It seems a match made in heaven.
Tampa's post-5 p.m. downtown streets look devoid of life, like a scene out of the post-apocalyptic Omega Man.
Artists are just dying for space to paint, rehearse plays, sell sculptures or create something, anything.
Empty buildings. Hungry artists. A city whose downtown needs an injection of life.
But matchmaking, it turns out, can be a tricky business.
Take N. Franklin Street, a winding brick-lined stretch through downtown that used to be Tampa's main shopping district from 1920 to the 1940s, the kind of place where, in those old black-and-white pictures you find at the historical society, Ford Model T's lined up to park in front of department stores.
Today, the northern end of Franklin Street is a collection of mostly vacant, often rundown buildings. Artists would love to get their hands on them, but the building owners, for the most part, have shown little interest in leasing at cut-rate, arts-friendly rents. That, in turn, has kept North Franklin, long envisioned as a culturally friendly entertainment district, a ghost town.
Unlike St. Petersburg across the bay, where new galleries and cool restaurants line Central Avenue downtown and make for lively nights and weekends, downtown Tampa has had no such renaissance. The zoning here allows for skyscrapers, and many properties stay moribund while their owners calculate how to cash out with multimillion-dollar construction plans. In St. Pete, without carte blanche to build towers at will, landowners downtown were forced to do something, while Tampa's building owners bide their time.
"They can afford to sit on these buildings," said Jeff Whipple, a visual artist and playwright in Tampa. "They don't see a benefit to having a cultural scene. They're not cultural people."
Art fills empty spaces — not only figuratively but literally.
It is artists and media production companies, for instance, who revived Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, which has regained its place as that city's chi-chi shopping district. Lincoln Road fell on hard times starting in the 1950s; government attempts to re-create its lure over the next three decades failed. In 1984, a group of artists saw promise in the blighted and vacant area and worked with a federal grant and city leaders to create affordable workspace in 21 storefronts on Lincoln Road. Today, the area flourishes, with trendy restaurants and shops drawn back to Lincoln Road by the energy and creativity of the arts district.
In Tampa, any one of three districts could have been — should have been, some argue — just like Lincoln Road.
Ybor City had a burgeoning arts scene, with affordable studio and gallery spaces — until rents took off over the last decade and drove artists out, fueled by the construction of Centro Ybor and former Mayor Dick Greco's vision of the Latin Quarter as the next Bourbon Street.
The Channel District's vacant warehouses served as great sites for studio and performing space — until the condo construction craze of the past five years swept them aside.
And then there was North Franklin.
It seemed ideal — a district close to existing large facilities like the museum and the performing arts center, and graced by a national treasure, the Tampa Theater. But its buildings were old, many of them vacant for decades. Its rents were neither low enough to attract arts tenants, nor its buildings interesting enough to be home to trendy restaurants.
Now, with high-rises planned along a good stretch of North Franklin, wiping out potentially arts-friendly buildings, the street's future as an arts district looks bleak.
"I had envisioned smaller-scale buildings" for Franklin Street, said Tampa City Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena. "I envisioned existing low-rise building stock would be rehabbed."
So far, that has not happened.
"It's always been frustrating to me to see the coolest areas of this city sit empty," said Whipple, who recently was forced to move out of the Channel District. "Tampa has many times more things going on [than St. Pete], but you have to drive 15 miles to see them all. You can't go to this one place and have all this energy going on."
So, last year, Whipple tried to do something about it. With the assistance of Paul Wilborn, Tampa's creative industries manager, he pitched an idea to Jeannette Jason. Her company, led by well-known Miami developer Doran Jason, controls several key blocks on North Franklin Street. (Doran, ironically, played a key role in the revitalization of Lincoln Road in Miami.)
One of the empty Jason buildings had plenty of space for an arts colony with a gallery, studio space and possibly a small theater. Whipple talked with seven or eight visual and performing arts groups and got their interest. He spoke with Jeannette Jason about it on several occasions. The key for the artists, however, was low — or no — rent.
"We can't pay market rate," Whipple said, "but we can bring a lot of energy to it."
In the end, he said, Jason offered a lower rent, but still not cheap enough to work for the arts groups — even though these tenants were willing to maintain the aging structure and bring some life to downtown.
Whipple is careful not to paint Jason as a villain, pointing out that she has had arts tenants in her buildings before. "She's very nice," he said. "I like her. I applaud her for trying."
Jason has bigger plans for the site: a 44-story condo tower at the former W.T. Grant five-and-dime store, part of a larger vision for her company to develop two other condo towers on Franklin Street, called the Kress Block.
Whipple is generous in his assessment of Jason's company, something that others downtown privately are not. They complain that the Jason-owned blocks and other buildings — notably the historic Maas Bros. department store site — have sat vacant for decades.
Jeannette Jason did not respond to several requests for an interview for this story.
Should property owners give away free space for the arts? It's an idea that seems antithetical to capitalism. Why should landowners subsidize, in effect, any industry or sector of our economy? Why should government, either, for that matter?
Some economists — Richard Florida in his Rise of the Creative Class foremost among them — argue that they should because the arts provide a diversity that attracts many other industries and fuels a strong 21st-century economy.
The theory has many proponents among Tampa's government and nonprofit leadership.
"The arts and cultural institutions are obviously beneficial for the kind of economic redevelopment and downtown revitalization that we are talking about," said Melinda Chavez, executive director of the Tampa Bay Business Committee for the Arts.
But the building owners have compelling reasons not to install artists in their vacant buildings. Many of the properties have not generated any revenue for decades. Many were built in the 1920s-1940s and would need extensive refitting, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to make them habitable. Some landlords have had arts groups as tenants before and found them unstable and difficult to work with.
Then there is the matter of downtown Tampa's zoning, which pretty much allows a skyscraper on every block. With the idea that a big hit is just a few years away, some landowners over the decades were willing to let their properties idle while they waited for the next wave of tower construction.
Take the Maas Bros. building, as an example. Once considered among the greatest shopping meccas in Florida, the creation of two German brothers was a fixture on Franklin Street for more than 80 years. Today, the building is considered a hazard and a public nuisance. The city's top code enforcement official earlier this year said the building is so unsafe that firefighters will not enter it — even if it's burning down.
With its 60,000 square feet, the Maas Bros. building could have been a great arts building — historic and funky, creative and open.
Instead, it was slated for demolition as part of a multi-block office tower proposed several years ago by Greg Hughes and Chesapeake Atlantic Holdings. It continued to sit vacant, along with other parcels, until Hughes' plans failed to attract a lead tenant and he sold the properties that had not already been lost to foreclosure. The Maas has a new owner — Pradip Patel — and an uncertain future.
And it's not just the arts that have this problem downtown. Shop owners suffer as well. A study done earlier this year for the Tampa Downtown Partnership said many good, desirable retailers "simply cannot afford to pay market rate rents for space," and many "older downtown buildings are owned by trusts, heirs, and others who are simply not motivated, or able, to renovate their buildings."
"It doesn't have to be a city of galleries," said Ellen Brown, owner of Old Tampa Book Company on Tampa Street. Brown ran an arts gallery for 24 years in Rochester, N.Y., before moving to Tampa with her husband, David, and opening the rare books store in 1994. "I know how hard it is to run a gallery."
Brown sees cultural organizations and businesses as just one part of a healthy mix of unique, locally owned shops and restaurants — and even a crafts community — vital to making Tampa's downtown special and affordable on many levels, for shopkeeper and customer alike. "A destination is what we're talking about," Brown said. "If they turn downtown into Generica, why would anyone come to downtown and pay for parking? I don't want to work in a mall."
But Generica seems to be exactly what we're in for. The trend in condo construction in downtown Tampa seems likely to spawn a national brand-oriented mix of retail and restaurants in downtown Tampa. As these new towers go up, most have some provision for retail space on the ground level, but those spaces will almost certainly rent at high market rates, making them unavailable to locally owned retailers — and, of course, artists.
And that translates to even fewer spaces available for the arts downtown, outside of the Tampa Museum of Art, which is an important institution but doesn't provide a foundation for an arts economy as small arts shops and theaters do. Without those entrepreneurial cultural businesses, you can't support artists or create an audience of theatergoers or art collectors. And in a chicken-or-the-egg vicious cycle, without arts patrons, you can't nurture (or even pay) young or beginning artists.
"Diversity, unique, challenging, those are the things that attract the collectors," said Brad Cooper, whose Brad Cooper Gallery in Ybor City is one of the city's oldest serious galleries. "To get those collectors, you have got to have viable artists. To have the artists, you have got to have diversity. That is the dilemma that the city is in."
The arts outlook for downtown is not entirely bleak. One skyscraper — Park Tower, managed by The Wilson Company — has committed to keeping a gallery in its ground floor for years. Condos such as Skypoint and the Residences of Franklin Street will provide homes for full-time urban dwellers. Skypoint's owners have spoken with city officials about putting a gallery in their building. The city has a committee that includes Wilborn that is aimed at matching arts groups with landowners who have space. Artists are returning to Ybor City. And Outback Steakhouse founder Bob Basham is part of a group that has bought much of the 500 block of North Franklin, although it has not announced plans for that property. While some might fear his chain experience, most are excited by the idea of someone with Basham's talent, abilities and money helping make downtown take off.
And then there's Grand Central at Kennedy, condos and offices that will include a new performing arts theater for Stageworks and gallery space for the nonprofit Artists Unlimited — donated free by its developer, Ken Stoltenberg. He did voluntarily what many say the city of Tampa ought to be requiring other builders to do: provide a space for the arts and consider those groups an amenity for residents.
Stoltenberg said the city could find a way to entice other developers to do likewise.
"If you want to encourage that, it's very simple: It's called carrot and stick," Stoltenberg said. "If you want to encourage developers to put in arts space, give them an incentive to do it. Make it financially worth doing."
While there was no city ordinance requiring it, Tampa officials made the free arts space a condition for approving the rezoning that made Grand Central at Kennedy possible.
Bonuses of increased height or greater density would give developers the incentive they don't have now to include space for the arts. Councilwoman Saul-Sena said she'd love to see such a change in the city's development code, but doesn't think it will come to pass.
"What's best is not the hammer of governmental rules but the carrot of enlightened self-interest," Saul-Sena said.
Other ways to provide space for the arts in Tampa could include:
• Expanding the options for using Tampa's 1 percent fund for public art. All downtown construction must set aside 1 percent of its construction costs (up to $250,000) for public art displays. Changing the city's ordinance could allow some of those funds to be used to support space for arts organizations. "It has been discussed," said Robin Nigh, who administers Tampa's public arts program. She cited cities such as Los Angeles and Tempe, Ariz., as places that have already embraced those kinds of options for their public art dollars. Tampa's City Council will hear about some of those options in November.
• Penalizing property owners — through taxes or some other mechanism — who allow their buildings to sit vacant. Currently, a vacant building that is rundown can actually lose value on tax rolls, lowering an owner's liabilities. (Some downtown business owners would penalize office tower owners who keep rents high and have excessive vacancies, but that's a whole other story.) Saul-Sena said the way to do this is through code enforcement: Tampa recently passed ordinances against "demolition by neglect" that allows city fines for buildings that sit vacant.
The creation of an arts scene in Tampa also suffers from an intangible: the comparisons, both fair and unfair, with Pinellas County — and particularly with the lively downtown of St. Petersburg.
"For Tampa being 'America's next great city,' they do not buy art as much as people in Pinellas County," said Lance Rodgers, curator at the Salt Creek Artworks in St. Petersburg, which is itself located in a formerly vacant furniture manufacturing building whose owner had the foresight to allow re-use for the arts. The Tampa crowd is younger and hipper-looking, Rodgers said — "and they don't buy art."
Arts advocates say Tampa has established larger institutions like its museum and performing arts center while ignoring the lack of an infrastructure that would create more jobs and economic benefit than the larger institutions.
"They're putting the carts before the horse," Cooper said. "That comes down to the value system of the leadership."
But it's not all about civic leaders.
"It's hard to fabricate the arts," said Ken Rollins, the new director of the Tampa Museum of Art, said at the inaugural meeting two weeks ago of a new downtown Arts and Cultural Committee. "It was small-businesspeople in St. Petersburg that did it."
And artists.
"The problem is that art begins with a person, not a space," added Anna Brennen, founder of Stageworks, "and it needs to begin with people who are qualified to be doing what they are doing. And the community needs to support these artists."
Just where will they do that? Wilborn says he hasn't given up on Ybor City as the focus for galleries and performing arts spaces, recreating the best of the 1980s and early 1990s when bohemians ran wild in the streets there.
Channelside certainly will be a candidate now that Stageworks and Artists Unlimited have long-term homes there.
As for N. Franklin Street? With boarded-up buildings, little buzz in the arts community and hardly even a mention of its role in the arts in the Partnership's study of the future of downtown, N. Franklin Street seems destined to stay empty — of art, at least.
Some arts advocates such as Saul-Sena say a more likely home for an arts colony exists on Franklin Street — but north of I-275, where one- and two-story yellow-brick buildings and warehouse spaces are perfectly suited for cultural development. That several-block stretch between the interstate and Palm Avenue is about half-vacant, with the rest of the buildings holding a smattering of wholesale (motor supplies, pool and billiards) and charities (Church Women United). The city is rerouting Franklin — which now dead-ends at a state building before getting to the interstate — to reconnect it with the Tampa Heights neighborhood.
Driving up that stretch of road, you see the potential, you almost see the sculpture, smell the greasepaint and hear the roar of the audience.
North North Franklin anyone?
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.