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The Warehouse Issue
People & Places
David Aguirre
What are the strengths and experiences you bring to the Warehouse District?
I bring the artist’s sensibility to artspace management. For the last 15 years, I’ve worked with artists, providing studio, exhibition and performance spaces, coordinating events, and striving for more exposure for artists.
I see a need for a meeting point between artists’ needs and the City; I am ready, reluctantly, to help fill the gap. I bring an artist’s vision together with the vision of building a sustainable, viable arts community. I want to help generate enthusiasm for the district, for artists, the warehouses and artists’ expanding presence.
 What is your occupation?
I am a ceramic sculptor. I create mainly figurative artworks with animal themes, such as birds, desert wildlife and desert fauna. I begin with an idea that adapts through a dialogue with the clay. I use a low-fire technique with surface embellishment of paint or glazes.
My studio is in the Steinfeld Warehouse, a building constructed a century ago. My space is high-ceilinged, with a skylight. It’s a warehouse, so I can make a mess. Trains go by nearly every 30 minutes, adding an ambience that I enjoy. I surround myself with inspiration in the form of books and Mexican folk art, and other nearby artists.
What is a typical day for you in the Warehouse District?
I talk to artists, almost daily, about studio space. These artists are moving to Tucson from cities where they have been priced out of the market. I try to help them find space. I try to facilitate between artists and warehouse issues, assisting with lease agreements, whether from a landlord’s point of view or the artist’s. I frequently deal with the condition of old buildings, provide advice about fire and safety concerns, artists’ products and hazards, and interface with building professionals. Afternoons are for making art when possible. The studio environment inspires and exhibit deadlines motivate. Sometimes, my afternoons are taken up with arts-related organizational commitments. I am currently creating work, being inspired by the idea of dancing figures, for an exhibit at Obsidian Gallery opening May 16th.
What do you consider to be the ideal relationship to the City?
I see the City as a partner and collaborator with the goal of creating a cool, creative arts production zone in the Warehouse District. I see the artists and the City moving the Warehouse District Plan into action. We are studying models for artist/City partnerships to make it work.
—Mary Ellen Wooten
John Laswick
What are the strengths and experiences you bring to the Warehouse District?
I have an understanding of “surreal estate” development - innovative types of development such as artspaces - and have a background in traditional commercial real estate. I helped develop the Shane House, Julian Drew Building, Toole Shed, and 6th Street Studios as part of T.A.C. and would like to see the T.A.C. manage the Warehouse District. I am currently working on the Rialto Building, turning part of a downtown wasteland into beautiful prime space. The space on Congress Street is a window on the Warehouse District, taking artworks hidden behind the walls of the warehouses to a space where people can see in.
What is your occupation?
I am a consultant. The mission of my work is to build better, more livable communities through a proven process of community-based planning, comprehensive design and collaborative implementation. I have a background in redevelopment. In 1977, I saw my first artspace project in New York City. My job with HUD (Housing and Urban Development) took me to Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Chicago. I became more familiar with development of artspaces as a CDBG representative for HUD in Minneapolis.
What is a typical day for you in the Warehouse District?
I am very busy working with artists, building owners, builders, and city staff and having the most fun I have ever had. The current issues and focus are about managing the district, the Warehouse District Master Plan and recommendations for the Warehouse District. I am very involved in dealing with positive people.
What do you consider to be the ideal relationship to the City?
The ideal relationship is that the city serves its citizens, and provides the community with what they need. The Warehouse District needs to be a private sector-driven initiative.
The Rialto Building proves what can be done without the City. In a short time, Flash Gallery, Club La Nuit and Coffee á TAC are up and running. The goal is to have a for profit business, an interactive space oriented to a late night, 24-hour crowd. The spaces can be used in various ways, as an internet café, performance space for music, and poetry readings, creating a nexus of what is best in Tucson. The primary goal for the space is to effloresce on the outside what is already on the inside of the Warehouse District.
—Mary Ellen Wooten
 Small Planet Bakery
Pumpernickel, whole wheat, marble, white and rye, the list tops about forty different breads, seven flavors of granola, and four kinds of nuts, yet Chris French and Lucy Mitchell, co-owners of Small Planet Bakery say baking wasn’t always their thing. In fact, they admit that they knew nothing about it when they started as a collective in the early 70’s, baking for Tucson Co-op Warehouse that was housed in the same building at the time. Since incorporating in 1975 however, Small Planet Bakery seems to keep a pretty good aroma coming from its oven.
Today the bakery produces four to five hundred loaves a day on bread-making days for primarily retail and restaurant sales to Bison Witches Bar & Deli, Time Market, Ike’s and 17th Street Market, to name a few.
“Business hasn’t always been easy, though”, says French, “it’s a continual challenge to run on such a shoestring budget. I’ve had myself on the same salary since the late 80’s. We’ve had to fight the battle too. The City has taken away some of our parking and the challenges like the Union Pacific Railroad charging us $100 a year because we encroach 10 inches on their property isn’t really conducive to encouraging small business. We do however produce a very good bread, a good product.”
The possible future alignment of Barraza-Aviation Parkway may threaten the existence of the building itself, as French and Mitchell could be bought out of their building, only to see it leveled. No official word has come down from the top, since plans for the parkway’s last mile are not final, but Mitchell says “it would be horrendous to move”.
 Originally an ice house, the building burned down in the late 1920s. It was rebuilt in 1931 for Buxton-Smith Mercantile, paid for by the sale of the cork that lined the basement’s ice storage facility.
Minus a few health code modifications and a closed-in dock, the building stands today in most of its original glory. The maple floors and the Douglas Fur truss system at the ceiling are as solid as the day they were crafted and the original Otis elevator has been preserved. “The State wanted to take the elevator out”, says French, “but we made the proper safety modifications and have it inspected once a year. Now the inspectors love coming here because it’s like a field trip to an elevator museum.”
Although Small Planet Bakery isn’t the typical artist workspace so prevalent in the district, the bakery does sublet its basement to Jim Blair, who designs and builds sets for The Invisible Theatre Company. “See, we do have some art here”, says French, “besides, we make art for other peoples’ palates.”
Small Planet Bakery is located at 411 N. 7th Ave. and can be reached by calling 884-9313. The public is welcome and tours are available for students.
—Dave Olsen
Sangin, Derailed
by Diane Daly
One March evening I watched David Sygall take a photo of himself…or someone’s idea of him anyway.
The drawing of Sygall’s face was sketched simply in thin white lines of paint., complete with wire-rimmed glasses and lines reflecting his fifty-something years. To the right of the sketch of Sygall was a sketch of his Mercedes Benz SUV. And between the images, in pretty script, the anonymous artist had written this: “Luxury is an asshole.”
The sketch was on a splintered section of floor at a cavernous warehouse named for the import company it once housed: Sangin. Located at the fuming northern mouth of the 6th Avenue train underpass, Sangin was the newest warehouse to join the District in providing painters, sculptors, and performers with cheap studio space. Sygall, a photographer and real-estate developer, was still the leaseholder on that March evening, and since September 2003 he had been keeping the warehouse stocked with the young bohemians who paid most of the rent, who appeared in his photos, and who every day grew more determined to push him out of the picture.
In seven months, Sangin went from pure vision to pure volatility. Now, with the management of the entire district dangling before various arts organizations and officials, this failed relationship between a leaseholder and his tenants should have every District stakeholder straining to learn from Sygall’s mistakes…if they were Sygall’s mistakes.
 Sygall never planned a warehouse full of artists. He’d assumed the lease of Sangin in early 2003 to use as his photography studio; inclusion of other tenants had been a strategy to lower his rent. But Sangin proved too utilitarian and close to the train to attract even most low-income renters, and six months into his lease, he says, “I was desperate.” Finally, a handful of artists including Ryan Eggleston of Sugarbush set out to pursue Eggleston’s vision of Sangin as an all ages performance venue, and to find renters for its studio spaces as well. The shows and new tenants paid some rent and lent Sygall colorful photographic subjects, so by September 2003 Eggleston’s vision was Sangin’s plan--with limitations.
Production of the venue’s events was stressful for Eggleston and fellow band member Dimitri Manos, between negotiating details with anxiety-prone Sygall and controlling the crowds that came for shows. “Everyone has a different idea of how to party,” Manos says. “So you’ve gotta be a cop, you’ve gotta collect money, you’ve gotta pay the band, you’ve gotta have a sound system.”
Eggleston says he used to block off all but designated venue space and the bathroom with rabbit fence, making the shows relatively easy to control. But by December “it just got looser and looser. People were all over the building. There wasn’t a good unit, there was me and Dimitri and a couple other stragglers. I can’t work that way. But--” he notes dourly, “Sygall didn’t seem to care that there were people all over the building either.” During Sangin’s lingerie party in December, Sygall was snapping photos. But afterward, Eggleston says, “Sygall freaked out.”
“I’d kind of had it at that point,” Eggleston remembers. Sugarbush maintained a studio space at Sangin until March 2004, but vacated their unofficial roles as landlord-tenant liasons by January. The problem was, no one took their place, and Sygall’s “whining” as a landlord had already been established as a threat, however easily tuned out, to the culture and aesthetic of Sangin’s tenants. Artists, transients, travellers, punkers, partiers, graffitiers: Dawn and Kee Copps of Sugarbush used various terms to describe who was populating Sangin by early 2004. But one term was used repeatedly to describe Sangin’s atmosphere by then: “sketchy.”
Those still renting by March 1st did sense “sketchiness” in the air, but they blamed it on Sygall. “We had a good thing here and he destroyed it,” one told me. The tenant described plans for a community darkroom and a non-profit organization, plans left unrealized, he felt, because of Sygall’s fear of code violations. The renters began privately seeking help from Tucson Arts Coalition and other outside parties to make the warehouse what they termed”one hundred percent Sangin” instead of “fifty percent Sygall.” Meanwhile, Sygall was “so upset,” in his words, about the chaos at Sangin that his girlfriend went down there and ended up in a scuffle with a renter. Around the same time, Sygall enlisted the police to “weed out the transients,” but the blurred line between transient and tenant made even that effort fall flat.
It was, in the words of a tenant, “a race to see who can oust the other,” but Sygall was blind to it until he was about to lose. He’d posted a sign stating “ONLY TENANTS IN HERE AS OF TODAY,” and someone had written between the lines, “David sign Sangin over to us you don’t want it anyway!” When Sygall emailed me his photo of the sign he said, “See, they are actually looking out for me.” When he discovered the unflattering drawing in the doorway, Sygall asked the tenants who were standing nearby, “Hey, is that the Mercedes?” No one answered. Then he looked at the skilled rendering of his own face and said, “Who’s that supposed to be?”
David Sygall agreed to give up the lease of Sangin in April 2004, after a tense meeting in which he stood on the east of the Sangin loading dock and tenants and their supporters gathered on the west end. Eerily lit by the setting sun, the small sillhouette of David Sygall ended the first chapter of the Arts District’s newest warehouse.
The irony is that in the next chapter of Sangin, the tenants will lose as well. The City owns the building, and when word of the tempest over Sangin reached City officials, they made an on-site visit and decided to shut the place down this month.
That luxury was no one’s but theirs all along.
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