D
uring an 18-year run that ended in September, a small, dusty storefront tucked away in the West End’s Brighton District hosted a parade of befuddling, transcendent art and music.
In another life, the building it occupied on Central Avenue just off the swooping Brighton Approach overpass served as a delicatessen, and white, fading letters advertising that former occupation linger like fat little ghosts above the slimmer, more jagged black type spelling out the empty gallery’s name: semantics.
While it was in the neighborhood, and before that when it briefly existed in Over-the-Rhine, semantics embodied the scrappy, exploratory spirit of do-it-yourself culture. Cincinnati has been a surprising hotbed for such self-funded, not-for-profit spaces, which exist in a twilight world just beyond the economic, regulatory and social rules that usually bound more traditional, for-profit entertainment venues. They’ve been aided by the low rents and lax oversight often found in the city’s more neglected corners and by a community of people looking for something outside the norm.
Many say these venues have given otherwise-unavailable opportunities to generations of Cincinnati artists and musicians. What’s more, urban experts say such DIY spaces are good for the social and even economic health of cities.
“These volunteer-run spaces incubate, educate and empower the under-21 set who often proceed to drive their scenes and city economies to greater successes,” Michael Seman, a researcher at the University of North Texas Center for Economic Development, told The Washington Post
in an interview about DIY spaces last year. “Running a DIY space is a great way for young adults to learn the ins-and-outs of marketing, arts management, business networking, graphic design, live sound, city permitting.”
But as interest in urban living continues to take hold in Cincinnati and those once-neglected pockets of the city attract the gaze of developers, the future of these unique places has become uncertain.
Dozens of the diverse spaces have popped up in Cincinnati over the last two decades, some focused on music, others fine art or literature, still others a mashup of all these disciplines with a big dose of partying thrown in.
Before the building semantics occupied was purchased, the gallery hosted everything from traditional paintings-on-the-walls exhibitions to experimental noise shows to so-called art “actions” that included a three-year stint in the late 1990s when gallery members entered their own cars into the Hamilton County Fair’s demolition derby. The gallery did all these shows, more than 200 by its count, without selling a single piece of art or charging admission.
Proponents of these under-the-radar venues say they’re important for more than just a few boundary-pushing art shows.
“All these spaces give a sense of community to Cincinnati,” says Loraine Wible, who teaches new media art at the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University.
Originally from Paris, Wible moved to Cincinnati to attend UC’s Design, Architecture, Art and Planning school and stayed to teach and help run DIY spaces.
“The amount of energy you have in Cincinnati, for the city’s size, is insane,” Wible says. “I don’t think a lot of places have that. And I think that’s because it’s affordable.”
Community Matters
Existing outside of larger art or entertainment institutions and the pressure of profit margins allows experimentation, expression and inclusion, according to long-time DIY space operators like Paul Coors. Coors started his first space, Publico, in 2002 at age 20 while studying at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
“There’s nothing quite like it,” Coors says. “Nothing is as unfettered by negative, unfortunate exterior forces, usually high-level financial forces. And for everything that’s really difficult and frustrating about doing everything out of pocket for a DIY space, that’s preferable to shaking hands with the devil. It’s more of a communal, throw-down sort of celebration.”
There are other benefits to DIY spaces. Experts say they can help knit together communities, bridging social divides that go far beyond the art world.
“Art is a way to give all of the communities in your city a voice and establish an ongoing dialogue,” says Seman, who has a Ph.D. in urban planning and public policy. According to him, such spaces bring together people of different viewpoints, class backgrounds and ethnicities in ways other forms of entertainment can’t.
Research also suggests that independent artists play a bigger role than most realize in the economy. A 2011 study by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis found that independent artists generated about $50 million in economic activity that year. It also suggested that number seemed to be rising.
Part of the role of DIY spaces, Seman says, is giving creative people a way to learn the ropes of being independent artists. As an example, he points to Omaha’s famous Saddle Creek record label, which sprang up from ad-hoc venues, including one in its founders’ basement, in the 1990s. From those DIY beginnings, the label went on to launch indie icons like Bright Eyes and Cursive.
And that individual success can translate into development for cities. In 2006, Saddle Creek founders Robb Nansel and Jason Kulbel, with the help of $1 million in financing from the city of Omaha, built a $10 million venue called Slowdown in the city’s then-struggling North Downtown neighborhood, presaging other new residential and retail development there.
Belief in the power of creative endeavors is at the center of economist Richard Florida’s trend-setting 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, which posits that cities can attract a young, professional population, lost over the past decades, by encouraging the growth of the arts and creative activities. Florida’s theories have become very influential for 21st-century urban revitalization efforts in many cities. That includes Cincinnati, which has fully embraced Florida’s suggestions for so-called creative place-making.
But DIY spaces aren’t designed to spark economic development. In some ways, they’re meant to circumvent traditional profit-driven economics altogether. That can create a biting irony: The same dynamism and social capital that make DIY spaces so attractive can cause some of the very pitfalls the spaces look to avoid.
As galleries and other DIY spaces create activity in forgotten corners of the city, they risk attracting high-level development, raising rents and, some studies and artists themselves suggest, unwittingly stoking gentrification.
“It’s a conversation spaces constantly need to be having with residents in the neighborhood,” says Calcagno Cullen, who helps run Camp Washington art space Wave Pool. “If you don’t, that creates animosity and perpetuates the myth-slash-truth that art spaces develop neighborhoods to the point where residents are kicked out. It’s a hard line to walk.”
[Read more of CityBeat’s interview with Calcagno Cullen here.]
Development Cycles
For decades, academic research around sections of Brooklyn, N.Y., San Francisco and other major cities has suggested that art spaces, even humble DIY ones, contribute to neighborhood change in the mostly low-income, minority enclaves where they often take root.
“Artists cause gentrification,” long-time independent art space operator and Brooklyn-based artist Ethan Pettit said in a TED Talk in the borough’s Bushwick neighborhood this summer.
Pettit discussed the transformation of Williamsburg, which in the mid-80s was a rough-and-tumble, mostly low-income neighborhood that hosted a teeming, democratic and off-the-grid art scene. Today, that same neighborhood is the site of soaring, four-figure-a-month rents and swank condos.
“These were communitarian events,” Pettit says of the Brooklyn art scene of the 1990s. “There’s
no questioning their intentions. The point is, the very presence of their sensibilities is promising to speculators.”
Pettit and others believe that the aesthetics and dynamic energy of these spaces — which traditionally attract hip, young and mostly white crowds — signal to developers that a neighborhood is ripe for real estate investment.
Academic research, including a 2015 study done by the University of Texas at Arlington and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, supports these ideas to a degree, finding that art spaces have at least the potential to help bring about gentrification.
There are some signs this process could be beginning in Brighton.
Once the industrial backroom to one of Cincinnati’s first wealthy neighborhoods — the Dayton Street Historic District a few blocks away — Brighton was host to heavy industry like meat-packing plants, the bones of which still remain in the district’s old, spacious buildings. The post-industrial era was especially harsh to the district, and for years many of those buildings sat empty, occasionally changing hands for a few thousand dollars. By the 1990s, artists had discovered all the space available and began to move in, mostly at the invitation of a few generous, arts-friendly property owners who offered low-rent or no-rent spaces.
Now, however, after years of expensive maintenance on those old buildings, and with new interest from property buyers, some of those owners are selling.
Long-running gallery semantics ceased operating in its space, which capped a stretch once occupied by a number of galleries and DIY music venues, after the building it occupied was purchased by developers. It went for nearly $75,000, almost four times its selling price in 1997, the year arts booster Fred Lane purchased it and invited semantics to set up shop.
Another space a couple blocks away at 2159 Central Ave., Cide Central, also recently closed its doors. The building it occupied, an odd structure with just two small porthole-like windows in its facade, was also purchased.
One of Cide’s main operators was longtime Cincinnati DIY promoter Robert Inhuman, who has been involved in a number of other efforts over the past two decades including the city’s long-running noise collaborative Art Damage and DIY label Realicide Youth Records. Before Cide, the building hosted a number of other popular DIY spaces, including LOHIO, Third Party and U-Turn galleries. It sold for $225,000 this summer, much more than the $70,000 it sold for in the 1990s.
Inhuman also lived in the building, he says, making the loss all the more difficult.
“I think desperate measures would need to be taken or Brighton’s identity is destined for significant disfigurement in the name of progress,” he says of changes happening in the neighborhood.
That said, he would like the example set by Cide and other spaces to live on.
“My hope is that people, especially the younger ones, who went to Cide Central will remember how it operated and its general ethos whenever they start up what will inevitably be the next waves of DIY spaces in Cincinnati or wherever else,” he says.
[Read more of CityBeat’s interview with Robert Inhuman here.]
The End of an Era
In some ways, it could be argued that Brighton’s DIY golden era passed years ago. During a high point in the early 2000s, there were a number of spaces active in the district and nearby Camp Washington. Some who ran galleries there at the time remember hay rides ferrying gallery-goers between the two neighborhoods.
The district’s gritty cred was anchored by a flurry of activity at the looming C.M. Mockbee building just across Central Parkway, also owned in part by Lane. The cavernous former industrial building hosted a number of large art and music events, first as SSNOVA gallery and later as Mockbee Inc., which was governed by a board and functioned as a quasi-formal arts organization. The building became a hub for Cincinnati’s DIY scene, hosting everything from multi-artist gallery shows to punk bands and dance parties that drew hundreds. Mockbee Inc.’s board disbanded in 2005, though shows continued there sporadically until around 2012.
“The higher profile an establishment is, the more all sorts of concerns matter,” says Cincinnati artist Andy Marko, who served on Mockbee Inc.’s board and also helped run semantics with other Cincinnati artists like Wible, David Dillon and Sandy Eichert. “Insurance coverage, municipal codes, electrical. Which is actually great for most people, for safety. But it also ups the cost of maintaining these spaces. In some ways, that often defines DIY spaces, whether it’s Berlin or here. They’re right on the edge of what may be permissible.”
With the closure of the Mockbee, Cide Central and semantics, significantly fewer spots for DIY remain in Brighton. Among those carrying on are the Ice Cream Factory, where Coors hosts art and music in his large rented living space on Central Avenue. Other places like Live-In Gallery, which occupies an apartment down the street, host art, and Rake’s End, a bar on Central, also hosts a number of noise and punk events.
The recent purchases of former art spaces in Brighton are just the tip of the iceberg for coming development in the area. A few blocks away in the Dayton Street Historic District, New York company Zada Development is undertaking an $11 million redevelopment project on the Heberle School, an 86-year-old former school building purchased from Cincinnati Public Schools at auction by the developer in 2012 for $60,000.
Zada is looking to turn the building into 59 market-rate apartments as well as ground-floor retail space. The developer also purchased another historic school building a block away, the 100-year-old Lafayette Bloom Middle School, for $60,000 and has similar plans for that building. The projects are the first for Zada in Cincinnati, which up to this point has done mostly high-end rehabilitations for residential space in New York City. An article earlier this year in the Cincinnati Business Courier speculated that the new rehabilitation projects could spur development of more retail spots, coffee shops and restaurants in the Dayton Street Historic District and neighboring Brighton District.
Those active in art spaces in Brighton see a familiar sequence of events unfolding. Many view coming development as an extension of the billion-plus-dollar effort to redevelop Over-the-Rhine.
“Money flows like water. It’s really hard to stop,” Marko says. “That’s cynical, I suppose, but that cuts to the heart of trying to argue against gentrification. What I’m hearing from some new folks coming into the area is that they view themselves as an extension of the move up from Findlay Market. The move for development is coming up.”
[Read more of CityBeat’s interview with Andy Marko here.]
OTR
The dwindling of DIY in Brighton echoes the recent past in OTR’s Main Street district, which less than a decade ago was dotted with small, scrappy not-for-profit creative spaces such as Publico, Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum, CS13 and others.
By 2011, development in OTR was heating up, but the DIY scene around Main was shrinking. Today, 1305 Gallery on Main Street is among the last galleries remaining in the area. Many others running DIY spaces who left OTR went on to Brighton.
“When we left, it was mostly for cost reasons, but also because there was no more scene,” says Wible of MG/GM, which moved to Brighton in 2011 after two years in OTR on Sycamore Street. “We ended up being alone over there. There were no more galleries, only stores, and there weren’t as many people coming.”
Among the last of the free-wheeling, alternative spaces in OTR was Tinderbox, which today survives as a series of roving pop-up events. Tinderbox started about two years ago in an abandoned industrial space north of Liberty Street about a half-mile from the Main Street corridor. That building is missing a third of its roof and is full of overgrown weeds, displaced ceiling beams and concrete rubble.
Tinderbox operator Oliver James Peabody (who asked that his name be changed due to the legal gray area his events have occupied in the past) and a roommate hosted a party at their apartment, which was attached to the warehouse, and quickly realized guests were much more interested in the post-apocalyptic landscape outside their abode. Soon, they were hosting bands, art installations and dance parties in the space — most free of charge.
At a typical Tinderbox event — if there was such a thing as a typical event there — you might see cellist Kate Wakefield perform or catch a comedy act from a grown man dressed as Bart Simpson, down to the yellow face paint and construction-paper spiky hair. Or you might see an installation by Cincinnati artist group Knomad Colab featuring neon lights glowing from the space’s many abandoned trucks, trailers and cars, or dance to hip hop played by a local DJ.
You could also run into a diverse crowd of people who might never come together otherwise, including residents and characters from the surrounding neighborhood wandering in to take part in festivities.
But those festivities were short-lived in OTR. A Halloween party that drew 600 people to the warehouse last year was the beginning of the end for Peabody. Events were attracting police attention, and, needless to say, the building wasn’t up to municipal code. He’s since moved on from the space with the aim of throwing more legal and profitable, but still unusual, events.
“I want to be exposed to something out of my norm,” Peabody says. “And I think going to these places helps you do that. But I’m trying to create that sensation in a safe environment.”
Soon after he abandoned Tinderbox’s crumbling birthplace, Peabody says he learned it was slated for redevelopment. Like other DIY space operators, Peabody is skeptical that the classic model — a fixed, low-rent space on the economic, legal and social edges, but in the center of the city geographically — can survive.
“That’s a wonderful side effect of decaying urban cores. That won’t last long if this reurbanization trend continues,” Peabody says, stressing that he thinks that, overall, that trend is a good thing. But, “it kind of implies that the DIY space is dying as a broader trend as cities become more popular.”
The Next Wave of Free Spaces
Even as some of Cincinnati’s DIY spaces disappear from the city’s tucked-away storefronts and warehouses, new not-for-profit venues have popped up that take a slightly different approach to economic sustainability, ownership and the question of a space’s role in the surrounding community.
In May, a group of inmates at the River City Correctional Center in Camp Washington gathered with community members and artist Erin Colleen Johnson at a green, lush urban farm in the often gray, industrial neighborhood. They were there to get to know each other, mull the meaning of breaking ground, set personal resolutions and to literally plant things in the garden.
The event was part of Johnson’s residency at Wave Pool, a Camp Washington creative space opened last year by Calcagno and Geoffrey Cullen. The couple, who both teach art at area universities, moved back to Cincinnati after a number of years in San Francisco to buy the then-vacant firehouse at 2940 Colerain Ave.
Since that time, they’ve incorporated as a 501c3, organized gallery tours for artists working in the neighborhood and worked with Camp Washington’s community council to help bring new energy to the area.
Setting up a community-centered art space like Wave Pool has been a long-time goal, Calcagno Cullen says, something that San Francisco’s prohibitively pricey real estate made impossible. As they looked to start their own creative space, Cincinnati had the right mix: a very active art scene and space at a very low price. But the Cullens also applied some lessons they’d learned in the Bay Area.
“Buy the building” is lesson number one, Cullen says. “Ten years ago, I was looking at spaces in Over-the-Rhine, and buildings that were $10,000 then, you can’t even get a condo in now for $100,000. You’ve got to own it, or you’re going to create that system that kicks yourself out. Art spaces (in San Francisco) are closing down like, every week and it’s a pretty sad pattern. But Cincinnati still has that potential.”
Wave Pool features all kinds of creative work, but is especially focused on so-called social practice art, which can be summed up as art interested in social interactions, communities and the public good. Part of the gallery’s work in that realm includes asking deep questions about the role artists and DIY spaces play in the communities they find themselves in.
Last month, Wave Pool hosted a panel featuring a number of Cincinnati artists discussing the links between art spaces, communities and gentrification. That panel included Northside artist and community council member Jonathan Sears, who runs Professional Artistic Research Projects.
A few years ago, PAR Projects set up a highly successful ad-hoc art show housed in 16 shipping containers on what was then an abandoned piece of land at the corner of Hamilton Avenue and Blue Rock Street. The group hoped to continue staging projects there, but developers and the city had other plans. Today, construction of the Gantry apartments is approaching completion at that corner. Sears thinks PAR Projects’ event helped catalyze interest in the location, but says active civic involvement kept the ensuing development project in line with neighborhood wishes.
“It’s absolutely true that artists lead to development,” Sears said during Wave Pool’s panel discussion. “Whether that development is gentrification or not is maybe up to the community.”
The Future is Diverse
The Cullens aren’t the only DIY space operators harnessing the power of owning a building and focusing on community engagement. Just days before Wave Pool’s panel discussion, the McMicken FreeSpace held its grand opening in an old brick rowhouse with a red door just a short walk from the Mockbee on West McMicken Avenue.
A diverse lineup of musical artists performed to a packed house during the opening, from the experimental hip-hop group Super Origami to indie pop artist Nancy Paraskevopoulos. But the space’s main focus isn’t music. Instead, the FreeSpace looks to provide a spot for community discussions, book clubs and other civically minded pursuits. The goal: a space that racially, economically and politically diverse groups can use and feel comfortable in.
Lately, these have included meetings by Black Lives Matter activists, neighborhood potlucks and other gatherings. The space also hosts, and is co-operated by, organizers of Soapbox Books, a politically minded library that until recently existed in Northside and featured hard-to-find publications on progressive politics.
Stephanie Phillips and Ryan Smith purchased the building the FreeSpace now occupies about two years ago after a month-long road trip across the country looking for the right city to host such a space. They had to leave Portland, Ore., to do so, they say, because property there was too expensive to buy or rent.
“I’ve always loved (these spaces) because you
can come in and read or hang out and you’re not necessarily expected to buy something,” Phillips says. “I think that’s really important, especially in a neighborhood where there are a lot of people who don’t have a place to go.”
More established spots like the Ice Cream Factory have also embraced a heightened awareness of diverse groups who have traditionally found themselves outside the DIY scene.
“It’s been much more of an effort of mine lately,” Coors says, explaining that recent shows at Ice Cream Factory have been designed with the idea of welcoming new faces into the fold. “Obviously, this is an extraordinarily segregated city, both financially and racially.”
[Read more of CityBeat’s interview with Paul Coors here.]
Other inclusive, sometimes makeshift spaces have emerged around the city, often with a pop-up, temporary approach. These include various punk venues run out of houses, art exhibitions hosted in small apartments and one-off shows in vacant churches, warehouses and elsewhere. Many in the DIY community agree that running events in more consistent, long-lasting spaces is getting harder, but they say the work is worth it.
“It’s important to try,” says Marko, stressing that semantics is hoping to open again in a new space. “I do think for some of us, there’s a certain political or ethical community sense in terms of keeping shit rolling. One of the hardest things is getting people involved in something that may not be in their immediate self-interest. But that’s what we need.” ©
This article has been updated to better reflect existing creative spaces in Brighton.
This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2015.
