Lower Manhattan has a lot of artists, but they are leaving in greater numbers than in almost any community of New York City, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future (CUF), a public policy think tank based Downtown.
The report, “A Creative Solution to New York’s Affordable Space Crunch,” notes that the combined communities of Lower Manhattan (meaning Tribeca, the Financial District, Battery Park City, and the South Street Seaport/Civic Center) and the West Village rank second of all neighborhoods in the five boroughs for the total number of resident artists, with 3,989 working creative professionals. (Only the Upper West Side, with 5,584, has a more robust tally.)
But the report also looks at dramatic changes in those tallies between 2000 and 2015. At the start of this period, Downtown and the Upper West Side had nearly equal creative populations, with 5,446 living between Riverside Drive and Central Park, and 5,234 residing Downtown. Fifteen years later, however, the Upper West Side maintained a stable creative population (experiencing an uptick of approximately 2.5 percent), while Downtown began to hemorrhage arts professionals, losing 24 percent of its creative headcount.
Among communities that lost artists, only the combined neighborhoods of Chelsea, Clinton, and Midtown West fared worse than Lower Manhattan, losing 28 percent of its visionaries, dropping from 5,178 at the start of the study period, to 3,711 in 2015.
Where are the aesthetes headed? In a word, “Brooklyn.” The CUF report tallied the net change in creative populations in every part of New York City. Among communities with the ten biggest net increases of artists in residence, half a dozen were in Brooklyn, which also took the first five places on the list. Bushwick gained more than 1,600 artists, while Williamsburg/Greenpoint got 1,200-plus, Fort Greene took in some 900, and Bedford Stuyvesant welcomed more than 600.
Lower Manhattan’s dwindling artistic population is, in some ways, ironic, because the area has come into its own in recent years as a cultural destination, where museums, and theatrical and dance productions have proliferated, along with street festivals and gallery openings. But these amenities are all geared more to consumers of art (as Downtown’s increasingly affluent demographic is apt to be), rather than those who produce it.
For the second cohort, the availability of affordable housing and ample workspace have traditionally been indispensable. The profusion of both is what drew legions of artists to Tribeca in the 1970s. Four decades later, the absence of these has conspired to make artists, if not an endangered species, then at least a rarer breed than in years past.
The CUF report goes on to note that forging partnerships with local public schools, where studio space and materials are often available, can help keep artists in communities they might otherwise flee. But for Lower Manhattan, this approach may prove challenging. Many of the area’s public schools have been forced, in recent years, to scrap dedicated spaces set aside for art, theater, and music in order to make room for more students. This is a bittersweet consequence of the success of these schools, which have lured ever-greater numbers of families with children to reside in Lower Manhattan, with the new arrivals often displacing the artists whose migration elsewhere is spotlighted in the CUF report.
But there have been local efforts to combat these trends. The Downtown Alliance has repeatedly partnered with Lower Manhattan property owners to make workspace available for artists, and the Trust for Governors Island has set aside multiple buildings to incubate creative enterprises. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council also works closely with hundreds of artists across a range of disciplines each year, not only to showcase their work in public, but also to provide facilities in which to develop it. For the next generation of creative minds, the Church Street School for Music and Art operates highly regarded education programs, and the Battery Park City Authority offers instruction for teenagers by working professional artists, focused on helping the students develop portfolios they can use to gain admission to selective high schools that focus on the arts.
But if Downtown’s tally of creative professionals is to begin growing again, the increase will likely have to come from within. In this respect, Manhattan Youth has at least partially offset the deficit created by public schools having to repurpose spaces originally intended for arts education, by creating intensive afterschool programs in areas like theater, dance, painting, sculpture, and filmmaking.
So people born and raised in Lower Manhattan may eventually replace at least some of the creative professionals who have moved away in recent years. But until then, the area seems likely to remain a community of artful dodgers.