Monday, October 04, 2004, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
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Old Rainier Brewery on
tap to be artists' home address
By Lisa Heyamoto
Seattle Times staff reporter
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From a rusty chair on the rooftop
of the old Rainier Brewery, Conan Gale can see the future.
Forget about those squat, gray industrial buildings fanning
out to the waterfront, and that dusty construction site across Airport Way
South. And ignore, for the moment, the aging brewery itself. Hollow and sort of
clammy, it's undeniably seen better days.
Try instead, Gale says, to see what will be, the vision he
has staked everything on helping to create: This peripheral neighborhood will
become a colorful and vibrant destination, with the brewery as its jewel.
Reborn as the Arts Brewery, it will be Seattle's largest and most ambitious
artist community.
A year after local company Ariel Development bought the
iconic building from the Benaroya Co. for nearly $6 million, a project some
thought was next to impossible is quietly taking shape.
The city 10 days ago gave its final approval. Last week,
Gale, as site manager, moved in to the first of 70 affordable artist lofts
reserved for "live/work" tenants — residents who will make
their living out of their homes.
The dark warrens of the building have been gutted of old
machinery; the old wooden floors have been buffed to a gallery shine; windows
for the live/work lofts have been carved from the outer walls.
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Leases have already been signed for 90 percent of the
space, and the first of the tenants could be in as soon as January.
The Jam Box recording studio, for example, plans to build
35 rehearsal rooms, a performance area and a bar inside the building. Quilombo
do Queimado, which teaches the Brazilian martial art known as Capoeira, will
turn the old brew-kettle room into a two-tiered practice room.
Height vision
Perhaps the most visible tenant, Vertical World, will
likely turn the brewery's signature smokestack into a rock-climbing tower.
Ariel hired Gale, 35, as project site manager, an
intentionally vague title that covers his job as consultant and liaison to the
arts community, live/work advocate, permit seeker, tech support, leasing agent
and the guy with defibrillators when things start to lag.
Years of navigating the vulnerable and often underground
world of the Seattle artist live/work scene have prepared him for this, and he
has hung both his reputation and his wildest dreams on making it happen.
"This is a magic trick," he says. "This is a
rabbit in a hat. Only this is a real rabbit, and a real hat."
When he was 20, Gale used to ride his motorcycle past the
Rainier Brewery on the way to his first artist loft, fantasizing about what the
rambling, oddly yellow building might become.
"But I never told a soul," he said. "It was
too far-fetched."
At that time, the landmark brewery by Interstate 5 was
still producing around a million barrels of beer a year. It would be 10 years
before Rainier's parent company, Stroh's, would announce it was selling the
building and moving brewing to Tumwater. The trademark 'R' would take its place
on the museum circuit with the rest of the relics.
From beer to coffee
After The Benaroya Co. bought the site, Tully's Coffee
moved its headquarters and neon green 'T' to the brewery in 1999. Tully's will
continue to lease a third of the property from Ariel, which bought the building
for $5.9 million in July 2003.
Though the Arts Brewery won't really get going for another
few months, there has been plenty of activity there the past year.
At least once a month, Gale organizes events in the
brewery's courtyard as a way to raise money and the project's profile.
While the rest of the building remains lifeless, one corner
is transformed each week — into a political-art convention or an
Ethiopian soccer festival or a Mexican Dia de los Muertos blowout, with
costumed revelers and pulsing house music, flashing lights and functional art
serving as furniture. Twenty bucks gets you in the door, drinks not included.
It would normally be Gale's nature to accept any group that
wants to use the space, but he's learning to check his instincts in light of
the stakes. That's why he checks the background of each organization before
saying yes, and why he swears he won't, but always does, stay at the events
until 6 a.m. to make sure everything goes smoothly. There's no way he'd be able
to sleep anyway.
"Maybe people don't understand, but they don't have an
$11 million project riding in it," he said. "I just can't put this project
at risk."
Maybe he's working up a premature ulcer trying to pull this
off, but a dream job's a dream job, no matter how late the nights.
It took Gale just an hour to both create and talk his way
into this particular dream job, on a sunny afternoon last summer on a
walk-through with Ariel and some artist friends, hearing about a remarkable
idea for the first time.
Gale has never been burdened by such woes as a stifling job
or a car payment. He's a filmmaker, writer, found-object sculptor and techie
who gets anywhere he needs to go on a fleet of vintage motorcycles that are
forever breaking down.
"I can live on next to nothing," he says.
"I've always felt that if a job puts your self-respect in question, then
you don't need it."
After a childhood in the Madison Park/Leschi area, he moved
to a loft in Georgetown, where he began cultivating his taste for vast, open
space and the myriad ways to fill it.
Community college wasn't really his thing, so he struck out
on his own making rather obscure, low-budget films, forming his own company,
Social Eyes Production, in 1989.
He eventually fell into a new occupation as a live/work
consultant, helping other artists secure their homes. Tired of being booted
from loft to loft himself, he started reading up on his rights. He became
well-versed in building laws, fire code, seismic requirements and other legal
details of live/work life. The most important option for a tenant, he says, is
to buy the space.
He had picked up some of his knowledge while working for his
dad, architect Fulton Gale. The rest he taught himself.
"Conan has sort of prided himself on
self-education," said Kaleb Hagen-Kerr, a fellow artist who worked with
Gale on his own live/work situation. "He thought that one of the saddest
things about artists in work/loft spaces is that they are not educated on the
law. What rights they have, they don't know, and they're easily bullied."
66 Bell
Gale experienced the thrill and the heartbreak of his
live/work education in the crazy, creative world of 66 Bell, one of Belltown's
best-known artist communities in the 1990s.
It was an extraordinary and prolific time for him, where he
and his neighbors would hold whole-building art openings, where he learned to
do a back flip on the 14-foot swing in his loft, and where no one minded if you
happened to meet your muse while the rest of world slept.
"Those were the golden years," he said.
"Something happens when you live in this kind of environment. When you
live without a lot of the common restraints, you see more options."
Gale and the other artists at 66 Bell were eventually
priced out of the building by Belltown's redevelopment and forced to the city's
margins yet again.
These days, affordable urban space is hard to come by, said
Cathryn Vandenbrink, a member of the Seattle Arts Commission and the driving
force behind the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts in Pioneer Square, a $16.5
million, 50-unit project that opened last month. The brewery, she said, could
help fill a still-crucial need.
She and Gale, she said, "have the same goal of
providing affordable space for people. This is one more great opportunity for
artists."
With two ambitious projects on the horizon, there's
something that feels an awful lot like momentum, many in the community say. And
given that few can speak of the widespread evictions of the 1990s without
bitterness, it's an especially welcome change.
Some people think Gale is a punk. Others call him a
sell-out.
Here's a guy trying to straddle two worlds, telling
authority types that artists are vital to the community, while rattling off
fire-code rules to his peers.
His position can sometimes be awkward, his colleagues say,
but Gale has a flair for the tightrope.
"His adaptability and his agility comes in
handy," said Hagen-Kerr. "I'm sure he steps on toes, but his heart's
in it. He really wants to reach a point in time where artists aren't just the
shock troops of gentrification."
Ammo against doubters
The Arts Brewery is emerging from perhaps its most
vulnerable stage as the dirty work is done and the tangible change begins. With
the city's approval of the project, there is one more I-told-you-so to show
doubters. Which is not to say Gale got a wink of sleep until he had it in hand.
"So much of what I do is imagine things," he
said. "And then force the world to make it real."
Soon, new life will creep into the familiar building, and
Gale's tenancy will lend the long-deserted place a bit of home.
"After this, there's no more risk involved," he
said. "There is no question in my mind that this will come to full
fruition."
In tribute to this more comfortable phase of the project,
he hung a banner on the building's side to announce Arts Brewery to the world.
The city made him remove it for safety reasons, but that doesn't matter. He
still has that rusty rooftop chair and a heck of a view.
Lisa Heyamoto: 206-464-2149 or lheyamoto@seattletimes.com
Copyright ? 2007 The Seattle Times Company