But if it's just sitting there?

There is a storefront at 315 Church Street in Tribeca that has sat empty since 2018. It was once T&T Plastic Land, a plastic supply store, now in Brooklyn. I passed this space nearly every day for six years. It’s in prime Tribeca, on the ground floor, and it’s empty.

Two blocks south is another storefront on Church Street that has been vacant for over a year. At a public community board meeting, the landlord explained that he couldn’t rent this retail space because of the entrance design. I thought, man, it will take more than a slightly inconvenient entry to get this rented. Have you seen all the For Lease signs downtown lately?

Both of these spaces are in Tribeca, a neighborhood full of galleries and an art world hub. Artists across all genres and mediums would love to have a space here to show their work, even if only for one night.

Maybe like you, my first thought when seeing all of these empty spaces was why not just lower the rent and get someone, anyone, in there, rather than lose money month after month. But it turns out, and researchers have studied this, that keeping it empty can be worth more than renting cheap. The rent a landlord signs is the number his building gets valued at, so he would rather give up the money now and hold onto the chance of a higher rent later. Sigh.

Meanwhile, artists are leaving New York. The cost of living here is incredible, on top of the housing crisis we all know and experience. Then, on top of that, filmmakers need somewhere to screen, dancers need somewhere to perform, and fine artists need somewhere to hang their work. That is the struggle I hear most from creatives in my networks. They have work but nowhere to show it. It can cost thousands of dollars to rent a space in this city for one night, which I know because I have paid it.

I see posts all the time on Instagram, creatives looking for a space in New York, one or two nights, for a reading, to release new work, or to put on a show someone is curating. People from out of town and people who have lived here for years, asking their Instagram network to produce a miracle by Thursday.

This morning I read a piece in the Times about a group upstate called Site Seen. Two artists run the organization, turning undesirable spaces, such as a vacant Dollar General store, into temporary art exhibitions. When I imagine a Dollar General, the first image is overhead fluorescents and dated floors, not sexy. But you know what, it takes a creative and an artist to see the potential in a space not typically considered beautiful and turn it into something that is.

Then the article also mentioned a landlord in Williamsburg who’d been trying to lease a vacant real estate office for a year with no serious offers. Site Seen held a three-hour show there in May, and days later the landlord suddenly received a rush of inquiries and had a lease nearly signed.

This story made me think about how we’ve been marketing ourselves wrong in creative and arts spaces. Like, “support the arts.” This is proof that maybe that needs a reframe. Less support the arts, and more let the arts support you. Maybe we hold more power than those outside the arts give us credit for. Having the artists there brought him business. Their magic of just existing brought in money. And we creatives can make something out of nothing. Out of a Dollar General, out of the back of a U-Haul truck, out of somebody’s apartment.

Meanwhile, two spaces on Church Street are doing nothing for anyone. Someone call the artists.