by James A. Bacon
First Fridays Art Walk in downtown Richmond has a long way to go before it reaches the iconic status of, say, Miami’s South Beach or San Antonio’s canal walk, but it is increasingly defining the City of Richmond and, by extension, the Richmond metropolitan area. The art walk arose spontaneously a decade ago from the initiative of several art gallery owners to drum up business by instituting an art-world parallel to a Friday night pub crawl. People came in trickles, then in streams and now in droves. The monthly event has expanded to theaters and performing arts, restaurants and boutiques along the once-moribund Broad Street corridor, drawing from all walks of life. There’s so much activity that the city has had to get involved to regulate sidewalk vendors, enforce noise ordinances and clamp down on petty street crime.
The idea for First Fridays Art Walk didn’t emerge from some consultant’s study, Chamber of Commerce brain storming session or an idea-seeking delegation to another city. It arose from ground-up civic entrepreneurship and the unique tastes and sensibilities of the region.
Richmond is one of the few Top 50 cities in the country without a major league sports team. We do have a AA team baseball team, the Flying Squirrels, and people do seem to like them. But we couldn’t get our act together to keep the AAA Richmond Braves, much less attract a big-league team. And if we don’t figure out how to finance renovation of the Diamond baseball stadium, we could lose the Squirrels. But we have one heck of an arts scene. In the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, we can boast of the finest regional art museums in the country. At Virginia Commonwealth University, we have one of the highest ranked university art programs in the country. If we can’t aspire to being big league in the sports world, perhaps we can aspire to become big league in the arts world.
In that spirit, City Councilman Charles R. Samuels has introduced an ordinance to create the Historic Broad Streets Arts District spanning 27 blocks in downtown. The proposal would qualify theaters, galleries, museums, dance studios, music halls and historical sites for special benefits such as participation in the city’s revolving loan program, tax exemptions and marketing/promotion dollars, according to the Times-Dispatch. The councilman’s heart is in the right place — better for the city to provide modest support to the arts than to spend multi-millions renovating a baseball stadium. But, as much as I love the idea of a turbo-charged arts district, I think he may be going overboard.
Permit me to draw a distinction between different types of assistance that a city can offer. The most important assistance is enforcing ordinances to maintain public order and tranquility. Street vendors are getting out of hand? Fine, license them. Bands and boom boxes are too loud? Fine, enforce the noise ordinance. Petty thieves are picking pockets? Fine, assign a few police to patrol the streets. The city can do things like enforce parking ordinances, chase off the prostitutes and clean up the trash the next day. That’s the basic function of government, and the City of Richmond appears to be doing a good job.
The second thing a city can do is get out of the way. For example, it can relax zoning codes that prevent artists or business owners from living in loft space above studios, galleries, shops and restaurants. It can prioritize building permit applications and inspections for entrepreneurs who are renovating old buildings. Both of ideas are part of Samuels’ package.
The third thing a city can do is to actively help. Samuels proposes subsidies both direct (city appropriations for marketing) and indirect (reduced or waived fees from the city’s revolving loan program, a non-profit exemption from the city’s 7% admissions tax, and a temporary exemption of the business-license tax for arts-related businesses).
That’s where I get nervous. I believe that government’s job is to create a level playing field for everyone, not to pick winners and losers. What if the city had favored some other use of downtown ten years ago? Would the Arts Walk ever have taken off? On the other hand, none of Samuels’ ideas should be terribly expensive and they can be easily reversed if they get out of hand — not like issuing $50 million in municipal bonds, say, to rebuild the baseball stadium, an action that cannot be undone.
Whatever the final fate of the ordinance, it places the city’s priorities in the right place. The Arts Walk makes a fine fit with other grass roots institutions like the James River Writers Festival and the VCU French Film Festival. I’m a wine-and-brie kind of guy, and I’m happy for Richmond to carve out its defining niche as a wine-and-brie kind of town.
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