Business & Tech
Chase Park Warehouses, risen from the kudzu, is a vibrant arts district
Once abandoned and forgotten, a restored warehouse district offers art studios, galleries, dance space, small local businesses, cafes and more.
It’s a typical weekday afternoon at the Chase Park Warehouses on Tracy Street: a dog walker crosses the parking lot shared with the cement factory, making her way to the section of residential condos. A young man leaves on a motorcycle, passing by Little Cuckoo, a café known for its homemade chocolates; minutes later, someone else arrives on his scooter, slowing down as he approaches the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art. A train rumbles down the tracks.
Stay long enough, and you might see a photo shoot or fashion show on the sidewalk, fire jugglers practicing poi, a mustachioed unicyclist rolling to and fro or any number of trapeze artists wandering the sidewalks.
“As a historic preservationist, I think this kind of adaptive reuse is the best thing about Athens,” says Melissa Roberts, director of Canopy Studio, a trapeze and aerial dance studio located next door to ATHICA and Floorspace in the district. “This kind of development certainly happens more in larger cities, but Athens is such a creative community, so it doesn't surprise me. There’s always bureaucratic red tape, but sometimes things just go well and keep getting better. Chase Park is definitely one of those projects.”
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It’s hard to believe that this bustling arts district was once empty and abandoned for around 40 years.
Records are scarce, but the warehouses were built in the early 1900s and used as cotton storage, says Sandi Turner, Athens-Clarke County public information officer. The first time the buildings appear on Sanborn fire insurance maps, which were produced every five years, was 1913, says John Kissane, administrator of Hands on Athens.
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That year, the warehouses consisted of the Atlantic Compress Company Cotton Warehouse & Compress, Georgia Phospate Company Dry Mixed Fertilizers and the Hardeman Phinizy Cotton Warehouse. By 1918, the Georgia Phosphate Company had changed to the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company, which is on the 1926 map along with the Southeastern Compress & Warehouse Company (formerly the Atlantic Compress Company) and the Atlantic Ice & Coal Company. The last Sandborn map for Athens was made in 1950; Atlantic Ice & Coal was still there, but it appears that the Gulf Atlantic Warehouse Company Cotton Warehouses owned the entire complex.
Around this time, Turner says, at least one fire damaged the warehouses, which were soon completely abandoned.
And then, in 2001, realtors began considering the complex as a 17-acre tract that could be used as condominiums for contractors. John Thomas, broker for Athenstown Properties, remembers looking at the site.
All that was visible was "a tiny piece of silver poking out through the kudzu," he says. "The only way to get inside was squeezing through a loose piece of siding....We had no idea (the warehouses) were even there, it was so overgrown."
Indeed, the buildings were so covered with kudzu that city planners did not know the warehouses still existed; one official had to drive to the site to be convinced, remembers Turner, who lives with her husband Chris Wyrick at the warehouses, where they own Mercury Artists in Residence, a series of studios.
But interest was growing in the area, primarily from FiveArt, Inc, a group of arts supporters and investors who became interested in revitalizing the area. The group—the late Donald Keyes, former curator of paintings at the Georgia Museum of Art, who died in 2007; Keyes’ wife, Valerie Aldridge; her son, Trent Aldridge; and Marc Lipson and Ellen Climo, a married couple who moved away in 2005, selling their shares to another married couple, architect and artist Linda Henneman and Mitchell Rothstein, a University of Georgia math professor and pianist—wanted to make an arts district, complete with affordable artists’ studios, says Valerie Aldridge.
FiveArt knew that Lizzie Zucker Saltz, now director of ATHICA, was looking for gallery space. Thomas knew that Canopy founder Susan Murphy wanted to build a trapeze studio. After a week or so of kudzu clearing, Saltz and Murphy looked at their prospective new homes when the warehouses were still raw, dark, untouched.
“I saw it before it even had a cement floor—a big pile of dirt,” laughs Saltz.
“What a dismal, dirty, falling-apart space it was,” recalls Murphy. “Leaky, decaying roof, asphalt floor, dark—there were no skylights—rough, dilapidated beams. I immediately thought, ‘This can not be possible!’”
But both Saltz and Murphy saw the potential. FiveArt offered to subsidize ATHICA’s rent; local architects Jennifer Bloomer and Robert Segrest produced a pro bono design for Canopy, full of light—and height, with a raised roof. Murphy’s husband, Don Carson, led construction work at Canopy himself; Murphy’s trapeze students (full disclosure: this writer included) volunteered hours raking gravel outside, painting walls, staining cement flooring and other tasks.
Both Canopy and ATHICA opened in the summer of 2002. ATHICA’s first show was “Raw Womyn." Canopy opened with an aerial performance featuring Serenity and Elsie Smith, former Cirque du Soleil performers who would later start the New England School for Circus Arts.
At the time, artists Andy Nasisse and Mary Engel had studio space in the warehouses, but the area otherwise remained empty. Still, people began flocking to ATHICA and Canopy. ATHICA continues to attract around 800 visitors to each exhibit and around 3,000 a year, while Canopy routinely sells 640 seats per performance on a 4-show weekend.
Canopy and ATHICA created a neighborly precedent for the area out of necessity: sharing walls means that noise travels, forcing the studios to schedule performances in an accommodating way. That friendliness was adopted by the studios, galleries, condo residents and other small businesses that soon established themselves there.
And word continues to get around.
Rebecca Almy brought her cloth diaper and green parenting-focused store, The Natural Baby, to Chase Park in January, inspired by the location and convenience for her customers.
“It’s a really neat mix of businesses, very eclectic,” she says. “It’s been a good fit for us. Many of the businesses are owned by young people, which is really great.”
“When we first started our project, my husband Chris and I were hacking at weeds over ten feet tall and wondering if we'd ever be able to give people sure-fire directions to get there,” says Turner. “Now, we have foot traffic, neighbors and an awesome little cafe. We joke that we never really have to leave the warehouse—everything we need is there now.”
Henneman compares Chase Park to the crude, creative artists’ studios in late 1970s, early 1980s Soho in New York City, before the area became “Disney-ized, filled with franchises,” she says. In Athens, the warehouses are “a place to watch,” she says. “It’s a community with its own character, a very artistic, creative character.”
Henneman notes that the economy of the last few years has “sort of frozen (the warehouses) in place.” Even so, there are events on the way: in August, ATHICA will host its inaugural Mystery Triennial, an exhibit and fundraiser devoted to Athens’ top artists, whose identities will be revealed to purchasers when they buy the art, and to the public at the end of the show. Meanwhile, Canopy is planning a major performance to celebrate its 10th birthday.
“In the beginning it was kind of desolate and scrubby,” says Saltz. “Now we’ve got landscaping and it’s more civilized with more people over here. It feels like it’s becoming more like warehouse districts in other cities. It’s a good feeling….We’ve really built something very valuable in town that’s very vital.”
“It has been amazing and wonderful to see the growth,” says Murphy. “Now when I visit, it feels like it has a life of its own. It almost feels like a strange new place, very different than what we started with, but still maintaining a communal and innovative spirit.”
What’s at Chase Park Warehouses?
ATHICA
Canopy Studio
Mercury AIR (Artists in Residence):
Little Cuckoo Chocolates
Charley Seagraves, painter
Mary Beth Tawfik, quilter
David Hale and Kris Davidson, art studio
The Natural Baby
Al Blackmon, house painter
Wild Woman Studio
