Painted into a corner

Artists turned the Fort Point neighborhood into a thriving community. Now, developers are catching up to them. Is the city responsible for helping the artists stay?

by Jason Gay

Dennis Sagwitz's place isn't Martha Stewart's idea of living, but it's not bad. The funky second-floor space, which is converted from an old factory warehouse in Boston's Fort Point Channel neighborhood, features hardwood floors, high ceilings, and a small bedroom loft that Sagwitz built himself. There's also a small kitchen, a modest bathroom, and plenty of room and light for Sagwitz's photography business.

Sagwitz, a 35-year-old with a goatee and action-hero biceps, moved to the neighborhood from Jamaica Plain two years ago. He liked the apartment, sure, but what attracted him most was the community. In the Fort Point district, Sagwitz is surrounded by artists of all ages and types -- painters, sculptors, musicians, and more. The building where he lives, 17 Stillings Street, houses 20 artists. Creative energy abounds. Residents of Stillings Street, some of whom are known regionally and even nationally for their work, regularly host art exhibitions, concerts, and performances. Occasionally, there are parties that would make Andy Warhol proud.

But that's all coming to an end. Sagwitz and his Stillings Street neighbors, who no longer have a lease, have been asked to vacate the premises by the end of December. The owner of the property, the Boston Wharf Company, intends to demolish the two-story brick building next year and replace it with a parking garage and two floors of office space. Unless something changes at the last minute, Sagwitz will likely be spending the first day of the new millennium somewhere else -- a friend's couch, perhaps.

"It's bad, it's discouraging," he says. "It's been happening all over. Artists are getting eradicated all over the place."

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Stillings Street may be the most jarring example of artist displacement in this neighborhood, but it isn't the first. For some time, Fort Point Channel -- a cluster of aging brick warehouses just a bridge away from South Station and the Financial District -- has been a community with a bull's-eye on its back. The neighborhood sits at the edge of the city's massive, multibillion-dollar South Boston Waterfront project, and developers are hot to get their hands on it. Signs of impending change -- flatbed trucks, bulldozers, brachiosaur-like cranes -- are everywhere. Every other person walking down the street, it seems, is wearing a hardhat.

At risk is nothing less than New England's biggest artistic community. Nearly 500 artists live and work in the Fort Point area; most of them, like Dennis Sagwitz, were drawn by the neighborhood's cultural community and its spacious brick warehouses, which feature low rents, freight elevators, and favorable daylight. Though most of these artists work in visual mediums -- painting, sculpture, photography -- virtually every creative field is represented somewhere. There are small galleries, collectives, performance troupes, and even a few museums tucked into the labyrinthine brick landscape.

For years, this artists' community has been something of a hidden jewel, a kind of SoHo-by-the-harbor. But with the waterfront redevelopment bearing down, the jig is up, and the art community's future is decidedly up in the air. Almost all the artist tenants have leases set to expire within the next two years, and there are no guarantees that their tenancies will be extended. Fort Point artists worry that they'll soon be evicted to make way for offices, luxury housing, or yet another parking garage. And, lacking the resources and political connections of moneyed developers, they feel hard-pressed to stop the wheels of change.

"It's David and Goliath," says Jerry Beck, the director of the Revolving Museum, a Fort Point institution that displays the work of local artists and runs art-education programs for city schoolchildren. "You have to believe you're fighting the right fight. And this is the right fight. It's about cultural survival. There's no doubt in my mind."

What's happening in the Fort Point neighborhood has happened elsewhere, from New York to London to San Francisco and beyond. The story goes something like this: artists, short on money but high on energy and creativity, settle in a neglected part of the city and help revitalize it, only to find themselves driven out once the neighborhood becomes attractive to others. It's happened again and again. "Artists always find the right places to work in, and then the real-estate agents catch up," says Jed Speare, the director of Mobius, another Fort Point artists' space.

It's kind of like, Hey, thanks for saving the neighborhood! Now get the hell out! Here in Boston, this trend is also playing out in parts of the South End, Jamaica Plain, and Mission Hill, as well as across the river in Cambridge and Somerville. Artists aren't the only ones being swept out, of course; long-time residents of all kinds are feeling the squeeze of the pepped-up economy and booming real-estate market. "It's an absolutely brutal market out there," says Obie Simonez, a sculptor and Stillings Street tenant for 18 years who also subleased the property to other artists. "It's so disgusting. It's sinful."

The brewing crisis in Fort Point raises some important questions about the place of art in Boston's future. Assuming that the city benefits from its artistic community, how much responsibility does it bear for preserving that community? Is a working artists' community part of the city's vision for the South Boston Waterfront? How about the city's large, mainstream cultural institutions -- what role could they play in helping local artists? Finally, what about the artists themselves? How can they make their case -- assuming they have one?

Answers to those questions seem far off right now, but the stakes are high. Fort Point artists want to stick around, but that's starting to feel like a long shot.

"I get so discouraged, and I wonder why I keep fighting, because I think it [displacement] is going to happen no matter what," says Jane Deutch, a sculptor who serves as a board member for the Fort Point Arts Community (FPAC), a neighborhood support group. "But then you walk outside, and you realize what you're fighting for."

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Fort Point Channel was developed in the early to mid 19th century, when the Boston Wharf Company, a subsidiary of the London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, filled in several hundred acres of low-lying salt marshes and mud flats to create a waterfront shipping and receiving district. In subsequent decades, blocks of brick warehouses were constructed in the area. Some were used to accommodate the shipping trade; some served other industries, including printing and wool.

These vast warehouses, many of which are intact today, are the Fort Point district's defining architectural feature. Though most of them lack expensive flourishes, the warehouses are noteworthy for their quality of construction and their compatibility with one another, says John Seward, a local architect and an amateur Fort Point historian. This is largely because a pair of architects designed almost all the Boston Wharf Company buildings in the area, Seward says. The two architects' practical but pleasing style visually ties the neighborhood together.

"They didn't break new stylistic ground, but we're extremely lucky in that it was a very good [design] done for a client that appreciated good character," Seward says. "You don't usually see that in other industrial buildings."

By the middle of the 20th century, the shipping industry had declined substantially in the Fort Point neighborhood, Seward says, and the wool and printing industries were slumping too. New tenants came and went, and some dark years followed. But by the early to mid 1970s, a new industry had appeared: artists began moving in. They liked the cheaper-than-cheap rents, and they also appreciated the wide-open spaces and sturdy floors, which were ideal for large-scale projects. In ensuing years, some artists began living in their work spaces -- some legally, some not. But landlords and city officials more or less kept a "wink wink" deal with artists living illegally in these studios: don't complain to us, and we won't bother you. Stillings Street, where Sagwitz lives, is not zoned for housing.

The district's transition from an industrial site to a thriving arts community was by no means smooth. The neighborhood was sometimes a forbidding place, not the kind of area you'd want to walk around in much. At night, especially, it was dark and desolate; it could feel a million miles from downtown. (Long-time Fort Pointers remember it as a good place to unload a stolen car.) The neighborhood was also home to the Channel, a rough-and-tumble rock club that had plenty of memorable shows, but also more than its share of trouble.

Developers earmarked Fort Point for a comeback in the mid 1980s, but the 1987 stock-market crash and the recession that followed brought that recovery to a halt. Today's revitalization effort, however, appears more stable. Fort Point Channel in 1999 is home to a growing number of finance, high-tech, and e-commerce companies, a development that's visible in the queues of shiny Volkswagens on the street (as well as the occasional Porsche). The Boston Wharf Company (still the area's largest landlord by far, with 3.5 million square feet of property) maintains its corporate offices here, some 150 years after it built the neighborhood from scratch. There are froufrou coffee shops, Dunkin' Donuts, and stores to buy expensive furniture and lamps. The neighborhood is also home to the Children's Museum, which sits behind an enormous sculpture of a milk bottle at the end of the Northern Avenue Bridge.

And there are artists, and plenty of them. Unlike the slick, expensive art scene downtown, the Fort Point arts community is authentic and unpolished; the neighborhood feels like a half-finished canvas, a work in progress. It's a place where the culture aficionados wear leather and paint-blotched jeans, not bow ties and stickpins. Most Fort Point artists aren't out to make the big bucks. They're people who have learned to get by on as little as possible to do what they love.

They're people like the Revolving Museum's Jerry Beck, who started his gallery/educational operation nearly 15 years ago, using some abandoned rail cars as headquarters. Eventually, the project grew into one of the area's most ambitious and recognized outlets for local art. The Revolving Museum occupies part of a warehouse on A Street, and its interior often looks like the scene of a highway collision between the Museum of Modern Art and Sesame Street: children's art projects are exhibited in spaces a few steps from hyper-creative installations, paintings, and films by some of the region's best adult talents.

Beck, naturally, ranks among the Fort Point art community's staunchest defenders, for reasons that are aesthetic as well as practical. "This is a beautiful community, at night and by day," he says. "Artists are always drawn to these types of communities. Always."

In recent years, however, a tide of anxiety has been sweeping over the neighborhood, Beck says. He hears artists talk more about lease negotiations than about their own creative projects. Artists who have lived here for years talk about leaving for Brighton, Chinatown, or Chelsea. Others are threatening to pack up and head for artist-friendly cities such as Lowell or Providence, where city leaders are recruiting artists to come and live in their communities.

But the vast majority would like nothing more than to stay, Beck says. "We put a lot of sweat into this neighborhood, and you have artists around here whose entire life's work has been created here. We may be coming to the table late, but better late than never."

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In order for the Fort Point artists to survive, however, their case must reach some kind of critical mass. That hasn't happened yet. People freaked out when the New England Patriots made noises about relocating to South Boston, but you don't hear the same kind of commotion about artists' being forced to move out. The megabucks convention center (price tag: $700 million and rising) got mega-press. Artists? They're still low on the public and political totem pole.

Part of the problem is geography. Despite its precious downtown location, the Fort Point district has traditionally been isolated from the rest of the city. It's one of those places you're not likely to pass through unless you have a specific reason to go there. (The neighborhood's main draw, the Children's Museum, is situated right on the end of the Northern Avenue Bridge; instead of exploring the rest of the area, most people who come to the museum merely visit, turn around, and leave.)

"Geography has so much to do with it," says Cheryl Forte, an FPAC board member whose family operates the last Fort Point wool warehouse, now in its 78th year. "You talk to people in the Financial District who have no idea this neighborhood exists. You could poll people getting on the trains at South Station, and they'd say, `The Fort Point neighborhood?' "

But the artists themselves represent another challenge, and people in the neighborhood readily admit this. By nature, artists tend to be individualistic, spending most of their working lives in relative obscurity and isolation. As a result, they don't tend to develop into the most refined of political animals. Add the fact that many possess something of an anti-authoritarian streak -- after all, artists are used to being kicked to the margins of society -- and you don't necessarily have the best candidates for going down to City Hall and sucking up to the political establishment.

"To some degree, I think artists instinctively feel they are outsiders, outside the mainstream, so it's difficult sometimes for artists to recognize mainstream ways of building support," says Steve Hollinger, an inventor who chairs the Seaport Alliance for Neighborhood Design (SAND), a collection of artists and other Fort Point workers and residents fighting to preserve the neighborhood.

That said, the Fort Point artists have done a solid job of representing their cause, Hollinger believes. In addition to SAND, which monitors South Boston Waterfront development issues and maintains contact with the area's political representatives, there's the 20-year-old FPAC, which does similar work as well as helping to negotiate leases for artist clients. (FPAC currently hopes to purchase some buildings from the Boston Wharf Company and protect as many artist tenants as possible.) There are also smaller, building-specific groups, such as the Stillings Street Artists Coalition.

Together, these organizations have enlivened and strengthened the waterfront neighborhood's identity, especially within the past year. Ironically, some people believe that the looming development issue has worked wonders to bring the Fort Point arts community together. "This is the best thing that's happened, in some ways," says Jerry Beck.

Virtually every Fort Point artist you talk to emphasizes that the community's not looking for a handout, a free or highly subsidized live-work space on the city's or state's dime. Artists, by and large, recognize that they're no more entitled to an affordable place to live and work than a shop owner, a single parent, or an ice-cream scooper is. "The stereotype put forth by developers is that artists are just a group looking for a subsidy," says Steve Hollinger. "The reality is that artists are just looking for a way that their [lives] in the city can be continued."

So what do the Fort Point artists want? Affordable, long-term leases would be nice, and homeownership would be better, but barring that, they're just looking for a few swings at the plate when the city begins implementing its waterfront plan. There's great concern in the neighborhood that the city's vision of the South Boston Waterfront doesn't include artists: if nothing else, they'd like an opportunity to make the case that they should be allowed to compete for a piece of the redeveloped-waterfront pie.

"I hope the city doesn't miss an opportunity to consider how artists can be a part of this community," says Jerry Beck. "We're not asking for a handout. We're asking for an opportunity to present visionary ideas, creative solutions, and a vehicle for this community to continue impacting the culture of this city."

But Beck and others know that they can't do it alone. In order for the Fort Point arts community to continue in its current form, artists must have the full support of the area's elected officials, especially those in City Hall. And right now, Fort Point residents are not the least bit certain whether they have much support at all.

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To date, Boston's political establishment has been saying the right things. Mayor Menino says he wants to help the Fort Point artists. Pretty much everyone in City Hall says something similar. The city points to its victories in preserving tracts of artist housing in the South End and Jamaica Plain, and says that it will make every effort possible to do the same for the Fort Point artists. (For its part, the Boston Wharf Company has not explicitly said it wants to kick the artists out. "Artists are good people, good tenants, and we like them . . . we don't move people out just for the hell of it," says Boston Wharf attorney John Dineen.)

"There are a variety of ways in which the city makes clear that it values and supports and encourages artists to be part of the community," says Esther Kaplan, the mayor's special assistant for cultural affairs. "Affordable studio space is one way. Affordable living space is another way."

Adds Menino: "We'd love to accommodate them, because I know how difficult it is for them."

But it's one thing to say you favor the protection of artist housing. It's another thing to actually protect it. To what extent is the city responsible for taking the initiative on this issue, especially in a neighborhood where real estate is white-hot and commercial development is closing in from nearly every side? Fort Point leaders say they haven't seen that kind of leadership from City Hall yet.

"There's been no action at all coming out of City Hall," says FPAC's Cheryl Forte. "Maybe part of it is our responsibility to create our case better, but we'd like to see some more creative thinking and action coming out of City Hall."

In fairness, Menino's facing similar issues virtually everywhere in Boston. Rising rents and a thriving economy have put enormous pressure on long-time tenants across town; old neighborhoods are being transformed from working-class to affluent faster than you can say "Starbucks." Fort Point is just one part of this picture.

But what's different about protecting their neighborhood, artists believe, is the potential payoff. The Fort Point artists' community has the potential to become not just a neighborhood saved from the scrap heap, but a cultural destination, proponents say -- an integrated, active collection of open studios and work spaces in a historic setting. It could become a must-see stop for any visitor.

"When the mayor talks about making Boston a world-class city, which it is with some of its major institutions, [he] shouldn't overlook one of its underrated institutions, which is this artists' community," says Jerry Beck. "I'm not just talking about numbers of artists. I'm talking about the quality of work."

Some of the artists' goals are already in the city's own master plan for the South Boston Waterfront. If there's one thing city officials don't want the new district to become, it's another Financial District, busy from dusk to dawn but creepier than a graveyard when the workers go home. Planners are eager to integrate living, breathing neighborhoods into the office, retail, and conventioneering mix.

Fort Point community leaders think that artists could be an obvious part of that mixed-use equation, helping to create a neighborhood that's totally authentic and original. "Neighborhood character is a combination of a diversity of income levels and cultures and backgrounds," says Steve Hollinger. "That is not something that can be bought."

But there's worry that the South Boston Waterfront, when it's built, won't live up to the plans to integrate commercial and residential landscapes. "Have the actual plans complied with the overarching goal of creating a neighborhood down there?" asks State Senator Stephen Lynch (D-South Boston). "There are some indications that we're straying from that."

For the time being, Fort Point artists feel more anxious than reassured by what they hear (and don't hear) from City Hall. The absence of a chief for the city's largest planning agency, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, doesn't help. BRA head Tom O'Brien left this fall following a scandal over a staff member's purchase of an apartment designated for low-income tenants; whoever replaces him could play a critical role in saving the artists' community or, on the flip side, wiping it out altogether. "All eyes are going to be on who they select," says Hollinger. "It will be a major indicator of whether or not our neighborhood is going to survive."

Meanwhile, Esther Kaplan, Menino's "arts czar," has been busy interviewing people and compiling a status report on cultural affairs for the entire city. Kaplan's report, which is due this month, is unlikely to contain any silver bullets for the preservation of the Fort Point community, but she believes it will provide a much-needed articulation of the city's cultural vision. "There are lots of ways that the city can and, I believe, will work to support and nurture and develop artists in our city," Kaplan says. "That's what the cultural-planning process is about."

Another question is what role Boston's larger cultural institutions can play in fighting for the Fort Point arts community. What would happen, for example, if the Museum of Fine Arts were to push for protection of the neighborhood? Or how about the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), which is now set to build a new home on the Fan Pier?

Fort Point artists aren't holding their breath. Boston's art world is a hyper-competitive place, with many institutions jockeying for the favor of the same politicians and funding sources. It's rare that one group stumps for another. You don't get a lot of that we're-all-in-this-boat-together feeling. (If anything, in fact, the news of the ICA's move has made Fort Point artists even more nervous -- they're fearful that the city, viewing the new ICA as its official gesture toward the arts community, will leave the rest of the waterfront district to the claws of developers.)

Still, the artists are not about to abandon hope.

"Yes, we're all angry; yes, we're all nervous," says Jerry Beck. "The question is, how do you use your anger constructively?"

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Which leads us back to Dennis Sagwitz and his friends at 17 Stillings Street. Sagwitz, too, isn't giving up just yet, even though his tenancy has fewer than 30 days to go. He's burning up his fax line and pager sending information about Stillings Street to every reporter and city official he can find. There's a fundraising party planned for Saturday, December 11.

Sagwitz looks around his second-floor space. It's a testament to one person's creativity; you won't find another place like it in the city. He's thrown thousands of dollars of his own money -- and more in his own time and effort -- into making it a comfortable place to live and work. But it's likely that a few months from now, it will be gone, making way for more office workers and more SUVs.

A half-dozen or so of the Stillings Street artists are expected to move to another Boston Wharf Company warehouse on
A Street. But Sagwitz and many others are still looking. He thinks there's a remote possibility he and his neighbors could get a temporary extension to stay in Fort Point. If not, there's talk of moving to open spaces in Chinatown, JP, or Brighton. Chaining himself to the building when the wrecking ball comes? Sagwitz smiles. He won't rule that out, either. This is, after all, home. And that's what home is like these days for Fort Point artists.

"We're at the point," Sagwitz says, "where we have nothing to lose."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com