MetaChat - Another approach to holiday shopping!

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19 November 2006

Another approach to holiday shopping! Yesterday we spent the afternoon at the Open Studios at Salmon Falls Mill, one of New England's many 1800s mill complexes that has been rehabbed into artists' studios. It's lovely to see some of the "dark Satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution, places of harsh labor under what would now be thought inhumane conditions, are now are excellent places to nourish your creative side, fill your eyes with beautiful and interesting things, and meet artists as well as pick up original gifties.→[More:]

I went to the Button Factory Open Studios here in Portsmouth last year, and loved it. This year I heard great word-of-mouth on the Salmon Falls place, so we went there.

It's a classic mill -- massive, four stories + basement, brickwork and ironwork and creaky wood floors and 20' ceilings. You walk down long halls and step through the doors, each one containing a different artist's world and expressing his or her vision. Some are like classic ateliers, redolent of wet oil paint and featuring velvety couches draped with throws and drying-out palettes everywhere, like stepping into a Renoir. Some are sandalwood-scented. Some are full of round, rich pottery forms. Some are hyper, bright, and Kieth-Haringy. Some are staid and dignified, gilt-framed museum halls. Every new studio was a surprise and most were delights. Looking out the large windows rewarded you with views of a rushing, tumbling river four floors below, the former power source for the mill, sluicing through turbine gates that no longer turn.

They put out refreshments -- cheese, wine, candy, fruit, cookies. There were occasional music and dance performances and craft tables for kids (and big kids like us). We saw some amazing woodworkers and furniture builders, and a huge router machine that die-cuts wood with a computer program. They gave us free die-cut stars made from Masonite. We also drank some free Chai and Apple Ginger tea, learned about copper etching, and ran into some friends. LT is a fine companion for exploring arty places with, comparing notes on what we liked (and didn't!), and spending imaginary tens-of-thousands of dollars on stunning original paintings and handmade furniture. Though we were not spending the big bucks, there was artwork available -- original paintings, jewelry, pottery! -- for as little as $10, and lots of postcards and notecards for much less. What a great way to spend a day. I like the idea of supporting artists by giving their work as presents.

post by: Miko at: 15:18 | 6 comments

Wonderful post, Miko. I grew up in Connecticut among abandoned mills, but moved away before anyone thought of anything useful to do with them.

We are flying home on Tuesday for an extended Thanksgiving in Connecticut--any suggestions of mill/artists complexes we should visit in Ct, RI, eastern MA or southern NH?

posted by LarryC 19 November | 16:51

Fantastic. And I do mean that... But I feel fairly bitter and cynical about "artist spaces" generally, as the typical arc is that creative people find run-down but interesting areas to populate (always with cheap rent, because the artists they are starving), which then makes those areas interesting to the rich but dull, who move in and push the artists out.

Learning their historical lessons, canny urban developers now take over huge, obsolete industrial spaces, creating "affordable artist studios" (usually accompanied by some sort of superficial attempt at a "program" to promote said artists) to artificially kickstart that whole cycle... and etc. Once the development gets an aura of panache, it's only the most commercially successful artists who can ever afford to live/work there.

Not dumping on what you've posted about, Miko - just one of my personal bugaboos, so please forgive me!

Not many people know this, but the French Quarter in New Orleans was just a ghetto for the most part of the 20th century, and the only thing that saved those historical buildings from being razed and replaced by nasty '60s and '70s architecture when the rest of the city was being built up was that nobody cared enough about that area to "modernize". Meanwhile, the artists and writers and other crazy people had the whole place to themselves for a few decades... enough to make it interesting enough to start ruining it. But a huge block of historically precious buildings were saved by neglect, and 'til the '70s and '80s, the only people who treasured and inhabited them were the homeboys and impoverished creatives who lived there.

posted by taz 19 November | 17:45

* Actually, it was in the '70s when the first preservationists started making noise about intended atrocities to that area; it was still affordable to a great many artist types into the '80s.

posted by taz 19 November | 17:58

I thought it was really cool because they don't really do this kind of stuff in Seattle - the whole renovate a mill for artists thing. At least not that I know about.

Some of the art was meh, some was worth buying. But yeah, Miko and I were total chatterboxes the whole thing, insatiably curious about each room.

Great way to spend a day.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 19 November | 18:03

The possibly unique thing about the New England mills, Taz, is that there are so damned many of them occupying so many 100s of thousands of square feet that it is hard to conceive of any scheme of redevelopment that will eventually yuppify all of them. Two summers back we stopped in Lowell and Lawrence Massachusetts where there are seemingly hundreds of huge huge old mills with little or nothing going on. Yet they are nearly all solid brick buildings, many with elaborate facades and clock towers and other cool features, fronting rivers and canals. They are raw industrial spaces, too huge to be converted into living space or anything else without huge infusions of capital. And if you drop a few tens of millions to convert one, what do you have? A converted building surrounded by block after block of dark abandoned mills. It is a hard problem in urban redevelopment.

posted by LarryC 19 November | 22:38

the only thing that saved those historical buildings from being razed and replaced by nasty '60s and '70s architecture when the rest of the city was being built up was that nobody cared enough about that area to "modernize"

Yes, Taz, I agree with you about that general dynamic. In fact, in preservation there's an axiom -- "poverty is the friend of preservation." Just about all historic neighborhoods survived to their day of restoration only because no one was interested in them for quite some time. The Cape, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard; Rockport, MA, cKey West, Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, and my own city -- all would have fallen under the urban redevelopment bulldozer had anyone ever thought (prior to artists' interest) that there was economic value in the property.

Still, what LarryC says is true -- there are mills all around us, hundreds of them, sitting vacant right now. Many are in areas where there is really little development interest. They're too far from urban centers to be bedroom communities, and too lacking in cultural attractions or housing infrastructure to be attractive places to live. This is a good reuse of the mills, because investment can be quite minimal (some drywall, basically).

posted by Miko 19 November | 22:57

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