Vital Signs

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Choosing Battles in the Warehouse District

by James Reel

ontrary to popular belief, plans to revitalize the Warehouse District have not gone into cold storage. Even if nobody has yet plowed into the asphalt in preparation for creating a vibrant live-work area among the decrepit old buildings that have been adopted by working artists, plenty of schemes and notions are flying back and forth among planners, stakeholders and city officials.

“I think the pace is about right,” says ceramic artist David Aguirre of Dinnerware Gallery. Aguirre sits on the board of the Warehouse Arts Management Organization, or WAMO. “I’ve been exposed to more of the planning phase than a lot of people. It isn’t very sexy stuff, but a lot of activity has been happening. Change is coming; artists have done enough preparing for the change that we’re ready to go into it with our partners, the City and Rio Nuevo.”

Says Anne-Marie Russell, executive director of MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, “On the one hand, the slow pace has allowed an arts district to be created. Artists took advantage of opportunities and revitalized a blighted area. But now that whole project needs to be taken to the next step, which is to ensure permanence. Slow is OK because democracy is slow; you’re just asking a lot of people if the plans are OK. But now it’s time to move a little bit faster.”

Had things moved faster a few years ago, there wouldn’t be a Warehouse District today. Two decades ago the Arizona Department of Transportation acquired the leaky old warehouses in the vicinity of Toole Avenue and the railroad tracks, intending to bulldoze them to make way for the final mile of the Barraza-Aviation Parkway. When construction of that last mile to the freeway stalled for financial and bureaucratic reasons, artists were allowed to lease the warehouses from one year to the next, knowing that they’d eventually be booted out when road construction resumed.

But the longer the artists stayed, the more imperative it seemed to let them remain. The precise path of the final mile is still unresolved—except that it will certainly be rerouted to save as much of the prime warehouse area as possible.

“The four alternatives we’re looking at now all do abandon the Barraza footprint south of the tracks,” says Rio Nuevo’s Karen Leone.

“In the big picture, the Warehouse District is still a transportation issue, when you look at the specifics of the disposition of the land,” admits Leone. “But getting past that, the part that’s exciting is that we do have a master plan that creates elements of an arts district.”

Says Aguirre, “Promoting the Warehouse District master plan is a big issue, and making it an active, living document and making it work and fit in with the new TIF [Tax Increment Financing] district that was just signed by Governor Napolitano, and making it fit in with Rio Nuevo and the Downtown mix, that’s what WAMO’s going to be refocusing on. The master plan was made and applauded, but then it was set up on the shelf. We want to bring it off the shelf and make sure everybody Downtown knows what it says.”

The trouble with making the master plan a living document is that so much in the Warehouse District has been uncertain, pending construction of the roadway. Where would it go? Which warehouses would have to be torn down? How would the roadway affect access to the district, and movement and parking within it? Are some of the warehouses so run-down that they should be demolished no matter where the road goes? And, whatever buildings fall or stand, what—if anything—should the Warehouse District shelter besides artists creating and selling their work?

“We’re always trying to push an extension of a roadway rather than develop the area and have the roadway support that,” complains Aguirre. “The road shouldn’t be the centerpiece; it should support other development opportunities.”

Aguirre notes the irony of the situation: “All these buildings were purchased for a highway, and then the artists made an arts district out of it, and our rents go back into the highway fund—so artists have been making highways here for 20 years.”

Interestingly, the artists could end up in charge of the buildings within a few months. Perhaps by June 2007 the City could approve a citizen advisory committee’s recommendation for the final alignment of the roadway. With that approval, ADOT can divest itself of the warehouses that are no longer in its way. WAMO president Charles Alexander, of Chax Press, hopes the City will buy the buildings, and turn them over to WAMO for arts-use management under 50-year leases. “It’s a huge worry what will happen to them,” he says, “but we’re trying to make it into a huge opportunity.”

As for demolishing buildings that are not in whatever path the new road will eventually take, many of the Warehouse District denizens would like to see as many old structures preserved as possible. People are still grumbling about the city’s decision to tear down one warehouse a few months ago when it calculated that it would cost three times as much to repair it as it would to demolish it. Some maintain that the warehouse came down essentially to make roadwork along Stone Avenue easier; there’s even a conspiracy theory floating around that the City deliberately caused the building to develop debilitating cracks to justify getting rid of it.

MOCA’s Anne-Marie Russell takes one of the more pragmatic positions. “I’m trained as a historian, and I’ve worked very hard in a lot of different places in the realm of historic preservation,” she says. “There are a couple of grand misunderstandings about this. An older preservation model was about individual buildings, designating them historically important or not important; to receive designation, they arbitrarily had to be 30 or 50 or 75 years old, and that’s absurd. The latest thinking about historic preservation has to do not with individual buildings but with streetscapes, the fabric of a city block. This new thinking is a better way to approach decision-making. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s good and it needs to be saved, but sometimes something that’s old does convey a different kind of information about a place that’s important.”

Russell thinks that appropriate and sensitive development can happen only with a partnership of “good design professionals, good government, a good developer and a good money person. I think this can happen here. We’ve planted the seeds for it.

“In the Warehouse District we’ve got a number of buildings that are worth our efforts, and others that it would be OK if it was necessary that they be torn down, or if they were torn down with good purpose to have something else happen there. But I don’t want to see more buildings get torn down to become parking lots. There’s so much infill opportunity that we shouldn’t even be talking about that.”

Says Aguirre, “You’ve got to choose your battles. There’s got to be a flexible line between preservation and development. A number of us are trying to find where that line is, and each case is different.”

Aguirre points out that if we’re going to talk about history, we have to recognize that we’re making history now, and there’s a place for the new alongside the historic, if they can be made to fit together.

Russell concurs. “There are often strong voices with regard to Tucson’s ‘heritage,’ and in some people’s minds to honor heritage means something has to be a two-story building with a red clay tile roof,” she says. “But people should talk about Tucson’s heritage and history in their full complexity. This place is not just about Spanish colonial expansion; it’s about being the oldest inhabited place in the country, involving Native Americans and Chinese populations and transplants from all around the globe. There are a lot of different notions of heritage around here. And history is happening now; it wasn’t just fossilized in 1692. We’re part of creating history now. There’s a sense that we have to lock things in the past. Do we hate our moment so much that we can’t create something of our moment?”

So, what would be a good purpose for new construction in the district? That’s been a matter of some contention. Some artists would prefer the Warehouse District to be primarily a place by, for and about artists. Other interested parties, artists among them, advocate more mixed use.

Aguirre says, “We have to think about how all these public assets can best be used. There’s plenty of space for developers, and there’s space for the existing artists. With the new TIF funding, we should get a line on the budget to, one, preserve the warehouses and, two, make sure the artists can stay here. Then let’s do some great stuff on the adjacent properties.”

How should that mix be balanced? WAMO president Charles Alexander has been especially concerned that the proposed Town West condominium development, El Mirador, at Franklin Street and Stone Avenue, will dilute the artistic nature of the district. The project would involve ground-floor retail space and 140 condos in six-, 10- and 12-story towers.

Alexander set out his concerns in a personal blog post last month.

“The working heart of the district is the Steinfeld Warehouse and 6th Street studios,” Alexander wrote. “This is where more artists and arts organizations create their work than in any other similar conjunction of buildings. Chax Press is here, the Alamo Woodworkers Collective is here, Dinnerware Art Gallery is here, dance companies are here, youth organizations are here; it’s impressive, not only for Tucson—it would be impressive anywhere. That’s the heart.

“The brain, at the other end of the district, is MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. … Heart & brain. Connecting them is the bloodline, the Toole Avenue corridor of artists’ warehouses, performance spaces, educational organizations in the arts. It’s lively there, as blood should be…. The final connecting point in this bloodline would have been this parcel that is now to be a 12-story condominium project. What a missed opportunity! This could have been the piece of the puzzle, as envisioned in the Master Plan, to ignite the district and give it a place for outdoor art and performances, coffeehouse and restaurant for gatherings, retail that supports the arts, and a place where more artists could live at affordable prices. Well, it isn’t going to happen.”

Town West later presented a revised plan for El Mirador, opening its courtyard and amphitheater more “publicly” on Franklin, and proposing to build artists’ lofts and a gallery behind the Steinfeld’s Warehouse, across Ninth Avenue. Alexander wasn’t mollified.

“WAMO is really interested in preserving the identity of the district as the Historic Warehouse Arts District,” he says now. “We are concerned about any developments that seem to do something of a very different character in the neighborhood. We also realize that economic development plays a role in the district’s staying vital, too, and we want to support those things when we can. But our priorities are the preservation of the historic character of the district, preservation of artists’ spaces in the district, and even expansion of those spaces.”

Rio Nuevo’s Karen Leone says, “Something sustainable has to happen there. Hopefully you would be looking at a diverse type of retail that would include dining opportunities, and it would all contribute to making a healthy artistic destination.”

She adds that this will require a mix of market-driven development as well as subsidized space for emerging artists, but “I do not see it as practical that the City will step in to subsidize them. There will have to be a more creative identification of a revenue stream.”

So, despite all the plans and anticipation, many things in the Warehouse District remain uncertain, as they have for 20 years. But one positive and highly visible development is sure to get started within the next three to 12 months, depending on the financing. An art walk will begin construction along Toole between Sixth and Stone, initially at the corner close to MOCA.

“It’ll have a curvy sidewalk, trees and benches and shade, public art, and gathering spaces for conversation and for carts to sell goods,” Alexander says enthusiastically. “Eventually it will be a site for festivals, with a side area for small concerts and performances.”

Within a couple of years, of course, people like Alexander, Russell and Aguirre want something in the Warehouse District even more important but less tangible than a pretty street.

Says Alexander, “I’d like to have some security, so we can just settle down and make art here.”

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