Just coincidentally, I finally saw the chilling German film The Lives of Others late last month, when I was in the midst of talking with—or trying to talk with—residents of what used to be called the Acme Artists’ Community. Maybe the movie colored my worldview, but attempts at communication with residents at what’s now the Bloomingdale Arts Building suggest an environment with parallels to life in East Germany. On West Bloomingdale, as in East Berlin while the wall still stood, you can find the cautious, urgent sharing of a few facts, the fearful concern for anonymity, the angry outburst followed by a perplexing silence, the weariness that gives way to submission.
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When it opened four years ago this collection of condominiums and a few commercial spaces, carved out of a rehabbed factory at 2418 W. Bloomingdale, was heralded as the first city-subsidized live/work space for artists in Chicago. Developed by the Near Northwest Arts Council (NNWAC) in collaboration with the people who would live there, it offered what sounded like an ideal environment: handsome, adaptable spaces built around a communal courtyard—a “village in the city” where poets, painters, and musicians would pursue their art and raise their families. It promised refuge from the gentrification that pushes artists out of one cheap neighborhood after another and instant equity, thanks to forgivable down-payment loans from the city. But it never fully delivered on its promises, and according to residents who didn’t want to be quoted, questions about problems have routinely met with hostility.
Despite the campaign to keep the problems under wraps, you can hop on the city’s Chicago Artists Resource website and get a pretty good sense of them. A click on the “Space” option there brings up an article by NNWAC head Laura Weathered, who’s built a reputation as an authority on artists’ housing and sounds like she might be gearing up for another subsidized live/work project. Weathered offers advice on what it takes to build an artists’ community—including the use of NNWAC, “with a history of democratic control, willing to work every angle possible and the tenacity of a pit bull.” She mentions rewards, like “spontaneous dinner parties” and “a garden that is a bit of paradise in the city,” but not much about what happens when everything doesn’t go as planned. The only allusion to the project’s troubled history is a caveat: “Not every artist can live with community control, and shared decision making requires patience and mutual respect. Building community is not easy.”
