The Prequel
(detailing adventures that led to our purchasing TE18 in 2012)
Written by E. Stephen
Katherine Bergeron (aka Katrina) and I have both been involved in the arts for most of our lives.
Specifically, we've both been involved in the arts around Boston since the 1990s.
In the early 2000s, our paths converged in NYC.
We first met officially in the fall of 2003, became inseparable, and relocated back to Massachusetts together. Katrina moved into an underground art and performance space in Allston MA named "Pan-9" that had been a publicly-clandestine base of operations for Boston artists for nearly15 years, and which I had been involved with since the mid 1990s.
On December 29th 2006, a fire tore through Pan-9.
The fire was caused by electrical problems which the landlord had repeatedly refused to fix.
The building was eventually repaired, but the 2000 sq ft space that had been Pan-9, where audiences of hundreds had once gathered to see live performances, was subdivided into 4 separate condo units.
Immediately after the fire, we began to seek a new space where art and people could converge. We visited dozens of rental spaces over the next two years, but there was nothing suitable in our price range.
During those same years, we also had countless meetings with city development councils and non-profit foundations, as we looked for ways subsidize an arts space in a rented commercial space.
Potential opportunities and state resources appeared bountiful from a distance, but tangible help was always an elusive mirage. The bottom line always seemed to be there was no help available to anyone who didn't already have a pre-existing multi-million dollar budget.
During those 3 years following the fire, Katrina and I moved a 8 times, from one cramped temporary living space to the next.
In 2008, the housing bubble burst. Rental prices stayed high. But suddenly a glut of properties were for sale at prices such that a monthly mortgage would cost dramatically less than renting the same square footage.
At that point, as buying a property was suddenly a more affordable option, major media pundits were trumpeting the message that the housing market crash was "proof" individuals were better off renting and should avoid ever buying property.
We rightly interpreted this pundit messaging as a signal that big money was planning a mass-buy up of bargain properties, and we knew we'd have a limited window of opportunity if we ever wanted to own property ourselves.
The dream of ownership had always held a huge appeal to us.
Over the years, we'd watched numerous art galleries and performance spaces forced to close by rising rents and difficult landlords.
For the benefit of any lucky people haven’t already experienced it here are 3 facts:
1. Most artists can't afford rent anywhere "nice". So Artists rent badly maintained buildings in less desirable areas. The artists invest sweat equity, make repairs, and create arts venues.
If the arts venues survive long enough to an build audience, the neighborhood usually gentrifies, the rents skyrocket, and the artist are homeless again.
2. Most art spaces are not financially profitable. They usually exist because the people running them are constantly busting ass, and pouring their own personal resources into the venture.
3. Becoming a non-profit organization does NOT instantly guarantee a magical stream of free grant money.
Our strategy was to buy a property in the price range of a conventional residential house for us to live in, but that was also big enough for arts events. The goal was to be less dependent on external funding than if we were had to cover costs of a "living space" and an "art space" attwo separate locations. When we began Katrina had a long-term fulltime job at Harvard University, and we both had some savings, so we began the hunt to buy property.
We quickly discovered most realtors didn't return phone calls at all.
So we found a buyer's agent who seemed enthused to work with us.
But he stopped answering our calls after a few weeks.
(Much later, we learned he'd unexpectedly keeled over dead, and thus was not checking his voicemail)
Eventually we found a wonderful buyer's agent named Deborah Galiga who'd been recommended to us by other friends in the arts.
With her aid, over the next several years, we visited over a hundred different properties.
We typically spent an hour a day, every day, searching the online real estate listings for greater Boston. We searched listings based on price per sq. footage, and proximity to public transportation. Even at post-crash prices, we soon realized our only hope of finding a space large enough for both living and art was to target oddball properties at the bottom of the market.
We visited boarded up gas stations, and rickety foreclosed homes.
We visited the moldy halls of obscure fraternal orders, basements still stocked with dusty liquor bottles from the 1980s.
We visited abandoned buildings full of burned-out cars and trees growing thru the floors.
There was one apartment building we'd been told was vacant, but when we got there, the building manager acknowledged it was still fully occupied by people living in the low-income units… but not to worry (he cheerfully explained), they’d soon be evicted.
We wanted to leave then, but the building manager insisted on giving us the full tour.
He jimmied the lock to a top floor apartment with a butter knife, while whispering "a crazy lady lives here, but I don't think she's home".
We were greeted by inquisitive cats.
Paper plates heaped with decaying takeout chicken-bones covered every surface.
The ceiling was a jungle of dangling flypaper strips.
From where I stood, I saw through the open bedroom door.
The far wall of the bedroom had hundreds of metal cans carefully stacked, covering the entire wall. At first I thought it was a beer-can collection…
Then I realized the cans were aerosol bed-bug spray.
I fled the apartment, and Katrina ran with me.
After we were back in the hall, it turned out Katrina hadn't run for fear of bed bugs. She'd run because from her line of sight, she'd seen a motionless, bloated, body lying in the bed.
On the first floor of the same building, the building manager, without knocking, barged into an apartment occupied by a young mother. Despite two active toddlers, the apartment was spotlessly clean and carefully organized. The mother had a sweet, open face and apologized to us in broken English, that she hadn’t had time to prepare anything for us to eat. The building manager whispered in my ear "She doesn't know she's about to be homeless."
We left almost in tears.
There was a listing for a "10 story building - 40 thousand square feet - $100,000."
At Boston prices, we assumed the price was a misplaced decimal point, but we called anyway. The realtors told us it was no misprint, and all would be explained when we saw it.
We arrived and found a 10-story-tall windowless obelisk of crumbling white concrete.
The listing agent opened the single rusting steel portal at street level, and we realized that the sq footage was strictly conceptual.
The tower was a single, hollow shaft, 85ft tall and roughly 30ft X 40ft square.
There were no electrical or plumbing connections from the street.
No floors. No stairs.
The darkness was broken only by laser-like beams of daylight angling in from dripping louvered ventilation slots near the roof.
Seagulls circled far above us.
We stood on gravely sludge. In the shadows, ancient stalagmites of bird shit towered tall as houses.
Mummified birds lay at our feet in congealed in oily puddles.
The structure had been built to store giant blocks of ice in the days before refrigerators.
In 1910, a single giant mold had been constructed on site, and the entirety of the concrete building had been poured into place in one single pour.
It was brutal masterpiece.
I cannot think of it even now, without the opening bars of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" playing in my head. Shortly after its centennial anniversary, the mighty 1910 Icehouse was torn to the ground. I still regret not buying it. (Katrina thought it was impractical for some reason)
I visited a store-front that looked OK from outside, but the interior was a dense barrier of cobwebs. The electricity was off, and all the windows were darkened by steel shutters.
With only the light from a small flashlight, I sliced my way through layer after layer of floor-to-ceiling cobwebs full of crawling spiders.
As we ventured deeper in, I discovered the outer layers of webbing had effectively contained a massive clouds of swarming flies.
Pushing on through the buzzing, I descended to the pitch-black of the basement.
Bugs swarmed, denser and thicker, until finally I reached the heart of the ecosystem: two large, very dead, raccoons writhing with millions of maggots. The raccoons were glowing with golden light…a beam of daylight! I looked straight up and saw the rotten hole that went thru the first floor and all the way up to the roof. The raccoons must have been climbing on the roof, and then had fallen two stories straight down, to their deaths, where their bodies now nourished the entire swarming ecosystem I'd just walked through.
During a 100 degree July heat-wave, we were led on a surreally heartbreaking group-tour of an occupied multifamily house. Dozens of potential buyers and their agents jumbled through the stifling, un-air-conditioned rooms, peering into closets, discussing different eviction tactics, while the actual residents of the abode, congregated awkwardly at the periphery.
I became disoriented in the claustrophobic heat and opened a door that I thought lead back outside. Within the room, a beautiful adolescent girl sat on her bed reading a book, seemingly wearing nothing except a translucent white bed-sheet draped over her.
She silently looked back at me, with an unblinking gaze more devastating than any epithet she could have shouted. I shut the door as fast as I could... I'd had it open less than a second…
but that moment remains etched in my brain.
At one building, we were glowered at by an abutting homeowner who initially assumed we were there to buy heroin from his neighbor across the street.
(And indeed there were multiple used hypodermic needles littering the sidewalks and gutters.)
We visited one open-house which was attended by one of the most spectacularly antagonistic men I've ever met. The building itself was a sprawling series of interconnected concrete garages and workshops that had been used by woodworking shop specializing in custom parquet floors. The showroom area was floored in gorgeously idiosyncratic hardwood mosaics, The place needed repairs, but was in better shape than many sites we'd visited. |
The realtor hosting it was a pleasant fellow and Katrina and I were chatting with him, and considering putting an offer on the place when an extremely muscular gentleman wearing a bright red, skintight, tank-top swaggered in.
From his gleaming bald head, to his moustache and cigar, he was fully in character as pro-wrestling villain.
He proceed to shout a monologue where he explained that he'd owned and lived in the residential house that the abutted the woodshop for 20 years.
During that time, he'd driven 3 separate owners of the woodshop into bankruptcy.
He knew all the rules and regulations and was head of the local community board and had friends in Somerville's government and connections to the Cuban Mafia.
He'd succeeded in changing ordinances to make the street in front of the woodshop one-way to decrease traffic.
Next, he'd made all the curbside parking residential permit only.
He watched the street 24 hours day to make sure any clients of the woodshop were instantly ticketed and towed.
He'd made it illegal for any vehicle with commercial plates to drive down that street.
The owners of the shop had to park their work trucks a mile away.
If UPS and Fed EX delivery trucks drove down the street, they were fined $300 per offense. When the owner of the woodshop tried to park his car (with a non commercial license plate) in the woodshop's own garage, the neighbor found a regulation whereby the car could be impounded for being too close to the mutual property line.
He had called the police with noise complaints if anyone in the shop used power-tools.
When the woodshop owner had considered converting the workshop building into residential condos, the neighbor had passed zoning amendments to ban the property from ever being used for residential purposes.
Apparently "somebody" mysteriously kept vandalizing the woodshop.
When the previous woodshop owner installed chain-link fence and security cameras, all the fencing and cameras magically disappeared overnight and the vandalization continued.
It was now illegal for anyone to make any changes to the existing exterior structure of the woodshop without the neighbor's approval. He had successfully brought an injunction to stop them from fixing the leaking roof, and he'd also legally prevented that same damaged portion of the building from being torn down.
He'd even blocked the planting flowerbeds on the property.
By the time he was done ranting, his veins were bulging and he was soaked in sweat.
I wanted to tell the neighbor we'd already bought the woodshop and planned to use it for urban pig and rooster farming, but Katrina dragged me away before I could get myself murdered.
In Katrina's opinion, the antagonistic guy sounded exactly like the cartoon character "Strong Bad".
During the period when we were house hunting, we placed offers on about 20 different properties. Every day was a like new lottery.
Each phone call might unspool an entirely different future as we waited to hear if offers had been accepted.
There were multiple small heartbreaks as houses we'd grown fond of escaped us.
Months passed into years. As we visited location after location, the novelty of discovering mummified animals and used drug paraphernalia in unexpected locations waned.
We first noticed the listing for firehouse in early 2010, and were intrigued, but at that point the asking price was over $600,000 which was way outside our budget, but we continued to periodically check back on the listing. As other properties came and went, the price on the firehouse slowly dropped.
We nearly purchased the building for $360,000 in early 2011, but because it was an unusual property, none of the banks that had pre-approved us for financing on other offers were willing to back us. On New Year's Eve 2011, the owners verbally notified us that they'd accepted our offer of $295,000.
And a few months later, in March of 2012, we finally closed on the property.
By chance, the date for the closing also happened to be my 38th Birthday.
Katherine Bergeron (aka Katrina) and I have both been involved in the arts for most of our lives.
Specifically, we've both been involved in the arts around Boston since the 1990s.
In the early 2000s, our paths converged in NYC.
We first met officially in the fall of 2003, became inseparable, and relocated back to Massachusetts together. Katrina moved into an underground art and performance space in Allston MA named "Pan-9" that had been a publicly-clandestine base of operations for Boston artists for nearly15 years, and which I had been involved with since the mid 1990s.
On December 29th 2006, a fire tore through Pan-9.
The fire was caused by electrical problems which the landlord had repeatedly refused to fix.
The building was eventually repaired, but the 2000 sq ft space that had been Pan-9, where audiences of hundreds had once gathered to see live performances, was subdivided into 4 separate condo units.
Immediately after the fire, we began to seek a new space where art and people could converge. We visited dozens of rental spaces over the next two years, but there was nothing suitable in our price range.
During those same years, we also had countless meetings with city development councils and non-profit foundations, as we looked for ways subsidize an arts space in a rented commercial space.
Potential opportunities and state resources appeared bountiful from a distance, but tangible help was always an elusive mirage. The bottom line always seemed to be there was no help available to anyone who didn't already have a pre-existing multi-million dollar budget.
During those 3 years following the fire, Katrina and I moved a 8 times, from one cramped temporary living space to the next.
In 2008, the housing bubble burst. Rental prices stayed high. But suddenly a glut of properties were for sale at prices such that a monthly mortgage would cost dramatically less than renting the same square footage.
At that point, as buying a property was suddenly a more affordable option, major media pundits were trumpeting the message that the housing market crash was "proof" individuals were better off renting and should avoid ever buying property.
We rightly interpreted this pundit messaging as a signal that big money was planning a mass-buy up of bargain properties, and we knew we'd have a limited window of opportunity if we ever wanted to own property ourselves.
The dream of ownership had always held a huge appeal to us.
Over the years, we'd watched numerous art galleries and performance spaces forced to close by rising rents and difficult landlords.
For the benefit of any lucky people haven’t already experienced it here are 3 facts:
1. Most artists can't afford rent anywhere "nice". So Artists rent badly maintained buildings in less desirable areas. The artists invest sweat equity, make repairs, and create arts venues.
If the arts venues survive long enough to an build audience, the neighborhood usually gentrifies, the rents skyrocket, and the artist are homeless again.
2. Most art spaces are not financially profitable. They usually exist because the people running them are constantly busting ass, and pouring their own personal resources into the venture.
3. Becoming a non-profit organization does NOT instantly guarantee a magical stream of free grant money.
Our strategy was to buy a property in the price range of a conventional residential house for us to live in, but that was also big enough for arts events. The goal was to be less dependent on external funding than if we were had to cover costs of a "living space" and an "art space" attwo separate locations. When we began Katrina had a long-term fulltime job at Harvard University, and we both had some savings, so we began the hunt to buy property.
We quickly discovered most realtors didn't return phone calls at all.
So we found a buyer's agent who seemed enthused to work with us.
But he stopped answering our calls after a few weeks.
(Much later, we learned he'd unexpectedly keeled over dead, and thus was not checking his voicemail)
Eventually we found a wonderful buyer's agent named Deborah Galiga who'd been recommended to us by other friends in the arts.
With her aid, over the next several years, we visited over a hundred different properties.
We typically spent an hour a day, every day, searching the online real estate listings for greater Boston. We searched listings based on price per sq. footage, and proximity to public transportation. Even at post-crash prices, we soon realized our only hope of finding a space large enough for both living and art was to target oddball properties at the bottom of the market.
We visited boarded up gas stations, and rickety foreclosed homes.
We visited the moldy halls of obscure fraternal orders, basements still stocked with dusty liquor bottles from the 1980s.
We visited abandoned buildings full of burned-out cars and trees growing thru the floors.
There was one apartment building we'd been told was vacant, but when we got there, the building manager acknowledged it was still fully occupied by people living in the low-income units… but not to worry (he cheerfully explained), they’d soon be evicted.
We wanted to leave then, but the building manager insisted on giving us the full tour.
He jimmied the lock to a top floor apartment with a butter knife, while whispering "a crazy lady lives here, but I don't think she's home".
We were greeted by inquisitive cats.
Paper plates heaped with decaying takeout chicken-bones covered every surface.
The ceiling was a jungle of dangling flypaper strips.
From where I stood, I saw through the open bedroom door.
The far wall of the bedroom had hundreds of metal cans carefully stacked, covering the entire wall. At first I thought it was a beer-can collection…
Then I realized the cans were aerosol bed-bug spray.
I fled the apartment, and Katrina ran with me.
After we were back in the hall, it turned out Katrina hadn't run for fear of bed bugs. She'd run because from her line of sight, she'd seen a motionless, bloated, body lying in the bed.
On the first floor of the same building, the building manager, without knocking, barged into an apartment occupied by a young mother. Despite two active toddlers, the apartment was spotlessly clean and carefully organized. The mother had a sweet, open face and apologized to us in broken English, that she hadn’t had time to prepare anything for us to eat. The building manager whispered in my ear "She doesn't know she's about to be homeless."
We left almost in tears.
There was a listing for a "10 story building - 40 thousand square feet - $100,000."
At Boston prices, we assumed the price was a misplaced decimal point, but we called anyway. The realtors told us it was no misprint, and all would be explained when we saw it.
We arrived and found a 10-story-tall windowless obelisk of crumbling white concrete.
The listing agent opened the single rusting steel portal at street level, and we realized that the sq footage was strictly conceptual.
The tower was a single, hollow shaft, 85ft tall and roughly 30ft X 40ft square.
There were no electrical or plumbing connections from the street.
No floors. No stairs.
The darkness was broken only by laser-like beams of daylight angling in from dripping louvered ventilation slots near the roof.
Seagulls circled far above us.
We stood on gravely sludge. In the shadows, ancient stalagmites of bird shit towered tall as houses.
Mummified birds lay at our feet in congealed in oily puddles.
The structure had been built to store giant blocks of ice in the days before refrigerators.
In 1910, a single giant mold had been constructed on site, and the entirety of the concrete building had been poured into place in one single pour.
It was brutal masterpiece.
I cannot think of it even now, without the opening bars of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" playing in my head. Shortly after its centennial anniversary, the mighty 1910 Icehouse was torn to the ground. I still regret not buying it. (Katrina thought it was impractical for some reason)
I visited a store-front that looked OK from outside, but the interior was a dense barrier of cobwebs. The electricity was off, and all the windows were darkened by steel shutters.
With only the light from a small flashlight, I sliced my way through layer after layer of floor-to-ceiling cobwebs full of crawling spiders.
As we ventured deeper in, I discovered the outer layers of webbing had effectively contained a massive clouds of swarming flies.
Pushing on through the buzzing, I descended to the pitch-black of the basement.
Bugs swarmed, denser and thicker, until finally I reached the heart of the ecosystem: two large, very dead, raccoons writhing with millions of maggots. The raccoons were glowing with golden light…a beam of daylight! I looked straight up and saw the rotten hole that went thru the first floor and all the way up to the roof. The raccoons must have been climbing on the roof, and then had fallen two stories straight down, to their deaths, where their bodies now nourished the entire swarming ecosystem I'd just walked through.
During a 100 degree July heat-wave, we were led on a surreally heartbreaking group-tour of an occupied multifamily house. Dozens of potential buyers and their agents jumbled through the stifling, un-air-conditioned rooms, peering into closets, discussing different eviction tactics, while the actual residents of the abode, congregated awkwardly at the periphery.
I became disoriented in the claustrophobic heat and opened a door that I thought lead back outside. Within the room, a beautiful adolescent girl sat on her bed reading a book, seemingly wearing nothing except a translucent white bed-sheet draped over her.
She silently looked back at me, with an unblinking gaze more devastating than any epithet she could have shouted. I shut the door as fast as I could... I'd had it open less than a second…
but that moment remains etched in my brain.
At one building, we were glowered at by an abutting homeowner who initially assumed we were there to buy heroin from his neighbor across the street.
(And indeed there were multiple used hypodermic needles littering the sidewalks and gutters.)
We visited one open-house which was attended by one of the most spectacularly antagonistic men I've ever met. The building itself was a sprawling series of interconnected concrete garages and workshops that had been used by woodworking shop specializing in custom parquet floors. The showroom area was floored in gorgeously idiosyncratic hardwood mosaics, The place needed repairs, but was in better shape than many sites we'd visited. |
The realtor hosting it was a pleasant fellow and Katrina and I were chatting with him, and considering putting an offer on the place when an extremely muscular gentleman wearing a bright red, skintight, tank-top swaggered in.
From his gleaming bald head, to his moustache and cigar, he was fully in character as pro-wrestling villain.
He proceed to shout a monologue where he explained that he'd owned and lived in the residential house that the abutted the woodshop for 20 years.
During that time, he'd driven 3 separate owners of the woodshop into bankruptcy.
He knew all the rules and regulations and was head of the local community board and had friends in Somerville's government and connections to the Cuban Mafia.
He'd succeeded in changing ordinances to make the street in front of the woodshop one-way to decrease traffic.
Next, he'd made all the curbside parking residential permit only.
He watched the street 24 hours day to make sure any clients of the woodshop were instantly ticketed and towed.
He'd made it illegal for any vehicle with commercial plates to drive down that street.
The owners of the shop had to park their work trucks a mile away.
If UPS and Fed EX delivery trucks drove down the street, they were fined $300 per offense. When the owner of the woodshop tried to park his car (with a non commercial license plate) in the woodshop's own garage, the neighbor found a regulation whereby the car could be impounded for being too close to the mutual property line.
He had called the police with noise complaints if anyone in the shop used power-tools.
When the woodshop owner had considered converting the workshop building into residential condos, the neighbor had passed zoning amendments to ban the property from ever being used for residential purposes.
Apparently "somebody" mysteriously kept vandalizing the woodshop.
When the previous woodshop owner installed chain-link fence and security cameras, all the fencing and cameras magically disappeared overnight and the vandalization continued.
It was now illegal for anyone to make any changes to the existing exterior structure of the woodshop without the neighbor's approval. He had successfully brought an injunction to stop them from fixing the leaking roof, and he'd also legally prevented that same damaged portion of the building from being torn down.
He'd even blocked the planting flowerbeds on the property.
By the time he was done ranting, his veins were bulging and he was soaked in sweat.
I wanted to tell the neighbor we'd already bought the woodshop and planned to use it for urban pig and rooster farming, but Katrina dragged me away before I could get myself murdered.
In Katrina's opinion, the antagonistic guy sounded exactly like the cartoon character "Strong Bad".
During the period when we were house hunting, we placed offers on about 20 different properties. Every day was a like new lottery.
Each phone call might unspool an entirely different future as we waited to hear if offers had been accepted.
There were multiple small heartbreaks as houses we'd grown fond of escaped us.
Months passed into years. As we visited location after location, the novelty of discovering mummified animals and used drug paraphernalia in unexpected locations waned.
We first noticed the listing for firehouse in early 2010, and were intrigued, but at that point the asking price was over $600,000 which was way outside our budget, but we continued to periodically check back on the listing. As other properties came and went, the price on the firehouse slowly dropped.
We nearly purchased the building for $360,000 in early 2011, but because it was an unusual property, none of the banks that had pre-approved us for financing on other offers were willing to back us. On New Year's Eve 2011, the owners verbally notified us that they'd accepted our offer of $295,000.
And a few months later, in March of 2012, we finally closed on the property.
By chance, the date for the closing also happened to be my 38th Birthday.
