DRAWING ART TO PADUCAH: CITY OFFERS INNOVATIVE PROGRAM TO ATTRACT ARTISTS

PADUCAH, Ky. -- Wanted: Artists to relocate to progressive city on the Ohio River. Financial incentives include 100 percent financing for real estate, below-market loans, a free Web site and health insurance.

Other incentives include a lively cultural atmosphere and 11,000 tourists stopping on riverboats and 30,000 more coming to the city's national quilt museum each year.

The Paducah Artist Relocation Program is an innovative attempt to rehabilitate the housing in the once-posh Lowertown area adjacent to its downtown. The houses in Lowertown were once the finest in the city and include a number of mansions. But slumlords divided many into apartments and allowed them to deteriorate over the past few decades. Drug dealers moved in.

The main objective of the Artist Relocation Program is to revitalize Lowertown. But the program also is enabling the city to keep the artists it already has.

When they heard about the Artist Relocation Program, Paducah artists Charlotte and Ike Erwin were preparing to move their Working Artist Studio across the river to Brookport, Ill. Now they have become the first artists in the program to close on a house in Lowertown, a Victorian house that when renovated will provide them with both studio and living space.

"The goal is to have one overhead," Charlotte says.

For an artist, it's helpful for the studio to be only a few steps away when you want to work. Sometimes the Erwins don't leave the studio until midnight.

"The creative button never gets turned off," she says.

Besides painting commissions, the Erwins do custom framing. Ike has been studying with a master bookbinder and also repairs and restores books. Thursday they were teaching an art class at Paducah Community College.

No bad experiences

Mark Barone, the director of the Artist Relocation Program, guided them through the paperwork, and city inspectors checked out the house for them.

"We did not have one bad experience with the program," Charlotte said.

They are using the money they saved on financing to renovate the house, a job that includes replacing the roof and fixing the porch.

Since the Erwins, six more artists from all over the U.S. have committed to the program. They include a Maryland physician who also is a painter (see related story), a printmaker from San Diego, Calif. and an art therapist from the Washington, D.C., area. Last Thursday, a stained glass artist from Chicago toured the city.

The artists can thank Barone, a fellow painter, for the idea. It evolved because Barone, who lives in Lowertown, tired of seeing drug deals on the street corners. He pressed for rental licensing ordinances that required landlords to maintain their properties and to screen tenants more carefully. But Barone realized that the problems were going to return unless something was done to bring in people who wanted to improve the neighborhood.

Idea from Indiana

He had heard about an attempt by the small town of Rising Sun, Ind., to revitalize its downtown by attracting artists. He and Paducah's mayor and city manager took a road trip to Rising Sun and liked what they saw.

Unlike Rising Sun, a town of only 2,000, Paducah already had a thriving cultural community. Unlike Rising Sun, Paducah devised a program that includes financial participation by the city. When the Bank of Paducah agreed to provide 7 1/2 percent loans through the program, the city offered to buy down the loans another half percent.

The program also offers artists six health insurance plans to choose from through the Kentucky Arts Council and marketing and advertising support.

The city gave the program $40,000 to start, half of which went to Barone as salary. The city also is willing to buy empty lots and give them to artists wanting to build. Barone is working with architects who will do elevations to show the kinds of buildings that will be historically accurate for Lowertown.

He has marketed the program through national fine arts magazines. The ads have prompted news stories about the innovative program in the same magazines. Since these appeared he has received calls from Fort Myers, Fla., from St. Louis, Maine and New York asking how they can start a similar program.

In October, the Travel Channel will film a piece on the arts in Paducah and will include a spot about the Artist Relocation Program.

Art center opens in 2002

Paducah has a long tradition of nourishing the arts. Next year, a $32 million performing arts center will open downtown. Artist Robert Dafford has painted 22 murals on the city floodwall, all paid for through individual sponsors. The national Museum of the American's Quilter's Society, the Yeiser Art Center, the Market House Theatre and downtown's new Maiden Alley Cinema, which shows only foreign and independent films, are part of the mix.

The Artist Relocation Program fits right in, Barone says.

"This is what we are. Our downtown is an arts community. When the mall came in 20 years ago it killed a lot of the businesses. Downtowns became ghost towns. What was put in its place was the arts. You play to your strength," he said.

Rosemarie Steele, assistant to the director of the Paducah McCracken County Convention & Visitors Bureau, says the growing number of cultural and heritage tourists are seeking experiences artists can provide.

"Most are educated and they want to educate their children," she says.

The tourists who get off the numerous riverboats that stop in Paducah also are interested in the arts, although perhaps in a different way. "The people who come in on the boats want to buy that one-of-a-kind thing," she says. "They want that thing that is hand-crafted."

Teri Clark-Bauer, executive director of the Cape Girardeau Convention of Visitors Bureau, says the arts are part of the mix Cape Girardeau offers tourists.

"Any time you have a diverse community you're going to provide more opportunity for visitors to the community," she said. "The arts are very important. The typical leisure traveler traveling for culture and the arts is going to spend more money than other leisure travelers."

Paducah's Artist Relocation Program is limited to those who want to relocate to Lowertown. The city's Main Street program provides incentives for artists who want to relocate downtown.

Catherine Dunlap-Stock, executive director of the Old Town Cape revitalization project in Cape Girardeau, says the Missouri Main Street program recognizes the important role the arts play in bringing downtowns back to health.

Workshop in Cape

Sometime after Jan. 1, a Minnesota group called ArtSpace will conduct a workshop in Cape Girardeau showing people how to convert buildings into artist live-and-work spaces. Dunlap-Stock says the Old Town Cape project is just getting started in the work that can be done to encourage the arts downtown.

"We've got a great niche for it with the proposed River Campus, an active Arts Council and several artists already living here. There's a nice potential to make artist live-and-work spaces," she says.

"It could be a boon for Old Town Cape district."

There is no litmus test for the artists' to qualify for the program. "They could make ashtrays if that's what they want to do," Barone said. "If they want to fix up a house, the commissioners don't really care."

Barone knew drug dealers would return to Lowertown unless others came in to replace them. When people talk about wanting to attract new industry to town, he tells them that artists revitalizing the city's oldest residential area will be a big help.

"Quality of life is the No. 1 thing those companies are interested in," he says.