8ShadesofGray

Cleveland: Some artists leaving New York City for local neighborhoods WKYC November 30, 2010 CLEVELAND -- Why would artists leave the cultural excitement of New York City for Cleveland? Ivana Medukic is a sculptor who lived in Brooklyn for three years. She grew up in Greater Cleveland. She and her chef- husband have decided to come back and live in Cleveland's Waterloo Arts District in Collinwood. A big reason, it's affordable to live here. They are deciding which house they want to buy. "Artists are getting priced out and dispersed through (New York City's) neighborhoods. You're losing the sense of community and working together...Cleveland is a great place for art. There's a lot of culutre and diversity here. You still get the big city feel, " she said ... ... More at http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=161580

Artists fleeing the city High cost of living, fewer part-time jobs drive them out of New York. By Miriam Kreinin Souccar Crain's New York Business November 14, 2010 For 25 years, Elyas Khan tried to make it as a musician in New York. The front man for the band Nervous Cabaret, Mr. Khan lived in at least 20 places, from Bay Ridge to Washington Heights, moving each time his lease expired and the landlord jacked up the rent. He worked so many part-time jobs to make ends meet that he barely had time to compose new songs. Two years ago, he and his wife, Melissa, got the boot from their live/work space in Dumbo when the landlord turned the building into luxury commercial space. That was the day Mr. Khan gave up on New York ... ... Other so-called second tier cities are giving New York a run for its money by actively courting artists with incentive programs and housing deals. In the Cleveland neighborhood of Collinwood, the Northeast Shores Development Corp. has bought 16 vacant properties and renovated them as artists' residences. All but four have sold, and the development company plans to renovate more properties. Brian Friedman, executive director of Northeast Shores, says that during the past few months, he has been getting regular calls and visits from artists and musicians interested in relocating from Brooklyn ... ... More at http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20101114/FREE/311149985#

Artists vs. Blight by Alexandra Alter Wall Street Journal April 17, 2009 Last month, artists Michael Di Liberto and Sunia Boneham moved into a two-story, three-bedroom house in Cleveland's Collinwood neighborhood, where about 220 homes out of 5,000 sit vacant and boarded up. They lined their walls with Ms. Boneham's large, neon-hued canvases, turned a spare bedroom into a graphic-design studio and made the attic a rehearsal space for their band, Arte Povera. The couple used to live in New York, but they were drawn to Cleveland by cheap rent and the creative possibilities of a city in transition. "It seemed real alive and cool," said Mr. Di Liberto. Their new house is one of nine previously foreclosed properties that a local community development corporation bought, some for as little as a few thousand dollars. The group aims to create a 10-block "artists village" in Collinwood, with residences for artists like Mr. Di Liberto, 31 years old, and Ms. Boneham, 34 ... ... More at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123992318352327147.html

I know some of these articles are posted elsewhere, but I thought it was time to get them all in one thread. They seem to be popping up more frequently ... and I have reason to believe that there will be more attention on artists' role in revitalizing Cleveland neighborhoods soon :)

Cleveland City Council approves spending to get historic League Park project started February 08, 2011 By Mark Gillispie, The Plain Dealer CLEVELAND, Ohio -- After years of fits, starts and disappointment, the late Councilwoman Fannie Lewis' plan to develop historic League Park in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood will become reality in the next few years. City Council on Monday approved spending $387,000 to hire an architectural firm to create plans and oversee the renovation of the former home of the Cleveland Indians at East 66th Street and Lexington Avenue. Mayor Frank Jackson's administration has committed $5 million to complete the first phase of the project, which is expected to be completed in 2012. That will include restoration of the ticket house and bleacher wall, which are still standing, and construction of a ball diamond on same footprint where the Indians won the World Series title in 1920, Babe Ruth swatted his 500th home run in 1929 and the Cleveland Buckeyes won a Negro League championship in 1945. ... More at http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/02/cleveland_city_council_approve_5.html#incart_hbx

This was posted in the Playhouse Square thread, too, but for COSE/GCP ... this is Sports Commission and Positively Cleveland. Interesting. Greater Cleveland Partnership will move to PlayhouseSquare; Positively Cleveland heads to East Fourth By Michelle Jarboe, The Plain Dealer Thursday, February 03, 2011 CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Displaced by the planned casino, Greater Cleveland's chamber of commerce and its visitors bureau are betting their chips on other downtown locations ... ... Positively Cleveland, which subleases from the partnership on the first floor of the Higbee Building, chose the western corner of East Fourth Street and Euclid Avenue. The visitors bureau and the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission will occupy 17,500 square feet on two floors. "It's an exciting development and a great location for a visitors bureau. It's the hub of all the visitors right now," said Terry Coyne, a Grubb & Ellis broker who represented Positively Cleveland in the deal. The first-floor space, which recently housed an exhibit of preserved human bodies, will be renovated for a visitors' center. About 1,800 square feet at the corner will be used for an unidentified Cleveland-centric store or restaurant ... More available at http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2011/02/greater_cleveland_partnership.html

It actually didn't sound to me like they had picked Lakewood yet ... Just that they weren't going into Grind and are busy exploring other sites. Their follow-up post is "Love when councilmen call and put their teams to work finding us a new home." That doesn't really narrow down which councilman or even which council, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was either Cimperman or Zone, and if that's right, they might still land somewhere on the Near West Side.

As interesting coincidence, I'm incorporating footage from the latter two videos into a short documentary I've been working on :)

Well, I would say that 5,000 seems achievable in the mid-term. After Euclid Commons is complete, residence hall numbers between Euclid Commons, Fenn Tower and Heritage Hall will be around 1,200. Add in an almost fully occupied Walker & Weeks, University Studios, 1900 Euclid and a smattering at University Apartments and Tower Press, and I wouldn't be surprised if we're talking about a base of 1,400. 3,600 to go :) As any of us CSU alums can attest, though, it's amazing how much just Fenn and the first segment of Euclid Commons have changed the campus dynamic. I graduated in 2005, and it just seems like an absolutely different campus now ... And it's great to see that change starting to spill out into eating options and a teeny bit of retail.

I believe she is currently exploring menswear opportunities. Fingers crossed.

Arts grantmaker in process of gauging community opinion As receipts from cigarette tax decline, group wants to know how its spending is viewed By TIMOTHY MAGAW, Crain's Cleveland Business January 17, 2011 The public body that doles out grants for arts organizations using proceeds from a 10-year cigarette tax that Cuyahoga County voters approved in 2006 is stepping up efforts to determine whether the community understands how the group works and whether the money is spent wisely. Trustees of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the group that determines which organizations and artists receive the cigarette tax money from a pool of applicants, gave the body approval to spend up to $50,000 with Burges & Burges, a Cleveland political consulting firm. Karen Gahl-Mills, executive director of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, said her agency is “taking the temperature of the community” to determine how its work is perceived ... ... More available at http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20110117/SUB1/301179998/1053/TOC&Profile=1053

Keep in mind that her coats are custom-fitted ... You're basically getting a piece made-to-order and hand-stitched. As someone who (sadly) splurges on some boutique clothing lines, these prices are not all that outlandish, particularly for the type of person who's really seeking that level of quality over something that's factory-made. Plus, part of her business model is providing a percentage of profits to charities, including the City Mission. That being said, she's got a lot of items at lower price points.

It's a Pop Up Shop for Valerie Mayen's fashion label, Yellowcake. Valerie was on this season's Project Runway, and she's a HUGE Cleveland booster My address inspires my collection The shop's scheduled to be open the first few weeks of February and will be stocked with pins, hair pieces, t-shirts, hats, accessories, and coats. More event info at http://downtownclevelandalliance.com/profile/Event/Valarie-Mayens-Yellowcake-Pop-Up-Shop/

Turn it up to 11: Cleveland International Film Festival expands to more theaters for 35th fest By Clint O'Connor, The Plain Dealer January 11, 2011 Turn it up to 11. The Cleveland International Film Festival will announce later today that its 35th edition will be housed in 11 theaters at Tower City Cinemas. That means, for the first time, the CIFF will take over the entire multiplex for its 10-day run, March 24 - April 3. The festival has grown from three or four screens to seven or eight as it has enjoyed a big jump in attendance this decade ... ... More available at http://www.cleveland.com/moviebuff/index.ssf/2011/01/cleveland_international_film_f_6.html

Thanks! Exciting on both fronts!

When color adjusting for a photo with a lot of white tones, a first step I will often take is to adjust automatically after identifying true white with the picker. This is particularly great if your problem is that your whites are coming out yellowish or blueish or whatnot due to shooting lighting. Within an automatic color adjust menu, you can point the picker toward the area of the photo you think should be closest to an absolutely clean white. The photo will then realign all the coloring to make your whites whiter :) Generally, this is just a first step for me. In a photo with a ton of white, you may find that this move gives the photo a neon quality; you may also find that there are also brightness, contrast and saturation issues. I think the best advice is to go through the various "Adjust" tools to get a better understanding of how they work and what works for you. Just make sure to zoom in as you're making adjustments or looking at previews when they're available, as fields of white or fields of black can pixelate pretty quickly. In most cases, you can probably achieve the results you're looking for with Auto Corrects, Hue/Saturation (Master) and Brightness/Contrast, but it's worthwhile to explore a little at the channel level in Hue/Saturation and with histograms, curves and levels. There's tons of tutorials out there than can walk you through each, but it can also be fun to just say, what happens when I put a point here and a point here and drag this curve way up here? :)

Yeah, agree. Don't want to sound like a Johnny Naysayer ... It's an amazing project and looking forward to the results ... Just wasn't sure the degree to which this was aimed at businesses currently in the district or who've expressed interest already versus a wider effort to solicit new ideas and new business proposals. Regardless, great effort. Who actually makes the funding decision ... OCNW or Charter One or an external review panel or ...? Any news on the kitchen incubator feasibility planning?

Over the past several months, I've moved inexplicably from mainly alt-country / folk rock stuff to a lot of synth pop and indie pop stuff. I'm particularly obsessed with Yeasayer right now and would also throw out Passion Pit, Vampire Weekend, Matt & Kim, Miike Snow and the Ruby Suns as good ones to check out. I guess after years of moping it up with my music, I just want stuff that makes me smile :) Yeasayer - O.N.E.

Unless you can do what Northeast Shores is doing (and I think several CDCs, actually) ... rehab the homes before you sell them. Or coordinate the rehab of a home with the specific build-out priorities of a particular buyer in mind. While I agree not many want to walk through the rehab themselves, surveying I've seen seems to suggest that there is still a ton of interest in historically renovated homes. I think one compelling strategy is to aggressively rehab properties while also seeking out opportunities for in-fill or parket parks on existing empty parcels. Industrial cities like Cleveland have no end of available space (there's 3,000 vacant ACRES of land within Cleveland proper), so I think it would be a real shame to be leveling houses when we don't need to (i.e. when they aren't structurally too far gone to rehab). For instance, the former mayor of East Cleveland had been exploring leveling the four blocks of houses closest to University Circle for speculative new construction (Circle East). These are houses in pretty good shape selling often for less than $20,000. If houses are sitting vacant at that price point, I question the wisdom of trying to finance a large-scale new construction project in this lending environment; I just can't imagine you would accomplish much more than bulldozing several intact streets.

^^ & ^^^ Very cool. Althought that seems like a pretty tight timeframe for businesses to submit their proposals, particularly for true start-ups or prospective businesses. Is there a total grant budget for the program? It appears it's coming out of a larger pool of $130,000 but there wasn't an indication of whether it'd be up to $50,000 in grants, or $65,000 or $100,000.

That's true to an extent, although it seems like particularly among NPI's Strategic Investment Areas on the east side (Fairfax, Glenville and Buckeye), there's been a lot of development beyond public housing. Looking at Fairfax over the past decade as an example, you have the $17 million Quincy Place, the $430K Quincy Park, the $5.5 million Langston Hughes Center, the $160 million Juvenile Justice Center, the $23 million Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center, proposed grandparent housing, as well as a lot of efforts around strategic land assembly, strategic demolition and neighborhood clean-ups. I think a lot of this is less driven by the forum intentionally casting a blind eye toward African American neighborhoods but more the reality of the neighborhoods in which forumers live. On the East Side, we have people living in Asiatown, University Circle, Little Italy and Shaker Square, and so naturally those east side neighborhoods receive more attention than others. In neighborhoods where forumers aren't there to catch projects in action, the projects we're most likely to share are either a) the biggest, b) the ones receiving considerable news coverage or c) the ones that are situated down corridors people might be driving down (e.g. Global Cardiovascular more than Langston Hughes in Fairfax, St. Luke's more than the Buckeye commercial corridor in Buckeye). Similarly, I don't feel like we do much in the way of coverage of Puritas, Stockyards, etc. on the West Side because I think we're largely underrepresented in residents / CDC reps from those communities.

I would agree with that; there's been an incredible amount of revitalization effort in African American neighborhoods, particularly in the NPI-funded nabes of Buckeye, Fairfax, Glenville and Slavic Village. For the record, if we were trying to concentrate artist-based community development around the areas where artist concentrations are already the highest, then the Heights are where that development would occur. I would love to say that downtown is the nexus of activity, but the overwhelming center of artists' places of residence in Cuyahoga County is in Cleveland Heights, with the Near West Side a distant second (I'll be able to share more specific data shortly and will probably start a new thread where we can talk about artist efforts at the city level). Personally, I understand the frustration of all of these fragmented commercial corridors coming back all over town, without a whole lot of connectivity. But on the other hand, part of the joy of Cleveland is the distinctness of its neighborhoods, and we would lose a lot of the character of the city if all our efforts were centered on the Near West Side. Even if you think artist housing in Collinwood is poorly sited, look at the larger lesson this is showing: In a neighborhood that's got its fair share of revitalization challenges, that's spatially separated from other nodes of activity, that just a few years ago was anchored by only two arts organizations (Beachland and Arts Collinwood), the CDC has been able to leverage a VERY modest budget to attract buyers in ... Buyers who in some cases are taking over extremely distressed housing. I walk from that saying, wow, what would happen if we did this citywide? Who could we attract in with a modest marketing effort? In Paducah, KY, a small mill town of 20,000 that's 2 hours from any major city, has attracted 50 artists from across the U.S. into a distressed neighborhood full of distressed housing: http://www.paducahalliance.org/artist_relocation_program.php. Two Pittsburgh CDCs collaborated to create the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative in a neighborhood somewhat similar to Collinwood; over a decade, vacancy rates have plummeted from 78% to 22%: http://friendship-pgh.org/paai/. What would happen if instead of redirecting Collinwood's efforts to the Near West Side, we started marketing those neighborhoods too ... And Buckeye and Asiatown and Westown and Edgewater? If Paducah can attract 50, could Cleveland attract 1,000? And what would that do for these neighborhoods?

^^ The organization I work for will be releasing research relatively soon about where artists are living throughout Cuyahoga County. That data is then used in a regression analysis to identify the neighborhoods where artists are most likely to live in the future (or at the very least, where you would expect more artists to live now). Some very interesting stuff ... And if artists are an indicator of revitalization potential, there are several neighborhoods on the east side that we shouldn't write off yet. But agree with your larger point, mikel ... This wouldn't work in every neighborhood.

I chime in for 806 and Velvet Tango (the piano's in the center room of the bar). Prosperity's not upscale, but when it's not Art Walk or Monday Karaoke, it's generally pretty chill ... Great atmosphere. And it's not in the area you're looking at, but Nighttown's pretty damn chill.

Understand some of the concerns, but to be fair to the initiative, this was CDC-driven, not city-driven or even NPI-driven. The CDC built a concept around it, and it worked / is working. And given that roughly 50% of the artists are moving from out of the region, it's not like they're stealing energy from the Near West Side ... And it's not like one of those CDCs couldn't start a similar program; they just haven't yet. As for the wisdom of investing in this particular area, it's arguably the Cleveland neighborhood with the best residential access to the lake. The streets nearest the lake are in great shape, and we're not talking about a huuuuuge footprint of redevelopment needed to take place to reach the Bratenahl line; if you can get most of North Collinwood stable, all the way over to Bratenahl, this starts to look like a pretty swank part of the city. Beyond that, while I love what's happening on the Near West Side, I think it would be a huge mistake to channel all our resources over there and to UC/LI, letting everything else east of E. 17th Street deteriorate. I'm glad to see them take the initiative, and I'm glad it appears to be working. If you look at research on this, artists are also driven by a great degree by the affordability of space. The fact that they can buy a house just off of an arts corridor for as little as $5,000 is a HUGE seller. Just because not every average buyer would want to "rough it" in Collinwood doesn't mean the average artist wouldn't; I think a lot of people would have questioned the wisdom of artists moving into the Warehouse District or Tremont 20 years ago, or James Levin opening CPT in Gordon Square 25 years ago, and now look at the relative stability of those neighborhoods. P.S. I believe there may be more efforts to provide local artists with homeownership opportunities in Cleveland and to recruit artists from other cities. Stay tuned!