Maida Millan knew things had hit rock bottom when she started chain smoking. Hours before the opening reception for the last exhibit of the season at the fledgling West Tampa Center for the Arts (WTCA), where Millan serves as executive director, the unthinkable happened: An inspector from the Tampa fire marshal's office arrived at the former cigar factory to distribute eviction notices to the Center's 20-some artists. Pinned to each studio door, the notices directed the artists to vacate the premises within seven days. What's more, an event permit for the evening's reception had been denied, putting the kibosh on an art exhibit and party months in the making.
Between phone calls Millan regressed to a cigarette habit she'd kicked years ago. Peppering some of West Tampa's most influential residents with calls — among them Jason Busto, known as the unofficial mayor of West Tampa, and City Council member Charlie Miranda — she struggled to find answers to a mystifying question: Why was a fire inspector suddenly so determined to shut down the building she and other artists had worked in for nearly a decade? By the end of the day, Millan had shed a tear and delivered a stirring speech to city officials about the importance of the arts to West Tampa — and the city as a whole — but she still had more questions than answers.
Those who attended the opening reception on Friday, May 23, know that the show went on, in altered form. A late-afternoon visit by Fire Marshal Todd Spear yielded a compromise: Visitors to the second and third floors of the building would be capped at 50 per level; refreshments and a pair of bands would move outside the building and to the ground floor; and two representatives from the fire marshal's office would supervise. Within seven days, the building's owners would attempt to fix the main sources of trouble — a lack of legal fire exits on the second and third floors — but even in the best-case scenario, it seemed likely that some artists would have to vacate their studios, at least temporarily.
As of May 30, that threat had become a false alarm.
Until last year, the West Tampa Center for the Arts went by a different name: Gallery 1906. About a year after purchasing the building in 1997, the owners of the former Santaella cigar factory — Bubba Ellis and his siblings, Jamie and Jenny Van Pelt — began leasing the second and third floors of the building to artists after plans with other tenants failed to materialize. The artists customized the space at their own expense and threw parties several times a year, during which they opened their studios to the public. With each artist inviting a couple dozen friends, the crowd quickly numbered into the hundreds; parties at Gallery 1906 developed a loyal following. The arrangement suited the family, who felt they were doing a good deed by supporting artists while renting the vacant space above their first-floor office furniture company, Ellis-Van Pelt, Inc.
Then in 2005, Ellis received some jarring news from a fire inspector, Stephen Hodge, during a visit to check on a fire alarm. During the visit, Hodge informed Ellis that the 104-year-old building was in violation of multiple fire safety regulations and suggested that power to the building be cut off, Ellis says. Alarmed, the building owner called then-City Council member Mary Alvarez to ask for her advice; shortly afterward, he found himself speaking with Tampa Fire Rescue Chief Dennis Jones. At Jones' behest, Ellis made a plan to bring the building up to code and began working with a different inspector, Toy Pelaez, to ensure that the work was underway; Hodge did not return.
Since beginning construction in 2006, Ellis estimates that he has spent more than $200,000 on changes to the building, including adding a layer of fireproof drywall to the artists' studios, expanding sprinkler and fire alarm systems and installing fireproof doors. For two years, he periodically phoned Pelaez to update him about the building's progress.
"I'd call him, and he would always tell me, 'I'm not worried about you guys. You're working to get everything done,'" Ellis says.
Last spring, after a suggestion from his nephew, JD Van Pelt, Ellis and his siblings moved toward formalizing their relationship with the artists upstairs. They approached Millan, a fine-art photographer and one of the building's first artist-tenants, about creating a community arts center in the building and offered her a small stipend to serve as executive director. With the family, Millan developed the concept of the West Tampa Center for the Arts — a more structured version of Gallery 1906 that would encompass the artists' studios as well as educational programming, community outreach, marketing efforts and partnerships with other local arts groups. In September, the WTCA hosted its inaugural exhibit, dubbed Nueva Evolucion.
In December, Pelaez resigned after becoming the focus of an investigation into whether he and another inspector in the fire marshal's office had accepted gifts from Advanced Engineered Systems, a Tampa company that installs fire alarms. (Ellis says he has never done business with the company.) Last week, just before the closing exhibit of the WTCA's first season was scheduled to open, a permit the owner had applied for to build an exterior fire escape came up for approval at the fire marshal's office. With Pelaez out of the picture, Hodge was the building's inspector again. According to Ellis, the two spoke on the phone and arranged to meet at the building on Thursday; during the conversation, Hodge mentioned that he had heard about the art exhibit reception and told Ellis to apply for an event permit, Ellis says. He hastened to comply.
During Thursday's visit, the inspector again discovered many code violations. Despite the work that had been done, both the second and third floors of the building lacked adequate fire exits, says Tampa Assistant Fire Marshal Geoff Brown. Other infractions included an alarm and sprinkler system that hadn't been inspected in several years. Worse yet, the fire marshal's office had previously told the building owners that occupancy of the second and third floors of the building was not allowed during construction, Brown says. No record of Pelaez's periodic approvals of the building's progress exists.
"[The building owners] had been given the requirements and had pulled permits and said they were going to work on them. They weren't supposed to be occupied during this construction," he says. "They were originally going to have the first floor for furniture sales, and that was OK as long as they didn't have anybody on the top."
On Friday morning, Hodge returned to issue eviction notices to the building's artists, having assessed conditions in the former cigar factory to be potentially life-endangering, Brown says. For Millan, the threat of eviction struck not only at her ability to earn a living but at her freedom of self-expression — and the freedom of each artist whose work had been hung on the building's walls in anticipation of a reception.
"I hate to call it censorship, because I don't want to piss [the inspector] off anymore — but to us, that's what it boils down to," she says. "Either codes have changed, or there's something that the last inspector didn't see that this one does."
Shortly after the notices were posted, she issued an S.O.S. to members of the West Tampa community. Out of necessity, she also informed artists that the exhibit reception scheduled for that evening would be canceled and artists with studios in the building would have to leave if Ellis couldn't bring the building up to code in seven days. Having witnessed two years of gradual updates to the building, the one-week ultimatum was devastating, Millan says.
"I knew for a fact that the owners of the building were more than willing to meet all their standards," she says. "What I wished was that the fire marshal would at least meet us halfway and understand that we are tax-paying citizens."
Later that day, the fire marshal met them halfway. Following Millan's phone calls, an impromptu gathering of city officials took place in the building about an hour before the reception for the exhibit was scheduled to begin. City Council member Charlie Miranda, Tampa Fire Marshal Todd Spear and the mayor's chief of staff, Darrell Smith, each arrived to tour the building. Spear indicated that a relatively easy change — enclosing the building's main staircase — could suffice to bring the second floor exits up to code; even some of the third floor artists' studios located near the same staircase could remain in use if it were enclosed. After an impassioned plea from Millan, the eviction notices came off the studio doors (though the order to vacate within seven days still held) and the reception went on as scheduled.
"I think the fire marshal did exactly what the requirements of the law required, then they realized there were some floors that were OK," says Miranda, who lives in West Tampa.
During a follow-up visit May 30, the fire marshal approved the changes Ellis had made to the staircase on the second floor and indicated that he would review plans for a third-floor fire exit next week, Millan says. None of the artists were forced to comply with the eviction notice.
Eviction wouldn't be dire for Lori Ballard, a photographer (and CL contributor) who keeps a studio on the building's third floor, because she uses the studio mainly as a gallery and typically shoots on location. But she feels sorry for the artists who need the day-to-day use of their studios and might have to find another place to work.
"I don't feel threatened [in the building]," she says. "And in an economy that's so tough, to kick people out and make their lives harder … It just seems a little ridiculous to me."
For Jason Busto, the West Tampa activist who fielded one of Millan's first calls for help, the net result of the inspection and eviction notices are a black eye for Tampa mayor Pam Iorio's efforts to turn Tampa into a "city of the arts." The hoopla has probably served mainly to demoralize a group of artists and a building owner who are "busting their asses to … make the richness of our city shine," he says.
"I don't fault [the inspector] for wanting to do a good job, but I want him and City Hall working from the same playbook," Busto says. "This is spirit-breaking nonsense."
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2008.