Arts-business leases at the city-owned Armory community building got approved Tuesday by the Somerville Finance Committee, but staff acknowledged that they were still getting their arms around the situation and did not have a plan for filling remaining empty spaces.
An idea for that came from the committee’s chair, city councilor Ben Wheeler: Give responsibility for that work to Arts at the Armory, the building’s longtime nonprofit anchor tenant and booker of its ballroom and cafe performance spaces.
“The ability for private nonprofits with excellent expertise to move nimbly is amazing. It’s one of the great assets we have in Somerville,” Wheeler told staff. “A fast-moving nonprofit can do things that government simply can’t.”
Staff did not say no. “We still have all options on the table,” said Alan Inacio, the city’s director of finance and administration. With the first cohort of tenants accepted and no plan or time frame for the next, “we do have a slight opportunity for a moment of pause, and we’re going to take that to evaluate all options and models.”
The Armory is a 27,000-square-foot building built in 1904 at 191 Highland Ave. that was bought and renovated into an arts building by the Sater family, owners and operators of Cambridge’s Middle East nightclub complex. The building reopened in 2008 and was run by the Saters until the Covid pandemic, when they considered adding a business use. Somerville took it from them in a $5 million eminent domain land seizure to guarantee it stayed solely an arts building.
An awkward and halting series of planning processes followed, leading to creation of an Armory Advisory Board and a request-for-proposals process in which tenants had to make an argument for their continued use of the space and new tenants were invited to apply. On Tuesday, the committee accepted renewed occupancy by The Acoustic Strings of New England shop and the producer Dead Moon Audio, and new tenants Badd Architect, which makes spatial art and sculptural installations; the poet and artist Birch Lo; the Larp Adventure Program; a tap dance studio run by Luke Nonas-Hunter; and ReCreate, a makerspace with a focus on repairs.
Most have five-year leases, though a couple of the businesses got three-year leases upon request.
One for Arts at the Armory wasn’t included, but staff hoped to have it signed by the end of the week. “We’re just working on sorting out some outstanding questions,” said Josh McCorkle, who began last month as the first tenant relations manager for the Armory.
Empty spaces
Roughly 18 percent of the leasable space remains empty, or 3,990 square feet, said Grace Munns, a city spokesperson.
There are no more tenants identified for consideration, as some who were accepted backed out and others were a bad match for the building – including a drumming group inside just long enough to test the decibel level of noise that neighbors would face if it were allowed to rent, McCorkle said.
“We’re working toward having an active building full of arts purposes – and also helping us keep The Armory afloat financially,” McCorkle said. But when it comes to filling the remaining spaces, “at this time, we don’t have a concrete next step. We are certainly considering different options.”
Councilor Jon Link said people “have been feeling nervous” about the pace of filling the building; fellow councilor JT Scott said he appreciated that basement spaces were lower-priced, but he was “shocked” to see the rent that Arts at the Armory would have to pay monthly – upward of $10,000. (Rents were set by an economic development team analysis balancing rates that “help us get the Armory to a financially stable operating environment” and the goal of providing affordable art space for the community, Inacio said.)
A scary application
Another factor getting in the way could be the process itself, Wheeler said, pointing to the application potential tenants must read and fill out.
“I didn’t do a full count, but I’m sure it was well over 100 pages and maybe something in the ballpark of 200,” Wheeler said. “It’s a lot of pages for someone who’s primarily focused on some kind of artistic pursuit.”
It probably scared off applicants, McCorkle agreed.
Arts at the Armory could help identify short- and long-term tenants and artists-in-residence and book them in spaces more flexibly, Wheeler said. A master plan released last year says the current five-member Advisory Board does not have to be the final form of governance, and “the city can seek the services of a nonprofit corporation to govern the Armory.”
“We need to partner”
There’s yet a third source bringing up this concept to the city: co-directors of Arts at the Armory Stephanie Scherpf and Jess White, who last week presented staff with a “proposal for a civic and cultural services agreement” that recognizes the value of their work and potential additional work they could do – an agreement like they had with the Saters.
“We paid them rent and then we had a contract with them that we were doing certain services like booking out spaces and helping with building management,” Scherpf said after the committee meeting. “Doing this, that and the other for basically a credit on our rent.”
In addition to tenanting the building, the nonprofit could get grant funding a municipality may not be able to apply for, and manage displays and sales of visual art similar to what Armory tenant Out of the Blue gallery did before leaving.
The credit would help the nonprofit survive its $10,000 monthly rents. “That’s going to be a big lift for us,” Scherpf said. “We have extremely thin margins,” and the city creates blackout days for the ballroom, cutting into the nonprofit’s revenue, by taking it for voting and other municipal uses.
“Your success is tied to our success, and vice versa. We need to partner here because otherwise, it’s not going to go well for either of us,” Scherpf said.
