Still, the city wants artists so badly that it will do almost anything to make it possible. That includes, according to Emmons, approaching property owners to ask if they would consider renting all or part of their spaces.
ARTISTS PROBABLY HAVE only a short time to enjoy such wooing. In a turnabout that's sweet to a city long mocked by Seattleites, Tacoma is on the cusp of change. Seeking new ground after Seattle, developers have discovered the city. Several arts-related projects are ongoing, including a Museum of Glass to open in 2002 and an adjoining pedestrian walkway designed by local boy and glass-blowing guru Dale Chihuly. Further spurring development, the city recently put in an extensive fiber-optic network, making the city the most wired in the country. Light rail is on the way, and a commuter rail line to Seattle is ramping up.
Alice Wheeler
Destination Tacoma: Artist Rob Jones pays $500 a month for 7,000 square feet in the City of Destiny.
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The reach of development is so far that painter and scenester-hater Randy McCoy thinks you can't talk about one central location for artists anymore. "You're going to find artists scattered in little pockets of beat-up buildings," he says.
He's found his hideaway in Ballard, which has enough of an artists' community to hold a monthly art walk on second Saturdays. Many of the neighborhood's artists are based in two adjacent buildings. McCoy holds a master lease on the space he has divided into 26 work-only studios. One building is a rambling former aluminum factory, which still houses a machine shop on the ground floor. The other, harboring an edgy gallery called the Fuzzy Engine, a descendent of Project 416, served as offices for a fish-processing company.
Neither building is in great shape, and the rent is commensurate. It's such a good deal that McCoy doesn't want to specify how much he pays. "Part of the problem is that when people find out where your space is, they want to come and pay your landlord more money," says the spiky-haired 32-year-old while pacing about his cold, spartan studio. McCoy is wary of opening it up for the neighborhood art walk, for fear invaders will come "scheming."
Yet he believes his days there are numbered anyway. "The people in suits with clipboards have been walking around," he says. He expects it will be three years at most before the buildings will be sold and redeveloped.
If that happens, he says, he's going to forget about looking for the next cheap neighborhood—he doesn't think it will exist. Instead, he's going to build a backyard studio at his West Seattle house. Like most artists, he says, he'll have to give up the dream of a separate studio in an artistic community, a refuge simultaneously offering inspiration and peace and quiet. As McCoy sees it, the scenesters will have won.
