Albany Barn founder sees rundown school as boon for arts

ALBANY — Jeff Mirel sees genuine potential where there is, quite frankly, urban decay. On a recent tour of the former St. Joseph’s Academy in the Arbor Hill neighborhood here, the 29-year-old Mirel seems to see beyond the broken windows, the water dripping through ceilings, the pigeons flying about or the piles of bird dung that litter the floor of this former, long-vacant school.

Art Barn

For more information about Art Barn, go to www.albanybarn.org.

For the past two years, Mirel has had the vision of turning an unused urban space into a breathing, multifaceted arts venue with affordable live/work space for artists. His mission has led him to form a nonprofit called Albany Barn. Besides the organization’s other efforts to support the region’s arts scene, its most ambitious objective by far is to create an arts incubator out of the ashes of the old St. Joseph’s Academy.

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Art Barns hopes for former St. Josephs Academy

Darren Scott, left, and Jeff Mirel stand in the gym of the former St. Joseph’s Academy in Albany’s Arbor Hill neighborhood. Scott, coordinator for the Albany Housing Authority’s Hope VI program, and Mirel, founder of Albany Barn, discuss plans to turn the dilapidated school into an arts incubator. The plans detail how the gym will be turned into a performance space and stage for live music and theater.

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Early this month on a tour of the former school with the Albany Housing Authority’s Darren Scott, Mirel spelled out his plans, which include a stage for live music and theater in the old gym; fully equipped studio space for both musicians and visual artists; a public darkroom; a multimedia lab. In the old classrooms, there will be 22 airy, open lofts for artists that will double as housing and work space. And all of it will be wired for the 21st century, Mirel says.

Space and visibility problems

The Albany Barn idea grew from his work helping organize local Rock2Rebuild charity concerts and his subsequent talks with artists who largely pointed to the need for performance, work and gallery space. “But talking to the public,” Mirel noted, “the perception was like, ‘What arts scene?’ So we had a space problem and a visibility problem from the standpoint of marketing.”

The building itself, at 39,400 square feet, is as big as the idea. Despite the neglect and the appearances once inside, the former St. Joseph’s Academy is structurally sound, says Scott, coordinator for the Albany Housing Authority’s Hope VI program.

The Housing Authority, meanwhile, has an option to buy the building from the local diocese. And it is working with Albany Barn as a partner on the project, looking for grants and applying for tax credits to help pay for it. Given the age of the school — it was built in 1906 — and the affordable housing component of the Barn, Scott said the plan should score well in the grant and tax-credit application process.

Costly endeavor

The costs are significant. The price tag for the rehab alone is estimated at $9.5 million. Then Albany Barn has to find a way to cover its operating costs once the facility is running. Scott, however, says it’s all feasible. Aside from the expected asbestos and lead paint issues that come from rehabilitating a building this age, most of the work is “finish work,” he said.

Mirel said Albany Barn will spend this year raising money and trying to increase its visibility. And if all goes well with the financing, doors to the arts incubator could open in late 2009.

Still, a major part of this project has to do with the streets surrounding the building. Though Scott points to some positive trends that show a neighborhood on the upswing, this stretch of Arbor Hill, at the corner of North Swan and Second streets, is decidedly rough and worn with age and neglect. The low point for the streets surrounding the St. Joseph’s building, however, looks to be in the past, Scott said.

In the late 1990s, “it was basically an open-air drug market right on this street,” he said, “and it had all the violence that’s associated with that. And not a lot of people live here anymore as a result.”

Revitalizing, not gentrifying

So far, the Albany Housing Authority has completed other projects here, and 23 apartments are under construction over storefronts. Scott points out several times how the Albany Barn figures into all of this. Get more people living here and they’ll need a place like the Barn to go, he says. Also, it fits into the community’s Arbor Hill Neighborhood Plan, which seeks to improve job opportunities, housing and access to the arts in this part of the city.

Nevertheless, urban improvements can come with unintended consequences. Gentrification can lead to increases in housing costs, which merely drive the poor — and in some cases the middle class — elsewhere. On that topic, Scott points to the Arbor Hill Neighborhood Plan and says the vision is for a mix of classes and races, while there are safeguards against gentrification.

“That’s a covenant of the Barn,” Mirel added, “to maintain this as an affordable space. The goal has never been to gentrify but to revitalize.”

Mirel moved to Albany in 2004. A tall and wiry figure with red hair, he grew up in Yorktown Heights in affluent, suburban Westchester County. He talks of days as a teen when he and his friends would drive to an arts venue in nearby Peekskill, then a rusting city on the lower Hudson that has since gone through a renaissance of sorts. It was at that venue where he was exposed to both visual art and music. When he talks about this past, he gets visibly excited. And several times he mentions creating an atmosphere like that for kids and teens at the Albany Barn.

Feasible but facing steep odds

But the question is, can he do it? He agrees that it’s an ambitious plan. But given the partnership with the Albany Housing Authority, which Scott says is committed to the project, this is indeed feasible, Mirel noted.

Others in the arts community said the same thing. Sarah Martinez, executive director for the Albany Center Gallery, said there will have to be a lot of collaborative effort on the part of the arts community to support the Barn and make it work. And she admitted Mirel is up against the odds, but said the incubator model is solid.

“It’s a good idea, because it saves resources,” she said, “to have that sort of collaborative spirit where artists can borrow things from each other or collaborate. . . . People can keep their own identity but sort of lean on each other’s shoulders where need be. And I think there can be a lot of synergy when there’s all this creative energy in one spot.”

Seeing beyond the blight

It’s not as if the Albany Barn idea is coming out of nowhere. Mirel has mined for ideas AS220, a Providence, R.I., arts organization very similar to what he wants to create here. He points to what AS220 has done for the revitalization of downtown Providence. And that revitalization, it’s been well-documented, had a lot to do with the arts and the artists who set up shop in vacant spaces no one else wanted.

“It’s all about the lens you’re looking through,” Mirel said when talking about the rough shape of the St. Joseph’s building. “I don’t see the broken glass. I don’t see the rust. . . . I see what it could be. That’s why blight is so devastating. If all you see is the rust, the holes, the weeds, it’s very demoralizing. We need to see beyond that, what all this could be.”

Retaining the character

On the tour through the building, both Mirel and Scott make clear that they want to retain the architectural character of the former school, which also has ’40s-era design elements because of a 1945 fire that necessitated a renovation. Some of the classrooms that are planned to become apartments, for instance still have the old chalkboards. A novel design, the boards line entire walls in sections. Each section pivots. Turn a section and reveal behind it a massive, hidden closet. Details like that, Mirel and Scott say, will be saved in the restoration.

“We’re trying to retain the character of the building and incorporate it into the artistic sensibility and the artist lifestyle,” Scott said.

In the next classroom they show, it’s the same thing. Massive windows let in ample light. And there’s that chalkboard design again. They keep talking as we walk out of the room, but glance to the left, and there's still writing on the blackboard, left over from the days when this was still a Catholic school. It reads, “Welcome to Miracles.”