Among institutional funders, “creative placemaking” seems to be all the rage. But do we all mean the same thing when we employ the phrase? And the use by many of those funders of “metrics” to analyze the “impact” of their “investments” is equally au courant. But what possible metrics could determine the efficacy of such a thing as creative placemaking, and is the normal grant period an appropriate period of time the measurement? I have a pretty strong impression the whole area is pretty murky. Even the names or some of the leading programs in the area are confusing, conflating the words “art,” “space” and “place.” What’s going on here?

I’ve been involved in quite a few attempts to employ arts programming to restore and improve public spaces, as well as to stimulate economic activity. Some have been hugely successful – in fact essential to the projects where they have been used: in other cases, not so much. The one quality that I can put my finger on that has distinguished the impactful projects from the lame ones is “critical mass.” I can also say, with a high degree of certainty, that these arts-led initiatives have taken more a one year to have any meaningful impact, and in some cases as long as five years. Solid placemaking practice, as I’ve said consistently, requires patience and consistency. Creative placemaking is no exception.

The Revolution in Bryant Park

I was originally hired by Dan Biederman, Executive Director of Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in 1991 to fundraise for and program a performing arts series to take place as soon as the fence came down around the park in 1992. Given the park’s long unsavory reputation, we weren’t sure whether people would return to the park in large numbers after the four-year construction period. We planned to “prime the pump” by creating a program of daily lunchtime performing events every weekday from early June to late September to bring people in. These included concerts of classical music and a comedy series. What made this work was that the programs were presented on a daily basis, with a rotation of events that were on the same day every week – i.e. the HBO comedy series was every Thursday. It was that consistency that created the essential critical mass.

I know that many BIDs and downtown management organizations organize a few days of concerts, or an annual festival to bring people into a public space. While these may be nice events, and people may enjoy them, in my experience they aren’t all that helpful in revitalizing public space because space users can’t count on the events to be taking to be in the space when they randomly turn up in them. Not many people say, “Oh, I think I’ll go eat lunch on the Court House steps on Wednesday.” One-off event don’t have enough presence to change people’s minds about the character of an inactive space.

Jazz Overkill

Consistency, unfortunately, isn’t enough. With support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund at Greater Jamaica Development Corporation we programmed daily jazz concerts, with trios and quartets in Downtown Jamaica for fourteen weeks. A jazz professor at a local college did the programming. We found that this didn’t have much impact at all in terms of drawing crowds or changing perceptions. Part of the problem was that small ensembles didn’t make enough of an impression in large public spaces. Part of the problem was also that what the professor wanted to program, and what the musicians wanted to play, wasn’t necessarily what audiences wanted to hear. The grant was a three-year one, and we were able to experiment a bit over the life of the grant. We found Caribbean music to draw larger crowds and that larger ensembles also made more of an impression. We added dancers from a community dance school to the mix – which drew the parents and friends of the kids. As those larger concerts proved to be more expensive, we were able to program fewer of them, and as a result they didn’t have much impact either.

New Year’s Eve Madness

For five or six years I produced First Night, New York, a family oriented, alcohol-free New Year’s Eve festival of the arts for Grand Central and 34^th Street Partnership. It was conceived of as rational counter-programming to the chaos of Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There were dozens of events at a half a dozen venues around mid-town. It took months to put together and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on. It had little to any pre-sale and was a show that opened and closed on the same night. The economics of First Night took nerves of steel that I, for one, didn’t have. While most years it got considerable media coverage reflecting the safety and fun of midtown Manhattan, in retrospect, as an annual, one-night affair, it wasn’t worth the effort. (For several of the years, the event included waltzing on the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. THAT really was great.)

The Big Crinkly

Working with dealer André Emmerich who I had cold-called through a personal connection, I created a public sculpture program in Bryant Park. We placed a massive Calder stabile called The Big Crinkly on the lawn over a winter season. It looked spectacular and created a sense of activity during an otherwise dormant time. This project had the requisite critical mass. André’s gallery paid for the installation and insurance – and the Gallery sold the piece to a collector as a result of the publicity that was attendant to the installation. It is now in the collection of the De Young Museum in San Francisco. This is an excellent example of a win/win deal between the not-for-profit and a for-profit business. Working with André, the Public Art Fund and other dealers we arranged a number of other winter large-scale art installations. All were a great addition to the park. Working with André was one of my great personal and professional experiences.

The Genius of Pop Up Galleries

Working with the artists’ organization, chashama, we took an empty building owned by GJDC that had once been a dentist’s office, and turned it into studio spaces and a gallery – with the former treatment rooms being turned into artists’ workspaces. chashama paid for utilities and no rent. The artists and chashama fixed-up the building to make it usable. One of the artists worked in the medium of road kill – really! But the artists made that building really hum from the afternoon until late on into the night for months. When nothing else was going on at night in Downtown Jamaica, we had an open gallery night every Thursday that drew large crowds who hung out outside the gallery until after midnight. One of the artists developed a following among disengaged young men in their twenties. He taught them drawing and took them on trips to museums in Manhattan. I regard this project as the signal turning point in the Downtown’s revitalization. The studio/gallery was in place for about two years. It too had critical mass.

More recently we worked with the group No Longer Empty (NLE), which occupied an empty retail space on the pedestrianized 165^th Street Mall. NLE’s model is heavily programmed and curated and they work to integrate their project into the local community. Critical mass is in their institutional DNA. They did deep research into the history and character of Jamaica, and their space was constantly active – it became a real draw. NLE is continuing its relationship with the community as well as with local artists. Again, all this took was the provision of free space for about six months.

The Value of Free Space

Like many disinvested downtowns, Jamaica had a good deal of empty and underutilized space. This included not just empty stores, but under-used institutional space. We provided the renowned, path-breaking theater company, Mabou Mines, with the key to a small 19^th century cemetery chapel that we had restored and that was not being used, for its theater artists’ residency and fellowship program. The building was used round the clock, seven days a week for rehearsals and teaching. Mabou Mines offered to provide internship and training opportunities for the students of the adjacent York College. Word also got around to other performers about the availability of this lovely space.

We provided free rehearsal space to the pioneering Beth Morrison Productions to prepare for its national tour of Missy Mazzoli’s opera “Song from the Uproar” at the underused, city-owned Jamaica Center for the Performing Arts. JPAC is a former church that has been adaptively reused into a theater space. The artists found that they loved the accessibility of Jamaica, and provided a free performance to the community at the end of the rehearsal period. Again, word got around among performers of the availability of high quality free/inexpensive rehearsal space in a community that was eager to host them.

The Goods and Bads of Murals

One of the truly great creative placemaking success stories is Wynwood in Miami, where the Goldman family has presented 50 artists, many of them household names in the art world, covering over 80,000 square feet of walls. Tony Goldman was one of the geniuses of placemaking, and the Wynwood Walls project put this formerly neglected neighborhood on the map. Murals have also been successful in creating a sense of place in the Mission in San Francisco, where the wall paintings are reflective of neighborhood culture and are of high quality; and in Cincinnati where the scale of the wall painting is tremendous. But mural projects are often difficult to distinguish from the graffiti that marks social disorder, and if too small or too spread out have no impact on neighborhood perception. They require either serious professional curation or to grow out of authentic neighborhood visual culture: as well as constant vigilance to preserve their integrity. Again, free space is what makes them tick.

The Bottom Line

As a result of these experiences, my conclusion is that the key elements of successful creative placemaking are consistency, quality curation and free space – all of which contribute to creating the required critical mass. In order for public events to have an impact they have to be presented on a reliable regular schedule in order to have enough of a presence to contribute to the reputation of the space. They also have to be of sufficiently high quality to draw a crowd. You just can’t put any old thing out there. Free and/or low-cost space provided over an extended period of time to artists is an easily used tool to promote creative placemaking. Both visual and performing artists find space essential to create their work. Making such space accessible to them is a magnet. It creates activity downtown, particularly in the “shoulder” periods of nights and weekends, and produces a “buzz” about the neighborhood among a new group of people who were previously unaware of what it has to offer.