Re: Re: Pearse Tower to be demolished July 10 at 12 noon

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March 23, 2007 at 10:56 pm #743770
manifesta
Participant

@paul h wrote:

I would love to see this particular area of ballymun develop as some sort of artistic haven
If they could keep this block, i’m picturing it brightly painted, artistic types hanging out, with a real bohemian
feel to it. Like a mini greenwich village(nyc) of the 60s and 70s.

Although it is hard to imagine this in ballymun, for obvious reasons

It’s worth imagining. In this age of the office block, boutique hotel and toytown apartments, redeveloping Ballymun into artists’ housing would be an amazing use of space. Space for artists to live and work (as opposed to some flash-in-the-pan new theatre or whatever) seems completely alien, if not anathema, to the agenda of most urban planning. So it’s refreshing to see this floated about as an idea.

Westbeth in Greenwich Village is the perfect model of this. This site, the former Bell Labs, was converted in the ’60s into artists’ housing, which includes a gallery, studio, and performance space. Photographer Diane Arbus, as well as Merce Cunningham and countless other artists, lived and worked out of Westbeth. It remains functioning as such to this day. Demand for the housing, which allows artists to pay rent based on a sliding scale according to income, was so great that they finally closed the waiting list this month– last I heard, the wait list for interested parties was twenty years long. 😮

http://www.westbeth.org/wb-about-pg.html

There’s some history of the building here, as well as some nice shots of the space dating from the ’30s (when the old high line railroad, now long defunct, ran right through the building) up to the present day. It’s such a shame there aren’t more spaces like this. As the cost of living in cities continues to escalate– in Dublin as elsewhere– there’s simply no other option for artists and writers and other starving artists other than scuttle off to the outskirts. Now if you’ll kindly excuse me. . .

: manifesta, tormented by visions of utopian urban planning, scuttles off to the outskirts :

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