If art is viewed as an economic activity, then business is very good for Kingston landlord Mike Piazza, who over the last eight years has acquired three historic factory buildings and turned them into havens for artists.
And now, county economic development officials are seeking to position Kingston, the first capital of New York, as the first choice for artists leaving New York City for cheaper accommodations.
“From our perspective, every artist is essentially a small business,” said Melinda S. Beuf, director of Retention and Project Management for the Ulster County Development Corp. “So we work with them to help them develop as a business.”
While such efforts may seem like penny stock in a global economy, Beuf cites a report by the National Governors Association on the role art plays as a seed for state economies not just through attracting tourists and other traditional measures of activity, but through the role arts play in nurturing a creative economic sector.
“States recognize that a competitive edge and a creative edge go hand-in-hand to support economic prosperity,” reads the 2009 report “Arts and the Economy,” which offers a sort of handbook on how municipal and state officials can nurture what is increasingly being referred to as “the creative economy.”
According to a recent survey cited in Crain”™s Business report, more than 10 percent of the artists currently working in New York City said they would be relocating outside the city, due to the costs in the wake of the Great Recession. “New York City”™s artist exodus could be Ulster County and the Hudson Valley”™s boon,” she said.
Kingston landlord Mike Piazza could be described as ahead of the curve. In 2002, he used help from the Empire Zone program to buy and renovate the 60,000-square-foot Shirt Factory. He paid $600,000 for the four-story industrial building, which required an additional half-million dollars to renovate into 60 units for artist studios and residences, featuring high ceilings, large windows, hardwood floors and the ability to practice one”™s craft at any hour.
The endeavor has paid off so well, Piazza has bought two additional buildings, without any help from economic development officials ”“the Brush Factory in 2005 and the Pajama Factory in 2006. Both were built around 1915 and have the same high-ceiling and big-window ambiance of the Shirt Factory.
Piazza, a commercial real estate broker for nearly three decades, said he favors artists for a very practical reason. “Artists are good tenants, they get involved in their space and take care of it.” And with little publicity or official help, he said, Kingston is becoming known as an artist colony, being listed by Business Week two years ago as one of the top five cities in the country for artists.
He said his investments in the three buildings have paid off and he is purposely creating artist communities in the facilities, even changing the name of the Brush Factory to the Kingston Media Factory, to celebrate the opening of an evolving multimedia dinner theater on the ground floor.
Artists in the Shirt Factory come from Amsterdam to Hawaii, Piazza said.
“I was looking for a space for a while,” said painter Alan Stamper, in his bright and spacious fourth-floor studio at the Shirt Factory, after relocating from Hawaii last year. He said New York City was too expensive and said he did a national search and found “Kingston had the best spaces and is friendly to artists.”
While there may be little money for traditional economic development work, Piazza said the city and the region could help itself with a simple bit of targeted marketing
“Kingston could do more in the way of marketing the city and the area as an artists”™ haven,” he said. “Art in the Hudson Valley is an industry much as manufacturing once was. It creates tourism and brings people to spend in the local economy. It”™s a big industry and they should treat it like that.”
