Warehouse Renaissance

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Transcript of Warehouse Renaissance

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F

irst there was darkness.

Then a single point of light exploded withthe brightness of three suns, shattering the nightwith a crack and the smell of ozone.

Paul Fioretti worked the light between his hands.Through the tinted glass of his facemask, he watchediron return to its beginnings: a ballet of metal melting into metal. Heavy pipes and gears glowed red-hot ashe bonded them together into sculpture.

The light spread through the workroom, flickeredon old oil drums and shelves, and shone through a baydoor into an alleyway. Some of the light fled into thelate-February sky, and some of it reflected off the sidesof buildings along the railroad tracks.

From balconies, people could see the light. They

saw a quiet intersection, the nexus of a makeshift vil-lage where, for the past 13 years, tenants had come andgone, creating things as they passed through.

The people who worked there — a handful of art-ists and entrepreneurs — wanted more than anything to make the place succeed. What did success mean?

 Visitors, mostly. Somebody to notice this place in-stead of driving by on the thoroughfares a block away.Somebody to come by and linger at the galleries andstudios, marvel at their beauty, spend some money.

Success had already come for Fioretti. It arrived onenight in late 2010, when he was working late at SouthFlorida Window Lift, the cluttered shop he had run inthe neighborhood for 20 years. During the day, he made

and repaired the motors that move car windows. Butsomething flashed in the back of Fioretti’s mind thatnight, igniting a connection like the white-hot arc of his welding tools: an impulse he had ignored for a long time. On the nights to come, he began experimenting 

with discarded parts, building a second life as an artist

after his wife and kids had gone to bed.If you stand on the corner outside Fioretti’s work-shop and look across Fifth Street, down First Avenueto where it dead-ends at Sistrunk Boulevard, you’llsee a long line of warehouses down the left side of the avenue. Some are large; some are more like littleconcrete offices; some have domed roofs like inflatabletents. On the other side of the avenue are a few emptylots, an auto mechanic.

This is FAT Village, a humble crucifix in downtownFort Lauderdale. It sits between the Florida East Coastrail line and the central artery of Andrews Avenue. It’snot very well lit, and parking is an informal affair. Shopsthat have windows need to cover them with iron bars.

Perhaps tougher than the problem with crime isFAT Village’s battle with perception: Fort Lauderdale,and Broward County overall, were long consideredwastelands of culture, even as arts districts sproutedin Miami, Delray Beach, and West Palm. Few peopleexpect to find great art in a gritty, landlocked sectionof Fort Lauderdale.

Still, the developer who owns nearly all of theproperty, Doug McCraw, charges relatively high rent.Many of the artists who helped form FAT Village havefled for cheaper real estate elsewhere, and those whohave remained continue to struggle.

FAT Village exists almost by accident, a remnantof a shining economic plan gone bad. If everything 

goes well, this sleeping neighborhood will becomeSouth Florida’s next great arts district. If something — money, people, artists — fails to materialize, FAT

 Village might just remain another abandoned bywayout of Fort Lauderdale’s industrial past.

O

n a recent afternoon, Doug McCraw stood in a

room that smelled like printer ink. About five-foot-five, 61 years old, wearing a polo shirt withkhakis, he leaned into the wall and squinted at a

portrait of artist Chuck Close. Two balding men withglasses, communing. McCraw tapped his fingernail onthe portrait, a metal plate covered with a dye-sublimationprint. A pair of tiny pug dogs snorted around his loafers.

“The work they’re doing here is really one-of-a-kind,” he said, the word kind stretching out in a Bir-mingham drawl softened by 35 years of South Florida.

He was inside Digital Artwear, a tenant in FAT Village. Neal Yaffe, the proprietor, showed off a shelf of digitally printed objects: messenger bags, tiles,notebooks. Yaffe’s assistant, a hip-looking Asian kid

named Tone, prepared packages for shipment to cli-ents around the country. As a working shop with anestablished outside client base, Digital Artwear is oneof the village’s more stable tenants. McCraw likesthem and wants them to stay. He owns the building,and they pay their rent.

That’s not always how things go in FAT Village.Some tenants credit McCraw with designing andchampioning this arts district he created from noth-ing. But others say his quest is simply about making money from artists, building an arts district as a wayto give value to an unwanted stretch of warehouses.McCraw says he’s given up on unloading the proper-ties to a developer, but changes in the economy have

proved him wrong before.Back in the ’90s, McCraw himself rented the space

that houses Digital Artwear. He ran a document stor-age company and needed space to expand his archives.Back then, it was just one in a row of obso-

Warehouse RENAISSANCE

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In art-starved Broward County,a creative district struggles on a

rough patch of downtown.

 BY STEFAN KAMPH     -    -      =

    -    -      =

>>p12

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lete warehouses, filled with crap that nobodywanted. He rented this building and then alarger one next door.

“I never dreamed when I was using the buildings that I would own them one day,” hesaid. But he had already been thinking aboutproperty investment, ever since he made a

 bunch of money flipping a house in the early’80s. Then, in the late ’90s, dot-com fortuneswere on the rise, and property was hot. Mc-Craw’s developer friend, Alan Hooper, wasplanning the Avenue Lofts, a set of high-risecondominiums just to the south along An-drews Avenue. McCraw decided to makean offer. In 1998, for a sale price of just overa million dollars, the buildings were his.

He inherited a few tenants, like a theatri-cal prop manufacturing shop that employedrecovering drug and alcohol abusers. It wascalled Starting Over Enterprises. Despite itsgood works, Starting Over was soon mov-ing out. Doug Jones and his fledgling eventcompany, Sixth Star, moved in. Jones renteda wood chipper and used it to destroy theprops and detritus of addiction that wereleft behind. The piles of wood chips still sit

 behind the building by the railroad tracks.The tracks. It seems like such a cliché, the

role they serve, separating this side from “theother side”: the traditionally black Sistrunkneighborhood. Inevitably, black men withdreads, black women with strollers, and blackchildren will walk down the right of way. Andinevitably, the mostly white artists and shop-keepers in FAT Village will watch them withsuspicion. The intersection at First and Fifth

has cleaned up considerably — “crack cen-tral,” McCraw called it during his first days asa landlord — but occasional break-ins persist.

One day in January, an art collector withsome money to spend was visiting the stu-dio of Francisco Sheuat, an artist who hadrecently moved in. The prospective clientparked his silver Dodge SUV on the streetoutside, and he and Sheuat talked business inthe doorway, looking on nervously as a groupof kids wearing skullcaps sat on the top of thewall and threw rocks. As if preordained, one of the rocks smashed the windshield of the SUV.The collector didn’t buy anything that day.

McCraw’s dream, at the beginning of the century, was to build FAT Village intoa technology workplace. The name — anacronym for “Flagler Arts and Technol-ogy,” as tenants are constantly having toexplain — occurred to him during a drive

to the beach. He envisioned a collection of  businesses hooked up to T1 internet lines, building the future from sunny Florida.

Then the dot-com bubble burst. Ten-ants lost money, and McCraw was stuckwith warehouses he couldn’t rent. So hedrew up a contract to sell them all, to pullout of the neighborhood. The buyer wouldprobably demolish them for condos. In2005, Hurricane Wilma stopped the deal.

Suddenly, said McCraw, “Therewas nobody here to buy it. There’s stillnot really anybody here to buy it.”

 And so FAT Village was born, an attempt

to do something unconventional with spacethat nobody seemed to want. McCraw sayshe has lost millions of dollars maintaining the buildings. He insists he can’t afford to bea philanthropist by renting spaces to starv-ing artists below market rate, but he says the

capacity of art to generate wonder exciteshim more than the bottom line: “When wedo art walks, nobody is more surprised thanme. I just get goose bumps. It’s more thananything I imagined in the beginning.”

Saturday night. Meredith Lasher satin a director’s chair inside the roll-updoor of Sixth Star Entertainment,legs crossed, eyes twinkling. “Hey, no

photographs,” she called in a joking, sing-song tone to visitors who stopped to takepictures of 20-foot-high shelves filled withstuff. Lasher runs the Women’s Theatre

Project in a space shared with Sixth Star.On the last Saturday of the month, FAT

 Village opens its warehouses for an art walk.Inside Sixth Star, a scale-model Christ theRedeemer beams down from a high shelf; bitsof old vanity mirrors and mock-up storefronts

look like the wreckage from a bombed-outOur Town

. A Seminole Hard Rock logo glit-ters near the ceiling. Near the back, there’san Oscar statue left over from a private partyin the Fort Lauderdale Isles neighborhood.

Sixth Star is an example of the kind of shopthat works indisputably well in FAT Village: anevent-planning and stage-show company, witha healthy client base, that needs somewhere towork. The art walks, for it, are an opportunityto show off what it does, but the audienceis an afterthought. It doesn’t need to makemoney from the people who drink its wine.

FAT Village wasn’t crowded on this Sat-urday in February. Maybe a hundred peoplewalked the block, ducking into galleries andworkshops. The audience felt more like agroup of friends exploring a neighborhoodthan the crush of humanity seen during artwalks in Miami’s Wynwood or West Palm’s

 Antiques Row. With Hula-Hooping com-petitions in the street and plenty of time totalk with shopkeepers, the vibe was right.Still, if these crowds were any indication of whether FAT Village would succeed, it wasclear the neighborhood had some work to do.

Down the block, the large warehousesat wide open. The inside was a bright ca-thedral with cement floors and woodenrafters, a void that could likely hold your

childhood home a few times over. McCrawstood in the corner, serving wine in plasticcups. On the walls were large abstract paint-ings by Miami-based artist David Marsh.

 A gray-and-white floating web hung as thecenterpiece of the room, extending from theceiling trusses and lit from all sides by spot-lights that cast a soft net of shadows. JameyGrimes, a soft-spoken artist from Tuscaloosa,

 Alabama, created the web, called Roil. Grimeswandered the open room with a camera andtripod, taking pictures of his work. Around10 p.m., a band called Pocket of Lollipops

 began to play at the back of the warehouse.

 About five mildly excited 20-somethingsgathered around to sort of dance. A fewolder art patrons chatted with McCraw,who explained how he discovered Grimes’art in a Birmingham gallery and matchedhim with David Marsh. The space

Warehouse Renaissance from p11 1. The Collide Factory, 2. Project Space,3. Digital Artwear, 4. Sixth Star Entertain-ment, 5. Francisco Sheuat, 6. Paul Fio-retti’s shop, 7. Doug McCraw’s office, 8.The Puppet Network, 9. Former Art of Alexstudio, 10. Former Gallery 101. McCrawowns the buildings here in blue.

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was empty for long stretches at a time.“Some of the art walks were good; some

were terrible,” recalled Alex Benitez, a prac-ticing artist with a retail shop who movedout of FAT Village when his one-year leaseexpired in December. They’ve been growing in attendance recently, and the feeling onthe streets is livelier than ever: All the shops

keep their doors open, and performancesat the village’s two black-box theaters drawcrowds. Still, the events lack publicity.

“People are surprised when they’re herefor a show and there’s an art walk going on,” said Lasher. “It’s like an undergroundsecret that only the cool kids know about.”

Leah Brown’s 18 Rabbit Gallery displayed agroup exhibit of conceptual sound art, includ-ing a set of speakers filled with water, sand,and beans. Flutelike contraptions screwedinto the air-conditioning ducts broke the airwith a high-pitched whistle. At Andrews Liv-ing Arts Studio, a sold-out crowd watched

a premiere of The Laramie Project after thenight’s signature distraction, a demonstra-tion by the toxically antigay Westboro BaptistChurch of Topeka, Kansas. Though the pro-prietors did not admit it, the theater may have

 benefited from this unsolicited publicity.On the corner, Fioretti had transformed his

shop into a gallery. Two welded and polishediron torches burned outside the entrance, anda Kool-Aid fountain circulated above a tray of cookies. His artwork was on display: a working clock, some smaller pieces, and a cactus-likefloor sculpture made of heavy polished gears.

Fioretti is the only artist in FAT Villagewhose building isn’t owned by McCraw, buthe may have had the most success during the art walk: He said he received multiplecommissions during the three-hour event.They included two more torches, whichhe said he would sell for $1,000 each, and a$5,000 dancing skeleton, made from the en-gine valve of a decommissioned battleship.

 Around the corner, a storefront on Andrewssat dark and empty. It used to house Gallery 101,which until February was a star tenant of FAT

 Village, bringing in collectors and serving as ananchor for the village’s eastern edge. Then, al-

most overnight, it was gone. Taped to the doorwas an eviction notice, claiming $18,788.07 inunpaid rent, signed by P. Douglas McCraw.

On a sunny, salt-sprayed afternoon onGalt Ocean Mile, Adam White reclinedon a black leather couch in the newlocation of Gallery 101. A stocky man

with silvered hair and a taste for gossip,White expressed no regrets about packing up his gallery and leaving FAT Village. Hewas in good company: Alex Benitez, the art-ist who moved out in December, set up shopin a retail space a block away from White’snew gallery. Rachel Henriques, anotherFAT Village artist, joined them in March.

The Galt Mile is a fusty strip along A1Anorth of Oakland Park Boulevard, known for

 buildings and residents that might have beenglamorous in the 1960s. The neighborhoodshares a name with John Galt, Ayn Rand’s in-dustrialist hero in Atlas Shrugged. In the novel,Galt persuades the world’s creative leadersto go on strike, revolting against a collectivistsociety that suppresses individual freedom.

“I’ve sold more art here in the last three

weeks than I did in six months in FAT Vil-lage,” said White. He said the pedestrianmall around his gallery, along with a mix of amenities like a wine bar, restaurants, andother galleries, made Galt Ocean Mile a morepleasant place for people to buy art. He alsocited the economic benefits: “I was paying $3,800 a month in my old space, and now I’mpaying a third of that.” White and McCrawwould not discuss details of the eviction.

 At Galt Ocean Plaza, the shopping centerwhere Gallery 101 is now located, busi-nesses include old independent restaurants,hair salons, boutiques, a cigar store. Thediagonal parking spaces are filled with Volvosedans and old Cadillacs. Parking costs 50cents an hour. Still, White said it had some-thing that FAT Village lacked: people.

In 2010, the Art of Alex Studio was oneof the most prolific and visible artist’s shopsin FAT Village, occupying the corner of the intersection opposite Fioretti’s shop.

 Alex Benitez painted swirling, cartoonishmasses of color that hung on prominent

display during art walks; he painted woodensigns saying “FAT Village” and attachedthem to stop-sign posts along the avenue.

Ultimately, the bottom line won. “For sureI gave up the ‘hip factor,’ ” said Benitez. “Inthe end, if I’m in a mall and can sell more art,I’ll give up hipness any day of the week.”

Benitez said city codes prevented the art-ists’ work from spilling out into the street.Even those stop-sign paintings he did wor-ried a few of his FAT Village neighbors, whodidn’t want a bad relationship with the city.Similar codes prohibit vendors from setting 

up tables at art walks, and tenants are not al-lowed to hang large signs off the buildings.Slowly, people are moving forward any-

way: Local graffiti artists have been painting murals on the backs of the warehouses, fac-ing the railroad tracks and the Regal Tracehousing complex. McCraw and Leah Brown,of 18 Rabbit Gallery, are planning murals onthe front sides, facing the avenue. McCrawrecently received a set of street-improvementgrants to install glass doors and roll-downaluminum grates over the entrances.

The tenants all agree that a vibrant-looking streetscape would draw more traffic. Still,

they find it hard to reach consensus. Jim Ham-mond, owner of the Puppet Network pup-petry and scenery shop in FAT Village, saidsomebody needs to take the lead if the appear-ance of the neighborhood is going to change,even if permission from the city doesn’t come.

“Maybe the artists have just beentoo well-behaved,” he said.

While Fioretti welded, another noctur-nal transformation was taking place.

 A hundred feet up First Avenue, lightpoured out of a small door at the front

of the largest warehouse, now emptied of artwork. At the center of it, in a small leatherclub chair, sat McCraw. He ate takeout pizzaunder spotlights as workers in black movedvelvet screens into place all around him.

He had been talking about this for months.The workers were setting up the displayand seating areas for an expensive whiskey-tasting event, sponsored by Dewars. “Veryslick, very high-end,” cooed McCraw as hespoke about the event. McCraw liked thewhiskey-tasting because it paid good money,and it would bring the attention of  >>p16

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well-heeled Floridians with disposable in-comes. But some FAT Village tenants didn’tthink this move toward money and luxuryand away from direct support of the arts wasa good idea. Was McCraw selling out hisgoal of giving creativity a place to flourish?

“He’s renting to a gym and a tequilacompany now,” said White in his new gal-

lery. “That has nothing to do with the artsin any way, shape, or form. He can’t figureout what he wants to do with the space.”

In fact, McCraw’s vision for the villageis hard to pin down, in part because he’s a businessman who has learned to hedge his bets. After getting stuck with a couple of  blocks of warehouses he can barely afford,McCraw will not act on idealism alone. Whenfirst asked by New Times about his visionfor the future of FAT Village, McCraw wasvague. “Well, I’d like to get a couple morehigh-tech companies in here...” He trailed off.

When asked again a few days later, he

painted a more detailed picture. “I see murals,lighting on the street. Boutique restaurants,maybe a microbrewery. Tech companies, art-ists, studios... I’d like to see it be permanent,not just something that’s around until therents go up. But you have to get critical mass.”

McCraw seems to have decided that the pos-sibility of a pedestrian-based creative districtis worth the money he’s sunk into it. But unlessartists stay and people visit, calling something a“creative district” won’t accomplish anything.

One of the neighborhood’s newest ten-ants, with a gleaming space anchoring thenorth end of First Avenue, was run by Mc-

Craw’s idealistic younger counterpart.Travis Webster is 29 years old, a clean- cut

young professional — though he’d cringeat the term yuppie — with long brown hair. A self-described “business guy,” he helpedfound the Collide Factory, which he calls “acreative and collaborative idea incubator.”Like McCraw, he has business acumen that’sstretched to its limits by the scale of his plans.

In the summer of 2010, Webster and a fewfriends, including local singer/songwriterand coffee-shop owner Ryan Alexander, con-verted the trapezoidal warehouse into a slick,air-conditioned space dominated by two

shipping containers expertly covered in graf-fiti. Webster needed the space for his busi-ness, Collide Brand Partners, which wouldprovide marketing and branding services. Hedecided to turn that into something far big-ger by renting out desks to other “creatives.”

“I thought, what if my office was ev-erybody’s office?” said Webster, sitting at atable made of rough-hewn wooden planksthat he and his friends nailed together.

There was an element of subdued terror

in Webster’s voice when he arrived in theempty space after a cathartic bike ride on anafternoon in late February. He said he had putnearly all of his money into the space, and itwas still too early to know if the pipeline of clients he envisioned would flow though theCollide Factory, enabling him to continuepaying his rent and hosting shows or con-certs during art walks. “I’m going to wait,”he said. “I look forward to the day when it’sactively working and breathing by itself.”

A

fter Fioretti stopped welding and Mc-Craw went home for the night, as props

and scenery sat tucked away in darkcorners, a freight train headed north

on the railroad tracks. It passed workshopsand studios and the wood-chipped remnantsof Starting Over. It passed the relics of falsestarts, the vaulted space of the big warehouse,and the gym that has nothing to do with art.The train engine hummed and the boxcarsrolled, clack-clack, clack-clack, over the joints, and finally, it went by the graffiti-clad back of the Collide Factory, a testament tooptimism at the end of the block. The lightswere off; the silver overhead doors weredrawn down and locked. The space waited

for people, and miles away on that Febru-ary night, Webster waited for a day whenhis project — his huge, messy, all-too-realproject by the tracks — could sustain itself.

Webster had recently taken stock of theinventory that had cost nearly all of his money.“We need two more desks, a couple of chairs,”he remarked. “We have to finish what westarted. Otherwise, this is just a big warehouse.”

Less than two months later, on April 14, sadnews would appear on Webster’s Twitter feed:“Friends, I have officially closed the doorsat Collide Factory FAT Village, due to over-whelming complications.” He would move to

Orlando, leaving behind FAT Village for good.The train rolled away into the dis-

tance. All around the neighborhood, therewas silence, and darkness, and space.

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Warehouse Renaissance from p14 Top: Doug McCraw owns most of the build-ings in FAT Village. Bottom: After a disputeabout rent, Adam White moved to a cheaperand busier space at Galt Ocean Mile.

Photos by Michael McElroy