Art gallery helps Downtown revitalization by finding Future Tenants for vacant stores

An abandoned building wastes away Downtown, without a single renter to fill its empty walls. Somewhere in the same city, a business just wants to find a place to call home. They’re perfect for each other — they just need someone to set them up. An abandoned building wastes away Downtown, without a single renter to fill its empty walls. Somewhere in the same city, a business just wants to find a place to call home. They’re perfect for each other — they just need someone to set them up.

That’s what makes Future Tenant Art Space more about matchmaking than art. The gallery, managed by Carnegie Mellon students in the Master of Arts Management program, finds derelict buildings and uses them to draw not only the eyes of art aficionados, but also those of potential tenants.

Built into the concept of Future Tenant is the paradox that if the gallery succeeds, it will be homeless. The gallery specifically chooses neglected buildings to house its art, in the hope that it will attract businesses to the real estate. And when businesses settle into formerly rundown areas, they become an economic and cultural boon to a once dilapidated Downtown neighborhood; and the gallery moves on to another  building to work its matchmaking magic.

So far, the Future Tenant program has successfully found a business to occupy one Downtown building. And now that the scheduled demolition of its current Penn Avenue home is delayed because of the tepid economic climate, Future Tenant has more time to find a match for the storefront.

Jerry Coltin, director of the CMU Master of Arts Management program, called the Crazy Mocha that now occupies Future Tenant’s original location at 801 Liberty Ave. a great proof of the concept. “It really showcases the urban revitalization and the viable real estate interest and income possible in the district that could help revive the Downtown area,” he said.

Of the many boutiques, restaurants and other upscale establishments that have begun to flourish in the district in years past, Coltin speculates that the Crazy Mocha is probably one of the businesses closest to the hearts of the employees of the Trust on a personal level. With their offices at 803 Liberty Ave., they needed a place to get a good caffeine fix without straying too far from the Penn-Liberty corridor — just like the art and theater patrons they worked to keep in the district.

Thirty years ago, the main streets of Pittsburgh were a cornucopia of undesirability — littered with peep shows, gutted buildings and a smattering of decaying theaters left over from the golden age at the turn of the century. Today those same streets are crowded with urban life and home to a vibrant cultural community, drawing upwards of 10,000 visitors for events like gallery crawls.

Pitt history instructor Carmen DiCiccio attributed this radical economic and cultural revival to one man: Henry John Heinz, better known as Jack Heinz, and the organization he founded — The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. “Jack Heinz was the one person that transformed that area from a red-light district to what it is today. He’s the engine that drove that transformation, the mover and shaker of getting that done,” he said.

According to DiCiccio, the city that Andrew Carnegie once called a “cultural wasteland,” the H.J. Heinz Co. CEO saw as having the potential to become a world-class destination for art and culture. He said that Heinz hoped to harness art’s power as a catalyst for urban revitalization and economic development.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Trust began accumulating undeveloped real estate to further Jack Heinz’s mission of bringing arts to the central district, eventually accumulating more than 1,000,000 square feet of property. Theaters like Loew’s Penn Theatre, the Stanley Theatre and the Fulton Theatre — now Heinz Hall, the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts and the Byham Theater respectively — survived being demolished during the economic downturn in the 1950s and 1960s and provided the infrastructure for the revival, but other properties in the area didn’t boast enough grandiose architecture or rich history to make them attractive to renovation. The Cultural Trust was faced with the challenge of how to showcase these spaces — how to make everyone, especially potential investors, see the potential they saw.

Trust President Kevin McMahon had an idea for how to kickstart the transformation: partner with arts organizations to curate visual exhibits in these spaces, both to enhance their aesthetic appeal and generate more attention for the area, creating more reasons for Pittsburghers to linger after work or take in a performance. The Trust would provide the space and the organizations would furnish the budget and the creativity.

One organization McMahon approached was Carnegie Mellon’s Masters of Arts Management graduate program. “We looked at each other and tried not to act too excited. We said, ‘Yeah, that might be an interesting idea,’” Jerry Coltin, director of the MAM program, said of his and his colleagues’ reaction to McMahon’s proposal. The initiative has since evolved into to a full-fledged gallery and multidiscipline performance space designed to make whatever space it occupies more attractive for a ‘future tenant.’ And that lead to the gallery’s name. The plan was for students to run every aspect of the gallery, and even the gallery’s business plan and original bylaws were developed as a senior thesis project by MAM students. Future Tenant displays art chosen by its directors, who  predominantly select local artists.

The Future Tenant initiative gives benefits to the Carnegie Mellon graduate students involved as well. It has provided an opportunity for them to see the theory they learned in their classes carried out in practice by allowing them to independently run a gallery and thus acquire skill sets difficult to attain through internships and coursework. Coltin said he has occasionally had to remind students that the gallery is not “a laboratory in the sense of Frankenstein’s monster. It’s a chance to take concepts learned in the classroom and see them fully realized, not only through theory, but through execution.”

While there is an advisory board in place to support the student staff members, all the responsibilities and tasks of operating the gallery fall upon the students. Katy Peace, a second-year graduate student who currently co-directs the gallery along with fellow second-year student Erin Gough, said that as far as directing the gallery goes, “Some of it is fancy and important … and some of it is cleaning the bathroom.” She said that becoming an executive director of an established gallery is always a long and arduous task, making experience in gallery management extremely hard to come by. She said her work at Future Tenant will put her in a better position for future job searches.

Jamie Leonardi, a Carnegie Mellon MAM alum and former Future Tenant director, said that after the experience of directing the gallery, other arts jobs she took on were “smooth sailing.” She chose the CMU program specifically for the opportunity to work at Future Tenant, which she said was instrumental in helping her learn the problem-solving skills necessary to run a gallery and understand the amount of work that goes into mounting an exhibit. Leonardi is currently a gallery assistant at the Morgan Contemporary Glass Gallery in Shadyside.

Trust efforts like Future Tenant and other arts initiatives have proved to deliver benefits with perhaps even more of an impact on the community than originally envisioned. Coltin said he has seen a drastic shift over the past four or five years in reversing the brain-drain phenomena — students leaving the city upon graduation.

He noted that an increasing number of graduates have chosen to stay, and he attributes the change to the city’s thriving cultural scene and projects like Future Tenant that appeal to the younger demographic.

Coltin explained that often cheap real estate for studios and inexpensive costs of living draw artists to undesirable areas, which they then transform with their presence.

“There are economic seeds where there are artists, so incentives for pioneers who are willing to move into spaces that maybe aren’t gentrified or have a lot of resources can start the ball rolling,” he said.

Leonardi expressed thoughts along similar lines.

“With the low cost of living, it’s a really great place for artists to live, where they can work on their trade and manage to have a half-decent quality of life — which you really can’t [get] in L.A. or New York. Compared to cities our size, the cultural capital we have here [in Pittsburgh] is ridiculous.”