A blank canvas for artistic endeavors

A GROUP OF prospective tenants tours the building at Conley's Wharf that the Partnership for Creative Industrial Space is leasing out. The former coal-gasification facility is being turned into offices and studios for artists and designers. /
A GROUP OF prospective tenants tours the building at Conley's Wharf that the Partnership for Creative Industrial Space is leasing out. The former coal-gasification facility is being turned into offices and studios for artists and designers. /

It has been two and a half weeks since the Partnership for Creative Industrial Space began seriously marketing Conley’s Wharf at 200 Allens Ave., and in the first 10 days alone, the nonprofit received 86 phone calls about the building.
PCIS has given at least nine tours of the 30,000 square feet spread out over three floors for which it holds a 10-year master lease. Five tenants have signed leases and are moving in this month, said Erik Bright, PCIS project director. And more are in the process of signing leases.
“Right now we have the building about 30-percent occupied,” he said.
Things are going well, considering the fact that the nonprofit has been forced to lease the space three times already. A delay of more than one year in getting its certificate of occupancy forced some potential tenants to back out of commitments. The lesson for Bright:
you can’t market what you don’t have.
“There are so many projects going on in the city,” Bright said. “Like most construction projects, they get delayed.”
This is the first project for which PCIS has purchased a master lease in order to re-lease the space at affordable rates — $5 to $9 per square foot – to artists, creative startups and arts-related nonprofits.
Based on Bright’s research, it’s not a business model seen often in the rest of the country A local developer and attorney, Patrick Conley, owns the building, which he purchased for $101,000 at a tax sale in 2001, and PCIS is leasing all but a gallery and a function hall. (Originally a coal gasification facility, it has variously been as a warehouse and an auto repair and tire shop over the years.) Conley said he charged PCIS $6 per square foot “more to be a patron of the arts” than to make a profit. He knows he could have leased the space for twice as much on the real estate market, he said.
The average rental rate for commercial space in Providence is around
$15 per square foot, Bright said.
Asked how he was able to afford leasing the space to PCIS so cheaply, Conley said he and his wife have “done very well in our other real estate ventures. We feel the remainder of that site gives us enough money to be comfortable. … You don’t have to squeeze every penny out of a project.”
Conley also has recouped about $6.4 million of the $8.1 million he’s spent rehabbing the mill building by qualifying for federal and state historic tax credits.
It’s a win for PCIS as well, because it enables the nonprofit to implement its mission, which is to facilitate access to affordable space for artists and creative businesses.
“Our goal is to prove this model [works] … and try to replicate it throughout the city,” said Lisa Carnevale, director of the two-year-old nonprofit, using the success of the current project as leverage for more investments.
“We hope the success of it shows our capabilities and, in turn, people and organizations will be more likely to support us,” Carnevale said.
That said, there are benefits to Conley as well. Not having to worry about keeping the building full of tenants is one. Receiving tax stabilization for property taxes from the city is perhaps the more lucrative benefit.
Receiving the break – which drops property taxes by 50 percent and keeps them there through 2011 – allows Conley to lease the space at about $6 per square foot, and thus gives PCIS the ability to maintain its below-market rate project.
“Part of the reason for the tax stabilization was to foster the creative economy that can be housed there, to support the stabilization of affordable space for artists,” said City Councilman Luis Aponte, who sponsored the tax stabilization deal approved at a council meeting Jan. 11. “The collateral effect is really supporting the first major creative reuse of space in that area.”
Tom Deller, Providence director of planning and development, said Conley’s Wharf is the kind of development the city hopes will start moving into the Allens Avenue corridor now dominated by strip clubs, asphalt manufacturers and other industrial uses.
The city hopes the area will attract retail and residential developments from downtown all the way to Thurbers Avenue, he said. It is one of the few untapped areas in the city with the potential to expand the tax base through new development.
Conley’s Wharf is part of a larger development called Providence Piers, which spans nine acres. Conley purchased the land for $2.3 million. He hopes to develop it into a 400-slip marina, a hotel, an 800-car parking garage and a condominium complex.
Conley said he recognizes that artists often spearhead the transformation of an area, and that is one reason he developed the mill building first.
Conley is waiting for the R.I. Department of Environmental Management to approve a remediation plan for the remainder of the site. He said that is what’s slowing the development of the rest of Providence Piers.
To further foster the arts in that area, Conley donated a 1,400-square-foot gallery facing Allens Avenue on the first floor of Conley’s Wharf. It’s for artists in the building to show their work.
The fourth floor contains a conference room that can be rented by anyone in the building or in the outside community. The same floor houses a function center that will be run by Blackstone Caterers.
The goal is to make Conley’s Wharf a destination, Conley said.
Bright and Carnevale want the site to become a destination as well.
That’s why PCIS applied for a loan from the R.I. Economic Development Corporation to build out half of a studio on the first floor into a glass blowing workshop that glass blowers could rent for blocks of time. It’s much like The Steel Yard, which allows artists to rent studio time and equipment for the industrial arts and was a model for PCIS’ plans for Conley’s Wharf.
Though there are only 15 studios in total, ranging from 733 to 3,575 square feet, Carnevale said. Some could be split up into smaller spaces for individual artists, small nonprofits or creative startups in graphic design, interior design or industrial design.
“The idea of the entire building is it is an incubator for creative small businesses,” she said, adding that the building could handle as many as 50 tenants.
There are a lot of creative businesses coming out of Rhode Island School of Design, Johnson & Wales University and Brown University, Bright noted.
“It’s the one thing we have that’s so unique in our economy,” she said. “People might make things cheaper in other countries, but we are still entrepreneurs, we still are inventors. … As long as we stay ahead in terms of design and invention, we can stay ahead in the global economy.”

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