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The Master Planning of Art

by James Reel • Illustrations by Donovan White

alking along Toole Avenue in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), arts development consultant John Laswick strides into a lane of sparse traffic as if the sidewalk had already been extended 15 feet into the street.

“We’re going to encourage a street life that needs more than this asphalt to be interesting,” he says. “There’s amazing stuff within the walls of these warehouses, but nobody knows about it. We need to pull it out into the street where people can see it.

“Look at this parking lot,” he says, marching toward an asphalt wasteland next to MOCA. “If they’d gone with the original Barraza-Aviation Parkway plan, this would’ve been a 16-foot-deep traffic sewer. But we can put six sculptures and 20 trees in here, and turn this into a little refuge, something beautiful that can help link the art nodes at either end of Toole.”

Laswick doesn’t intend those trees to stay there permanently; if the Warehouse Arts District Master Plan that’s just been finalized comes to fruition, within a few years there could be new buildings here, connecting the old artist-rented warehouses with multiuse properties where artists could live, work and sell their wares. That’s just part of the redevelopment effort being proposed by Corky Poster of Poster Frost Associates under contract to the Tucson Arts District Partnership (TADP), with the collaboration of area artists, various city agencies and other downtown stakeholders.

It’s a plan that, even on the most optimistic schedule, cannot be fully realized for several more years. But during the past few months, the process of drawing up the plan has given working artists hope for what was once downtown’s most derelict district; it has given city officials a more realistic idea of what sort of redevelopment (and rent) the artists can accommodate, and tolerate; and it has revived the almost-dormant Tucson Arts Coalition into a bold collective with big ideas about how the Warehouse District should be managed.

One element of the plan likely to begin moving forward immediately, according to Poster, is the recommendation to abandon the current alignment of Barraza-Aviation, originally a freeway that would have sliced right through the district. The plan suggests moving the project north; artists and residents are hoping it will be abandoned entirely, or reduced to a project that merely widens a few streets and alters some intersections.

Says Laswick, “By the time they make a final decision on Aviation and free up this land, you’re looking at three or four years, maybe two at best. So we’ve got two years of playtime here. We can start doing some short-term stuff here now. The idea is to make the short-term plan a preview of the long-term plan, then make the process fixed and let the content change however it needs to.”

Getting the process in place and creating an entity to manage it is the other element that Poster predicts can be developed by midsummer. “Mediation is too strong a word, but a facilitated process is about to begin to structure this artist-tenant-centered management organization,” he says. “All of the players interested in this will be around the table. I think everyone is feeling very collaborative and positive about the opportunity to work that out. Everything else depends on that.”

This group, according to the plan, would manage the tenant selection process, leases, the rent levels and structure, daily operations and short-term and long-term capital improvement policies for the state-owned/city-operated warehouse buildings. Initially, the Tucson Arts District Partnership put itself forward as the logical entity to take on a major part of that responsibility. But with many artists casting their allegiance to the Tucson Arts Coalition (TAC), and with TADP’s continued funding a sensitive issue, Partnership director Vera Uyehara these days is talking about coalition-building.

“I don’t think there is one entity that can do it all,” she says. “I think one of the opportunities we have is to allow different entities that have different strengths to be a part of the whole decision-making process. In our original report—and I was the one who wrote the section on governance options—there are all kinds of scenarios. Basically, I think that if someone has an interest, if there’s a sector of the stakeholders that wants to be a part of it, they should be.”

TAC is trying to position itself as the best organization for the job, overseeing a management unit that would in effect be a TAC committee. According to Laswick, the group’s secretary, it wouldn’t be necessary to invent a new entity or go shopping for people with relevant experience, or leave decisions in the hands of possibly uncomprehending City officials. “On our board, we’ve got over 80 years of experience between us in this district,” he says. “We can run it as a community-based organization faster, cheaper and cooler than the City can.”

As a model of what can be done on the fly and on the cheap, Laswick points to TAC’s newly opened Flash Gallery at 312 E. Congress St. Over the course of a couple of weeks, TAC got permission to take over most of the ground-floor spaces in the Rialto block until serious renovation of the buildings begins. They slapped on some paint, knocked holes in a couple of walls, and almost instantly started showing new work by local artists.

Laswick thinks TAC can similarly make immediate short-term improvements along Toole with “fun, inexpensive things” like murals on highly visible walls and small-scale commissions. “For most of these artists, $1,000 is a big commission,” he says. “They could do a lot with that kind of money. So we’re saying to the City, subcontract with us. We can get it done fast, and we know the artists.

“We’re not trying to run this thing,” he adds. “We’re just trying to coordinate it. Art and warehouses are inherently anarchic. It can’t be controlled; it can just be adjusted.”

But before adjustments can be made, there has to be something to adjust. The master plan is ambitious and written in a way that will not allow the entire project to collapse if one part of it doesn’t work or is thrown off schedule, but many of those steps can be impeded by what may politely be termed “challenges.”

Rerouting Barraza-Aviation was initially the big challenge, but, as mentioned, that long-gestating freeway is widely expected to be less of a threat, particularly once a study committee releases a new report on the project in July.

The warehouses themselves are not in the best shape. Because the Arizona Department of Transportation has been expecting to tear them down to make way for the freeway, artists have limped along with 30-day leases since the early 1990s. “We can’t take a 30-day lease to the bank to get loans to make the improvements we want,” says David Aguirre, a ceramic sculptor and Warehouse District property manager. Some tenants, like Steven Eye of Solar Culture, have managed to invest tens of thousands of dollars into the buildings, fixing leaky roofs and other structural problems. But other warehouses need extensive work. Worst of all, perhaps, is 35 E. Toole, which is contaminated with what seems to be diesel fuel from an underground tank. The City has a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up, but work has not yet begun.

More mundane repairs elsewhere will cost money, too, and it’s not entirely clear where those dollars will come from. The City has promised $300,000 for critical repairs, but will that be enough?

“The high costs projected for renovating some of these buildings are inflated,” says Aguirre, the man some artists tout as the best prepared to oversee the Warehouse District. “Some of the funding is coming from grants, and there’s a loan from the Pima Association of Governments. Those are more like starter kits for what needs to be done here. I’m looking forward to when we get into the high costs of contractors, trying what other cities have done: agreeing to have contractors employ artists to do simple things like drywalling or painting, so the artists get a little extra money and costs can be kept down for everybody.”

But what about the rent artists will end up paying? Last year, when the City threatened to raise rents, artists revolted. Things are calm now, but more negotiations are coming.

“It’ll be a wonderful exercise when we talk about economics and the rules by which certain artists can and cannot rent certain spaces,” dryly predicts Robert Peterson, principal planner with the City Dept. of Transportation. “Connected with that is the lease rates; most of the artists are leasing properties at extraordinarily reasonable rates. How long those should hold and when and how to raise them and what to do with the additional revenue, all these are important questions that need to be asked and responded to.”

“I think the artists have always been scared of the rent skyrocketing if it did turn into a retail district,” says Jessica McCain, who used to have a studio on Toole. “How to keep the rent down is the big struggle; if everybody wants to be there, the rents go up and it becomes another Laguna Beach or Santa Fe where nobody can afford to be there anymore.”

And what about the proposed city-county court complex south of Toole, east of Stone? Not a problem. It’s already on the master plan, and people like Laswick are happy about its Homeland Security-imposed setback, a landscaping opportunity.

Much of the new arts-related construction hinges on the availability of parcels that will take some strong lawyering to liberate. “The master plan proposes lots of new and exciting development on land owned by the State of Arizona and transferred to the City,” says Poster, “but unless the lawyers put their heads together creatively, we can’t go ahead with any of the parcel recommendations. We’re looking at two different bureaucracies constrained by different charters and constitutions.”

Then, of course, there’s the eternal problem of parking. If the infill plans go through, about 400 parking spaces will be taken out of inventory, according to ParkWise coordinator Chris Leighton. “From a personal philosophical standpoint, I think there are better uses for those areas than surface lots,” he says. “But I have some concerns over how the plan is being worded. It talks about not putting parking uses in the Warehouse District. Now, if the plan refers only to those two lots on Toole, I don’t think there’s a huge concern. But north of the tracks, there are concerns; the mixed-use facilities will need parking. It seems to me a parking structure could blend well into the Warehouse District, just maybe not in those couple of blocks.”

Poster insists that the people who live and work in the multi-use spaces will have their own parking, but he notes that visitors to the area will have to rely on whatever results from some future parking plan for Downtown as a whole.

Some disagreement is simmering over exactly what should be joining the artist workspaces in the area. Planners and city officials are always excited these days about mixing arts, retail and residential uses Downtown. Warehouse District artists wouldn’t mind a few cafés, but they tend not to want the flavor of the area diluted by a lot of non-arts retailers. But not every artist advocates a purely artistic environment.

Jessica McCain moved her McCain Studios off Toole to the east side three years ago because she couldn’t support herself on her Downtown sales alone; there wasn’t yet a critical mass of galleries and other retailers drawing customers to the area. McCain’s view is that the presence of the RISE Inc. facility (affiliated with COPE Behavioral Services and other behavioral health agencies) at the corner of Toole and 7th Avenue was not compatible with her objectives as an artist interested in attracting customers. “My opinion as a professional artist is there’s not enough focus on treating the Arts District as a business district for artists,” she says. “I’ve always thought nonprofits and businesses don’t mix. It’s unfair for someone like me trying to conduct an art business next to a nonprofit whose rents are extremely low and who doesn’t rely on the retail-buying public to survive.”

McCain would like to see Toole reserved for professional artists selling from their warehouses, with a requirement that they open their doors to the public. “A lot of artists in the Warehouse District are just kind of hiding down there, and their doors are closed and you can’t get into their spaces,” she says.

There should also be an aggressive push, she says, to recruit something other than individual artists. “The Scottsdale Art School is looking to branch out in Tucson, and the Arts District needs to move mountains to get a real professional art school like that Downtown, and foundries and glassblowers like Philabaum. Arts districts have always flourished around art schools; people come and hang out, you get eateries, everything takes off. They need to start with big cornerstones, not teeny people like me.”

Poster’s plan does, in fact, include the possibility for an art school, at the northwest corner of Franklin and Stone, a block that could include a mix of uses, including housing and performance space.

One problem inhibiting such a coherent development of the Warehouse District is the lack of an overall cultural plan for the city.

“We need a cultural plan that sets out the big vision,” says Mary Anne Ingenthron, executive director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council. “The vision can then inform public policy and the allocation of resources, and it can also help in decision-making down the road when we’re trying to assess one project against another project.”

TPAC has requested $120,000 a year for the next two years from the City and County to put together a comprehensive cultural plan that would take into consideration Downtown, public art, neighborhood arts, education, cultural tourism and economic development.

“We need the mayor and council to put forth a cultural policy plan so they can’t just say, ‘Arts are good,’ then leave City staff stuck because there’s not infrastructure to support it,” says Anne-Marie Russell, executive director of MOCA. “The arts are a big draw, both for quality of life and for economic development. There needs to be mission and vision and a strategic plan, and those are three different operating levels, from most conceptual to most logistical.”

John Laswick, for one, isn’t waiting for a grand plan. He’s pacing the sidewalk outside MOCA, plotting small, quick improvements that will draw people into the Warehouse District now.

“I want to put lights and twirling (art) here,” he says at the northwest corner of Sixth and Toole. “Something to grab the attention of people driving by. Something that says, ‘This is the Warehouse District, and this is where cool art is.’”