly powerful about stumbling on unexpected bolts of poetry in prosaic settings. It’s one of the things great cities have in common.

Peter Dobrin, the classical music columnist, whose purview includes great writing on cultural aspects of public space ("Great article on urban design qualities of Kimmel Center in Philadelphia | extendable to civic assets more generally"), suggests in the second PI article that the Organ needs to be more visible, and have music organizations as partners, that maybe the space should be converted from retail.  One person he quotes suggests that a Philadelphia-focused museum would work, and keep the Organ in the public domain.

-- Friends of the Wanamaker Organ 

Dobrin also suggests that The Wanamaker Grand Court and Organ are an important gateway to Market East and its future, which has been the subject of a great amount of community input since the initial proposal, since retracted, to relocate the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team to space above the Market East train station ("Bait and switch in Philadelphia: 76ers basketball team won't move to Downtown, will remain in South Philly").

Perhaps that could be an outcome of Philadelphia's renewed focus on celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country, focusing on how Philadelphia was the first capital ("Time for a civic ‘Tush Push’: We need an all-hands-on-deck, brotherly and sisterly shove to get us over the goal line in readying Philadelphia for the Semiquincentennial celebrations.," PI), a program for the lower floors of the Wanamaker Building, and a plan and program for the Organ.

=======

Note that here in Salt Lake, the Church of the Madeleine, the most prominent Catholic church in the region, also has a great organ, albeit not on the scale of the Wanamaker.  And one of the Eccles foundations sponsors an annual series of concerts to promote the existence of that cultural gem to the community, regardless of religious identity.  There is even an event where people with experience can play the organ.

Revisiting entries: Should community culture master plans include elements on higher education arts programs?

This article was published in 2016, "Should community culture master plans include elements on higher education arts programs?," and the next year there was a brief follow up on the for profit arts school sector.  Both sectors should be included in such plans if relevant.

The article made the point that community cultural plans should have an element on higher education if they have small/independent arts colleges, to be prepared if economic and other circumstances change significantly for those organizations.  In DC, the fulcrum was the independent Corcoran Gallery of Arts and its related College of Arts and Design.  

It wasn't until some time after its dissolution that I figured out what would have been the best course--not giving its property to GWU and art to the National Gallery of Arts but to reposition as a locally serving fine arts museum and shifting the college to the University of the District of Columbia.

The piece reads great 8 years later!

Philadelphia brings this back to the fore because the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is shutting down most of its academic programs ("Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to end its degree-granting programmes," Art Newspaper) and last year the University of the Arts shut down ("Closure of Philadelphia Art School Spurs Review by State Attorney General," New York Times, "Heartbreak, anger and many questions follow University of the Arts’ abrupt decision to close," AP).

WRT PAFA, according to the Art Newspaper:

The academy’s educational transition website states that there was no “single reason for the decision to wind down degree-granting programmes”, but rather several “converging trends” that led to the downsizing. Principal among the trends listed on the site are “[i]ncreasing expectations from students, prospective students and the families that college should provide a broader range of academic and professional opportunities beyond the fine arts”. This sentiment is echoed in Pryor’s statement that “universities in our own region and across the country are struggling with these trends”, with PAFA representing a particularly vulnerable example in a national arts education sector facing serious headwinds.

Beyond the challenges of attracting and satisfying students, PAFA cited the difficulty of providing adequate services and complying with regulations for a relatively small school, noting that “it is simply impossible to maintain a college—with admissions, enrollment, Title IX, student support services and other requirements—with a student body of less than 300”. The school noted that these difficulties were only exacerbated by the pandemic, leading to even more pronounced challenges in enrollment and operating costs.

Likely this is a problem for other small arts schools.

Now, UAS's properties are being sold off, and the bankruptcy trustee isn't inclined to keep the properties as arts uses, so potential arts-related bidders compete ("Lead bidder for UArts’ Hamilton Hall plans art gallery, work space for artists, and restaurant"), unequally, with for profit developers ("Mayor Parker can help keep the arts in the Avenue of the Arts — if she acts quickly," Philadelphia Inquirer).

A drawing of David Yager, former president of University of the Arts, is on a column outside Hamilton Hall on their campus in Philadelphia, Wednesday June 5, 2024 as students, staff, and faculty rally before marching to 1500 Market and another rally in front of the former law offices of UArts chair Jud Aaron. (Tom Gralish/The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Philadelphia has a strong philanthropic community still, in particular the Pew Foundation, and if the city had been prepared wrt arts planning in the higher education sector, perhaps these institutions could have been saved, and/or the building portfolio remained in the arts sector.

A great example of this happening was in Detroit, when the Kresge Foundation stepped up to save the Detroit Institute of Arts in the face of the City's bankruptcy.  It turns out that the DIA was run as an agency of the city, so its collection and assets weren't separately protected and were in danger of being sold off ("Foundations Commit $330 Million to Protect DIA Collection," Philanthropy News Digest).

Apparently, UAS enrollment had dropped by more than half since 2009.  If that's not an indicator for a need for extraordinary intervention, I don't know what is.

Art facilities portfolios.  In "Reprinting with a slight update, "Arts, culture districts and revitalization" from 2009" (2019), I recommend that such properties be owned and managed by arts-related community development corporations.  These articles provide some additional examples ("BTMFBA -- London edition (2025), "From BTMFBA to "community right to buy"" (2024)).

A community right to buy codicil is what they need in Philadelphia.

Hard to make difficult decisions without a plan.  But getting the Mayor involved is a long shot.  She has to be convinced.  And without an organized plan it's hard to get elected officials to act let alone act with the alacrity necessary to save a school ("The long, slow death of Birmingham-Southern: What killed an Alabama college with 168-year-old roots?," Birmingham News) or a building portfolio.

Write those elements in community cultural resources master plans.

An interesting public space development project in Downtown Pittsburgh: extends the range of after-work activities to keep office workers engaged

Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is developing a multi-faceted public space-park in Downtown Pittsburgh ("'Asset for the people:' Pittsburgh Cultural Trust unveils name, more details of Eighth Street block overhaul Downtown").  This is interesting for a couple reasons.  

First, it involves other public organizations focused on Downtown improvement, creating public spaces where consumption of food and drink is not necessarily a primary activity.  Second it looks to be addressing multiple demographics, including kids, when planning for children was never a priority before.  

Third, it takes daypart and attraction management to new levels (Planning programming by daypart, month, season: and Boston Winter Garden, DC's Holiday Market, etc.") whereas spaces like these were never really a priority, at least in terms of planning and programming--sometimes such spaces were created as part of development agreements, but then left to languish.

-- "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," (2012)

It's a different way of staying Downtown compared to consumption of alcohol indoors after work, and is responsive to declines in alcohol consumption by younger demographics ("Why Gen Z Is Drinking Less," TIME)..  Although public beer gardens are a method chosen by Philadelphia Horticultural Society and later the Parks Department, alongside Milwaukee to activate spaces ("Cities Want Young Families to Play and Stay: New Features Include Parks, Playgrounds and Beer Gardens," Wall Street Journal, 2014).

Fourth, it reminds me of a point made in Learning from Bryant Park, that commercial district revitalization organizations should take a more active role in developing unique spaces that extend the range of activities available to patrons. 

Fifth, it extends the range of third places ("Third place issues") where consumer consumption isn't a requirement.  And it's close to the Allegheny River.

Pittsburgh, meet Arts Landing. That’s the name for the new $31 million Downtown gathering and play space being proposed by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust on Eighth Street bordering Penn Avenue and Fort Duquesne Boulevard.

On Thursday, officials from the Cultural Trust, county and city dropped the name and more details about the four-acre spot, which will include a great lawn, a bandshell for concerts, a play area, a garden walk, pickleball courts and a small running track. “This will be a place for co-workers to meet after work, for families to bring their kids down to play — for people to go out on their first dates,” Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato said. “It’s really going to become an incredible asset for the people of Pittsburgh for generations to come.”

... “This is not a short-term fix or an incremental improvement to an existing space,” Mr. Holmberg said Thursday. “This is reimagining and building an entirely new destination that will delight and benefit our community.” The centerpiece of Arts Landing will be the “great lawn,” a one-acre green space along the Allegheny River and between the Andy Warhol and Rachel Carson bridges. A bandshell will be located in the northwest corner of the gathering spot near Fort Duquesne Boulevard. It will be used for concerts and performances.

... “It’s really meant to be a people-first focused space,” said Lisa Tziona Switkin, a partner at Field Operations, the architecture firm designing the project. Other Arts Landing features include a play area for children and families — designed with the help of a focus group of 8-year-olds, Mr. Holmberg said. A new visitor center will also be located on the ground floors of two Cultural Trust-owned buildings at 819 and 821 Penn near the Ninth Street intersection. The center will include public restrooms.

Note that past blog entries have referenced Pittsburgh Cultural Trust as national best practice.

-- "The Howard and Lincoln Theatres: run them like the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust/Playhouse Square Cleveland model" (2012)

BTMFBA: London edition

The Buy the Mother Fucking Building Already series of articles about how arts groups (independent retail and nonprofits) should buy their own buildings to protect their interests.  The premier example is SEMAEST of Paris, which focuses on buying and holding retail space and making it available to independent retailers.

-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016

-- "BTMFBA: maintaining arts spaces in the face of rising real estate values | Seattle, New York City," 2024
-- "New form of BTMFBA in San Francisco," 2023
-- "A wrinkle on BTMFBA: let the city/county own the cultural facility, while you operate it (San Francisco and the Fillmore Heritage Center)," 2021
-- "BTMFBA: Baltimore and the Area 405 Studio," 2021
-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators," 2018
-- "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
-- "From BTMFBA to 'community right to buy,'" (2024)

although sometimes nonprofits can't be trusted either.

-- "Lack of a system breeds more of the same: Source Theater, Washington DC, up for sale 2006, 2024," 2024
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review," 2016

=====

It turns out that London has a similar organization, focused on the arts, called the Creative Land Trust ("Mayor launches groundbreaking Creative Land Trust").  Starting in 2019, it aimed to get 1,000 spaces, recognizing that there is demand for 14,000 such spaces across the city.  I don't think they've come anywhere near to that amount of space under control as of yet, while SEMAEST, much older, has more than 700,000 s.f. under control.

-- Creative Places Create Value: The Impact of Creative Workspace on Local Residential Property
-- Urban Precarity: Affordable Art Studios and Creative Flight in the Post Covid City, Kings College, London

One of their projects, small at 4,600 s.f., is in a new build residential complex.  And two floors in a building in Hackney Wick (a cool district I stayed in in 2018).

Sydney, Australia is modeling a similar program ("Sydney launches cultural strategy with plans for a new Creative Land Trust to boost affordable artist workspace Creative Land Trusts: a proven solution for growing affordable creative workspace in cities," World Cities Creative Forum, "The radical property plan to bring artists back to Sydney," "The plan to use White Bay Power Station to fix Sydney’s live music crisis," Sydney Morning Herald).

Sydney’s proposed Creative Land Trust is closely modelled on the same-name scheme launched by the City of London in 2019 to fix its acute shortage of rehearsal and studio spaces. The scheme involves allowing properties gifted or transferred by public or private landowners to working artists, musicians and writers at a subsidised rate.

Council analysis of the 2021 census found the number of artists, musicians, writers in greater Sydney fell by 11.6 per cent when in every other capital city the population of creatives had increased, showing the impact of rising property prices on the creative sector.

... Over the last decade, Sydney’s cultural infrastructure has shrunk by the equivalent of three Sydney Opera Houses, Lord Mayor Clover Moore will tell cultural leaders. Of that lost space, 14,400 square metres was once production space occupied by artists, musicians, writers and performers, a decline of 28 per cent over that time.

... The council identified the need to help the “missing middle” in its updated cultural strategy that is to be voted on by councillors on June 24. “There is a notable lack of midsized venues, mid-sized organisations and opportunities for mid-career artists,” it noted.

To this end, Moore said city council would boost cultural funding by $20 million over the next 10 years. Out of this, 50 individual fellowships per year, start-up grants and artist residencies would be funded with writers to be given space to work in City of Sydney libraries and community centres.

The difference between these programs and DC is that DC doesn't want to be on the hook for creating, buying, and holding such spaces.

The town (or place) that art saved(?): arts as revitalization versus arts as community building

I suppose there is a book out there, modelled after The Town that Food Saved, about the arts.  The issue I have been attuned to going on 20 years is revitalization focused arts programming versus what I call arts as community building.  

The way of specifying the difference is a program versus a one off activity creating a mural, etc.  It's not that the latter isn't important, but it isn't a program with objectives, and it's the program that makes a difference in revitalization (Developing and Advancing a Cultural District Tools: Resources, and Templates for Creating a Successful Cultural District, Americans for the Arts)

Another way to think about this is sustained efforts ("Building the arts and culture ecosystem in DC: Part One, sustained efforts vs. one-off or short term initiatives," 2015).  My entry on arts districts and arts as consumption versus arts as production is about this kind of approach ("Reprinting with a slight update, "Arts, culture districts and revitalization"," originally 2009, revised 2019).  The entry discusses arts as production versus arts as consumption, relying on the writings of John Montgomery, the components of arts districts, and facilities as infrastructure.

Or from Urban Regime theory:

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. [emphasis added, in this paragraph and below] ...

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

So much about the arts in community and revitalization is the lack of a program.  Also see: 

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Five | Planning for Public Art as an element of park facilities"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning, Part Six | Art(s) in the Park(s) as a comprehensive program "

Murals as community building: Philadelphia.  Can murals be a gateway to a more developed revitalization program?  Philadelphia is known for their mural arts program, which is massive ("Philadelphia's Mural Arts program will bring expertise, funding to Detroit," Detroit Free Press).  

But while it contributes to neighborhood stabilization and gets people involved, does it truly harvest the interests and needs of the community in terms of improvement of the local micro-economy?

I think it comes down to most artists involved in such programs not being interested in revitalization.  Often, city arts functions are part of the "economic development" cluster of city agencies.  But I'm not sure good the average arts council is on these functions either.  If, and that's a big if, cities want to achieve revitalization objectives from mural projects too, they're going to have to plan for it.  For example, Arts Councils probably need to add some economic development planners.

Springfield Missouri Museum of Art.  Somehow I came across a program by the museum which had community members go through the collection, especially items in storage and create exhibits of their reactions.  Again, I think this is community building. nd building awareness and interest in the institution and the community ("House of Art(s) to open at the Springfield Art Museum," Springfield News-Leader), "Drury Students to help with De-Installation of Springfield Art Museum Exhibit," Ozarks First, "Space as event as ouevre," Gerard Nadeau).  But that isn't revitalization, and again ikely that's not a goal of the museum.  From the first article:

In collaboration with Drury University's Art of Space, led by assistant professor Gerard Nadeau, the museum is erecting the outdoor House of Art(s) on the northwest corner of the museum's grounds. 

 Sarah Buhr, the museum's curator of art, says the project has been in the works for months and is funded with money from Missouri Arts Council grants. Buhr says the idea for the outdoor exhibit was born after members of Art of Space visited the museum. "We gave them a small tour of our storage spaces in our collection and a challenge: Think of a project that would connect with the interior of the museum from the outside," she says. 

The Drury students came up with the idea for the House of Art(s). Large weatherproofed panels that were painted by artists throughout the community will form the walls of the space. Plexiglas panels will form a sort of roof, to protect the contents.

Arts as revitalization.  Below are listed programs that I think qualify as arts as revitalization.  The list is by no means comprehensive.  There are dozens and dozens of such districts in the US and abroad.

Murals as community branding: City of South Salt Lake.  In SLC, SSL is considered "inner city." If they only knew.  SSL has a bunch of industrial land, is adding apartments, doesn't really have a center but claim to be creating one ("South Salt Lake’s “downtown” has been a bust so far. Its new transit station areas plan aims to change that," Building Salt Lake), although they have the opportunity because of a heavily used Trax station just a couple blocks away from State Street.

Main Street in Salt Lake is more a dividing line between east and west than a Main Street per se, that function is fulfilled by State Street  (Hwy 89, which crosses the entire state).  In SSL, Main Street is mostly a lot of low rise industrial, and so in today's post industrial society, brewpubs qualify zoning-wise, so there are many.

Nothing Lasts mural and Apex Brewing.  It's hard to develop vitality in a corridor when most of the buildings are fronted by parking.

This corridor has been targeted by SSL as the site for an annual Mural Fest in May ("Mural Fest draws international attention to new art in South Salt Lake," KSL-TV), where artists create new murals to add to the outdoor gallery.  It's comparable to Wynnwood Walls in Miami (see below), but the large size of the blocks and car dependency make it hard to develop a walking culture, especially because many of the buildings still function as industrial.

While SSL has designated this area as a Creative Industries Zone, I don't think it's had the same kind of impact of Portland's Central Eastside industrial zoning for small and artisan businesses.  Still, the very visual murals have been a way for the city to differentiate and develop an identity separate from Salt Lake City.

Pittsburgh.  I read a bunch of articles over the weekend from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and these are about mural projects ("North Side mural project will bring a splash of color to blighted streets," "New Sharpsburg public art highlights the borough's vibrant community and indigenous history," "“TThe Strip Mural,” on the Hermanowski building in the Strip District.9MORE Strip search: A Penn Avenue mural is filled with Easter eggs to the neighborhood it honorss,")

Pittsburgh Glass Center is one of the anchor institutions that was recruited by the Penn Ave. Arts Initiative.

OTOH, Pittsburgh has at least two national best practice examples of arts districts, one is the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, operating Downtown and in other parts of the city ("The Howard and Lincoln Theatres: run them like the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust/Playhouse Square Cleveland model," 2012, "Pittsburgh Cultural Trust maintains diverse real estate portfolio to support arts," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; "How the Arts Drove Pittsburgh's Revitalization," The Atlantic) at a bigger scale, more arts as consumption, and the Penn Ave. Arts Initiative, which is more a bottom up effort focused on expanding the work and array of art as production, centered on artists who live in the neighborhood, complemented by the development of arts anchors, sponsored by two neighborhood improvement associations along the avenue ("Artists revitalized Penn Avenue by creating Pittsburgh’s longest-running monthly art festival," NextPittsburgh, "Creating Place: The role of Community Development Corporations in Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods," 

Artfields, Lake City SC.  There is an educational television program I saw over the weekend, "Towns in Tune," featuring two communities, one in Canada, one in the US.  

The US program focused on Lake City, SC, a town which crashed in association with the decline of tobacco and other crops.  An initiative, called ArtFields, is both an 11 day event, held in spots around the community, an organization, and an ongoing program including galleries, public art, and arts education.  

They do interesting things, and is an example of a town that art saved, as business has increased, vacant storefronts have been occupied and became thriving businesses, a stream of tourists, etc.  Surprisingly the small community has access to a ton of money, through the generosity of Darla Moore, a hedge fund operator, who grew up there.

"Tin Man" by Bill Secunda, is on display at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids. At 17 feet tall, it towers above pedestrians and traffic and is seen "offering to us his most prized possession, his heart." Chris DuMond, Special To The Detroit News

Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Art Fields is modelled after the Art Prize program in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  It's  a two week festival, with decent monetary prizes for artists ("ArtPrize to transform Grand Rapids in two weeks," "Why ArtPrize had a bigger economic impact in 2023," WOOD-TV,  "ArtPrize returns to downtown Grand Rapids. Here's what's different this year," Detroit News, "15 years later, can ArtPrize still wow Grand Rapids?," Grand Rapids Press).

Amanda Browder’s Spectral Locus, 2016, included in ArtPrize’s Project 1 biennial. Photo: Tom Loonan/Project 1.

Last year, they had over 700,000 attendees at 50 events.  Pieces are placed at hundreds of venues across the city, from coffee shops to an auto body shop, helping to make connections and generating income for local businesses.

Like Lake City, the program had a big donor, originally the DeVos Family.  Grand Rapids didn't need saving, it's one of the most thriving communities in Western Michigan, but you can never be successful enough.

Unfortunately, with covid, the program started disbanding, but was revived by the city and other entities ("ARTPRIZE DISSOLVES BOARD, ENDS COMPETITION," ArtForum, "ArtPrize calls it quits after 13 years," Grand Rapids Press).  Obviously there is a lesson there too.

Baltimore.  The Station North Arts District, anchored by Penn Station, Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of Baltimore, has always impressed me.  It shines during Artscape, a weekend art festival run by the city through a separate nonprofit but government agency, but more recently Artscape has had problems because of city over involvement, rain wrecking most of one festival, and covid, "Artscape will return to Midtown and Station North in 2024; 11 new members join BOPA board of directors," Baltimore Fishbowl).

The Made in Baltimore market was part of Artscape 2023. Baltimore's Artscape festival returned in September 2023 after a three-year hiatus. Photo by Ed Gunts.

The district has many anchor organizations and buildings, with space for arts and organizations and programs ("Art Space: Former Station North Funeral Home Transforms Into a Community Art Hub," Baltimore Fishbowl).  Anchoring institutions include the Maryland Film Festival and theatres, and the Johns Hopkins theatre and film programs (the campus is a couple miles away).

A parking lot in the Station North arts district will become the setting for a six-story, 160-unit apartment building designed for artists, under a plan by The Severn Companies and CAM Construction..

Art House Baltimore is the name of the project.It  will house a community gathering space, management offices, a telework lounge, a fitness center, covered parking and about 13,000 square feet of commercial space that can accommodate a mix of artist studios, a makerspace and a café. The residences will be a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments.

And there is a good program for developing live work housing for artists.  It used to be that Jubilee Housing of Baltimore was the main actor, but now for profit developers are active too ("Artists’ housing: Six-story, 160-unit, $37 million apartment building proposed for Baltimore’s Station North area," Baltimore Fishbowl).

Both Station North as an arts district and the Penn Ave.. Arts Initiative have "an advantage" in that they are still weak real estate markets, so property prices, while rising, aren't the same kind of hindrance as they are in strong real estate markets ("Central Baltimore Partnership and Johns Hopkins unveil new plan for Station North," Fox5 Baltimore).

-- 2024 Station North Economic Development Implementation Roadmap

It is interesting that the University of Baltimore and MICA weren't also conveners of the study.  And 10 years ago I suggested that Morgan State should have moved their architecture school to the district ("Morgan State University should move their architecture and planning school to Downtown/Station North Arts District," ).

Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts has sponsored other big annual festivals and events, including a book festival and winter light festival.

In 2025, Artscape will be run by the city, not  BOPA, and will move to Memorial Day weekend

The State of Maryland has an arts district designation program, which has some benefits to artists like tax exclusions on sales of art made within the district, but it's pretty limited.

-- State Cultural Districts, Policy Brief, National Assembly of State Arts Agencies

Mural by Reinier Gamboa.

Wynnwood Arts District, Miami.  Was created by gallerists, but a few years later the Wynnwood Walls program of mural production was created to extend the arts district to the outdoors and increase foot traffic and visibility ("n Miami, the Murals Are the Message," New York Times).  

It's become one of the city's arts centers, with galleries, five museums, private collections presented to the public, artist studios, performance spaces, various festivals, and Art Basel Miami ("Breathing Life, and Art, Into a Downtrodden Neighborhood," New York Times).

Interestingly, as rents rose the number of galleries shrunk from 70 to 10.  So the Wynnwood district is an example of arts uses preparing a neighborhood for reproduction of space in ways that displace the pioneers.  

Prince Edward County, Ontario. A rural community development program that pre-dates Lake City is the Creative Rural Economy initiative in Ontario ("Canada’s underrated answer to the Hamptons – halfway between Montreal and Toronto," Telegraph).

This economic and community development program focuses on food, agriculture especially wine, arts and related activities ("Creativity, Tourism and Economic Development in a Rural Context: the case of Prince Edward County," Journal of Rural and Community Development)

North Adams/Pittsfield/Williams College/Williamstown: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In Western Massachusetts, between Albany and Boston, MassMOCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art was created to show large works over the long term, in previously abandoned very large manufacturing facilities.  

I think this was one of the first arts districts I came across, when I first started working on urban revitalization ("MassMoCA: What Dallas can learn from a museum in rural Massachusetts," Dallas Morning News, "Mass MoCA sees momentum through 25 years," "How can a museum grow a creative ecosystem?," and "North Adams and Mass MoCA look to the future," BTW Berkshires, "Mass Moca, the museum that almost wasn't, celebrates 20 years," Art Newspaper).

From Art Newspaper:

The museum does not collect, which is another break from the institutional norm. It has some long-term installations, such Sol LeWitt’s dedicated wall-drawing retrospective that has an astounding 40-year run (it remains up until 2043). Only Mass Moca had the space and entrepreneurial spunk to do it. 

... Mass Moca is an anomaly in another respect: the museum has 37 commercial tenants that now generate $50m in economic activity for the region annually. The commercial rents are an essential part of the museum's financial model. This hybrid use of space will—and should—inform future museum expansions. 

Mass Moca is also different in the role performing arts play in its programming. Around half the museum's resources go to dance, theatre, film, concerts and festivals. Of the museum’s 300,000 annual visitors, around a third come for the performing arts. ... Few museums truly integrate the performing arts with the visual arts, although almost all great artists have been passionately engaged with the music and theatre of their times. Though this seems like a no-brainer, so thorough and organically united a programme is rare.

(An educational film on the project, "Downside UP," influenced one of my H Street Promotions Committee members, and we came up with an expanded concept for an arts district on H Street NE in Washington, DC.  While there are some organizations and plenty of eating and drinking establishments that have opened in the two decades since, no way is it an arts district.

We proposed incorporating the schools, and off street buildings into the program, and a couple of then abandoned city-owned buildings, when property was still "cheap" but it didn't come to pass.)

While the museum is super cool and some related businesses have opened, the area hasn't succeeded in becoming an arts district draw in the way that the other districts.  From the Boston Globe article, "Has Mass MoCA accomplished what it set out to do 25 years later,":

Mass MoCA has delivered on its artistic promise. It now ranks among the largest contemporary art museums in the country. Innovative long-term loans ensure works by art-world heavyweights fill its galleries. Lively music festivals draw tens of thousands of visitors each year, while its cavernous halls enable contemporary artists to create exhibitions at a scale seldom realized in the United States. One 2017 study put its annual lift to Berkshire County at just more than $50 million.

But the numbers tell a less convincing story when it comes to the museum’s economic impact on the people of North Adams. The median annual household income here — according to the latest estimates around $49,525, or roughly half the statewide figure — has grown by about $2,300 when adjusted for inflation over the past quarter century. Though it’s impossible to say where the city would be without Mass MoCA, the median household income has grown statewide by roughly $10,000 during that time, nearly four and a half times greater than in North Adams.

The lessons here are (1) you need a revitalization plan to extend beyond an anchoring facility, to make purposeful connections between potential assets, because (2) trickle down isn't enough, and (3) regardless it can take decades to see results.

Leimert Park, Los Angeles as a model of a POC centric commercial district.  Many years ago Leimert Park in Los Angeles was featured in the Washington Post as a black-business district ("Los Angeles's Black Pride: Taking In the Retro Vibe of Leimert Park," places, 2006).  

I visited it back then and wasn't impressed.  But it provided the bones for a model.  Especially with amped up investment.  The issue back then was disinvestment, not the concept.

-- "How a gentrifying Leimert Park is ending up in Black hands," Los Angeles Times
-- "Purchasing power: Leimert Park merchants come together to buy their building," Los Angeles Standard
-- "Leimert Park Art Village: The Struggle with a Sense of Place," PBS SoCal

Since 2007 when I saw it, there has been a lot of new investment in the district, not just adding rail transit service, but in revitalizing what had been an old theater into a multifaceted cultural center.

Leimert Park is decently organized, and successfully campaigned for a more directly accessible transit station as part of a new line being developed to serve their area.  Also see "Leimert Park plays to its own beat," USC, and "Leimert Park: where does it go from here?," KCET--the latter article discusses how since the approval of the transit station, an unknown buyer has purchased many properties in the district. 

The Vision Theater in Leimert Park Village will be a cultural anchor and will bring new customer segments to the commercial district throughout the day and into the evening,  Photo from Horizon and Skyline blog.  

Also see "Leimert Theater: Envisioning a Neighborhood Landmark," KCET.  

Key to the revitalization program has been the retention of existing businesses and the incorporation of new arts and culture anchors (Leimert Park's World Stage hopes to keep the music playing" and "Play festival heralds impending revival of L.A.'s Vision Theatre," Los Angeles Times), along with park refurbishments, streetscape improvements, and other public space improvements.  

Indianapolis.  Again when I first became involved in revitalization, I learned that Indianapolis was one of the first, if not the first, cities to create a cultural (arts) district program.  The state later developed its own program.

At that time, they designated 5 areas, invested a lot in urban design, public art,. and sustainable mobility connections between the districts and Downtown.  They've since added two more districts.

A key anchor is the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, which provides high quality biking and walking connections to and within the districts ("The new Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a masterpiece of bike-friendly design Cleveland should emulate," Cleveland Plain Dealer).

The trail connections are pretty cool.  Many business have created back door entrances to facilitate patronage by people on the trail.

The UK and London's Cultural Capital programs.  One of the things the UK lost access to with Brexit is the Cultural Capital program sponsored by the EU.  Liverpool very successfully participated back in 2008.  So the UK created its own program, and London followed, creating its Borough of Culture program..

The UK program designates cities every other year.  Next year it's Bradford ("Why Bradford is the UK’s most underrated cultural city break," Telegraph, "‘The UK is invited’: Bradford reveals 2025 City of Culture lineup," Guardian).

Wandsworth is the Borough of Culture for 2025.  Two programs are selected on a four year cycle.

My criticism is that two to four years isn't enough time to build a program and improve civic assets.  Bradford is finding it tough ("Bradford races against the clock to finish works in time for city of culture," Guardian).

Arabianranta in Helsinki.  Is a good example of an arts as production district, anchored by the Aalto school of arts and design, and various other ventures ("Developing Creative Quarters in Cities: Policy lessons from “Art and Design City Arabianranta, Helsinki," Urban Research and Practice, 2013).

Large institutional arts districts. All of the arts districts listed above are a kind of ground up district, whereas there are many "arts districts" across nations featuring multiple large institutions, usually presenting institutions focused on arts as consumption.  The Dallas Arts District, /BAM Arts District associated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  Arts districts associated with City Beautiful, like Cleveland, etc.

You could call the Smithsonian Museums on the National Mall in DC an example except it's not managed that way.

Not arts districts per se but a program of adding or improving cultural institutions on a city-wide scale.  A couple cities come to mind that have invested heavily in the arts and culture, although the facilities haven't been grouped together.  Bilbao is one example ("Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning".  Also, Edmonton and Toronto ("Downtown Edmonton cultural facilities development as an example of "Transformational Projects Action Planning"").