Movement grows to energize arts downtown

Community leaders in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Minneapolis and St. Paul are successfully leveraging their cities’ arts and creative scene to help revitalize their downtowns. Could Rochester be next?

With a nod to the city’s filling in of the Inner Loop and the space it makes available for housing and potential arts projects downtown, a group of industry sector leaders next week will host an Arts in the Loop Symposium, aimed at answering that question.

“Arts in the Loop is bigger than the symposium,” said Jim Doser, director of the Institute for Music Leadership at the Eastman School of Music and a member of the Arts in the Loop committee. “It’s a group of community leaders from many sectors who have this mission of energizing Rochester center city through the arts, entertainment and media sectors, with an initial focus on the Main Street corridor.”

The idea for the symposium was born in 2017, when those leaders began reviewing aspects of the creative sector and cultural revitalizations in numerous U.S. cities. That was narrowed down to five cities that have had or are having success creating a vibrant downtown environment through the arts.

The five key findings from the initial assessment include: leveraging a city’s unique identity; creating areas for creatives to cluster and work together; designing for diverse culture appeal; empowering effective partnerships across sectors; and ensuring entrepreneurship training and affordable housing for artists.

“We’ve been meeting together since December and working on a strategy for gathering information to help us develop the vision,” Doser explained of the committee’s work. “The symposium is bringing five public people I met in other cities to Rochester to help us in that task, to really look at what they’ve done successfully and help us see what could be relevant in our work here in Rochester.”

Taking place June 5 and June 6 at the Eastman School, the symposium will offer four sessions that feature participants including Audrey Russo, president and CEO of Pittsburgh Technology Council; David Pankratz, research and policy director for Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council; Jun-Li Wang, community development program director for Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul, Minn.; Gulgun Kayim, director of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy for the City of Minneapolis; and Jill McMillan, executive director for the Arts and Business Council of Nashville.

“We’ll have a session on design and place-making, how the intentional design of environments in the city can help connect people and places through the arts and architecture,” Doser said. “We have a session about the best practices of arts councils, how they can be inclusive and effective and help everyone—from the individual artist all the way to major arts organizations—contribute to this vision.”

Additionally, a double session will focus on the creative economy and how this kind of targeted support for arts and the creative sector spurs all types of economic activity, from street-level activity to innovation in small and large businesses, creating new ideas and products, Doser said.

“But also creating that environment that people in businesses love to be immersed in in their cities,” he added.

Between 75 and 100 people are registered for each of the four sessions, Doser noted.

Rochester Downtown Development Corp. President Heidi Zimmer-Meyer said cities’ downtowns nationwide have become places where innovation and creative class enterprises are locating. And that is happening here as well.

“We’ve got more than 180 of those kinds of companies that have located downtown,” Zimmer-Meyer said. That’s grown from 108 innovation and creative companies less than three years ago. Most of those companies moved downtown without any incentives or subsidies.

“They’re being attracted to an environment,” she said. “What Jim is doing and talking about doing is to put that on steroids, and to leverage this incredible story that we have for culture, for performance, for music, for sculpture, for street art, even for food, which has become almost like an art form.”

The creative environment is intensely attractive because it allows places for collaborative opportunities that one might not expect, she said. They occur because the environment encourages people to commune.

“What we do know is that regions that succeed economically need to be places that attract talent because it’s the talent that is now attracting business location,” Zimmer-Meyer said. “So we know already that to be a place that people want to be in, and to connect and enrich the environment where creative collisions occur and creative enterprises build on each other’s ideas you need to think through how that environment is structured and what the street-level experience is.”

When we look at downtown’s traditional tenants, banks, law firms and financial service firms, the top three reasons to locate there are parking, the premier aspect of the space and cost or amenities, Zimmer-Meyer noted.

At the top of the list for innovation companies is a vibrant street life, followed by proximity of food and beverage enterprises and arts and cultural happenings. Parking is ranked seventh.

“These are things that will impact the real estate sector by encouraging people to sign leases in certain environments, and those same people will avoid other environments,” she added. “And where the economy really has an opportunity to grow in this region is in that innovation and creative class world. We’ve already seen it.”

But does Rochester have what it takes to activate the arts here? Are we prepared for an “arts invasion?”

“Unlike many other cities, we don’t have to build the arts; we have the arts resources,” Doser said. “We have the artists, the arts organizations. We have that vitality.”

What Rochester lacks is activation of the spaces in between those resources, particularly opportunities for community members, people from the neighborhoods, people who live downtown to participate and engage in street-level art, he said. Think the Strong National Museum of Play connecting to Blue Cross Arena; the Eastman School of Music connecting with Broadway Theater League.

“It’s that activation, connecting with what we already have,” Doser said. “I think downtown is primed and ready for that kind of street level activation, so that we all feel like it’s a community of arts and creative activity. We have to build that pedestrian-friendly, community-activated feel.”

In fact, that will be a must in the years to come as the center city gains residents. Zimmer-Meyer noted that the residential population of downtown Rochester has grown from roughly 3,250 people in 2000 to 7,250 people today. And there are 21 housing projects in the pipeline.

“We’ve got all these activities that are starting to connect neighborhoods and connect people in those neighborhoods, a broad range of people, because that’s what makes for really dynamic downtowns,” Zimmer-Meyer said. “Downtowns are owned by everyone in the community, and that includes people from very different backgrounds, ages, incomes, lifestyles, races, neighborhoods.”

Zimmer-Meyer also said many of downtown’s public spaces are not being used to their maximum potential, places like Parcel 5, Washington Square Park, Manhattan Square Park and others.

“The way we’re programming them, we leave an awful lot of untapped opportunity on the table, and with ROC the Riverway, we’re going to be creating a whole new set of public gathering spaces that will connect the east side and the west side of our city and our downtown, and that will create gathering places for the whole community to come together,” she added. “So, part of what we’re talking about is we need to think about what we do with those spaces, and leveraging the arts is job one.”

The key to energizing Rochester through the arts is public/private partnerships, Doser said.

“We see the arts as one of those areas that lends itself to that kind of partnership,” he added. “When you put these folks together from these different sectors and find ways to connect them in their interests, the arts make for the perfect place for that kind of stew to brew.”

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