Old Rainier Brewery on tap to be artists' home address
Forget about those squat, gray industrial buildings fanning out to the waterfront, and that dusty construction site across Airport Way South. And ignore, for the moment, the aging brewery itself. Hollow and sort of clammy, it's undeniably seen better days.
Try instead, Gale says, to see what will be, the vision he has staked everything on helping to create: This peripheral neighborhood will become a colorful and vibrant destination, with the brewery as its jewel. Reborn as the Arts Brewery, it will be Seattle's largest and most ambitious artist community.
A year after local company Ariel Development bought the iconic building from the Benaroya Co. for nearly $6 million, a project some thought was next to impossible is quietly taking shape.
The city 10 days ago gave its final approval. Last week, Gale, as site manager, moved in to the first of 70 affordable artist lofts reserved for "live/work" tenants — residents who will make their living out of their homes.
The dark warrens of the building have been gutted of old machinery; the old wooden floors have been buffed to a gallery shine; windows for the live/work lofts have been carved from the outer walls.
Leases have already been signed for 90 percent of the space, and the first of the tenants could be in as soon as January.
The Jam Box recording studio, for example, plans to build 35 rehearsal rooms, a performance area and a bar inside the building. Quilombo do Queimado, which teaches the Brazilian martial art known as Capoeira, will turn the old brew-kettle room into a two-tiered practice room.
Height vision
Perhaps the most visible tenant, Vertical World, will likely turn the brewery's signature smokestack into a rock-climbing tower.
Ariel hired Gale, 35, as project site manager, an intentionally vague title that covers his job as consultant and liaison to the arts community, live/work advocate, permit seeker, tech support, leasing agent and the guy with defibrillators when things start to lag.
Years of navigating the vulnerable and often underground world of the Seattle artist live/work scene have prepared him for this, and he has hung both his reputation and his wildest dreams on making it happen.
"This is a magic trick," he says. "This is a rabbit in a hat. Only this is a real rabbit, and a real hat."
When he was 20, Gale used to ride his motorcycle past the Rainier Brewery on the way to his first artist loft, fantasizing about what the rambling, oddly yellow building might become.
"But I never told a soul," he said. "It was too far-fetched."
At that time, the landmark brewery by Interstate 5 was still producing around a million barrels of beer a year. It would be 10 years before Rainier's parent company, Stroh's, would announce it was selling the building and moving brewing to Tumwater. The trademark 'R' would take its place on the museum circuit with the rest of the relics.
From beer to coffee
After The Benaroya Co. bought the site, Tully's Coffee moved its headquarters and neon green 'T' to the brewery in 1999. Tully's will continue to lease a third of the property from Ariel, which bought the building for $5.9 million in July 2003.
Though the Arts Brewery won't really get going for another few months, there has been plenty of activity there the past year.
At least once a month, Gale organizes events in the brewery's courtyard as a way to raise money and the project's profile.
While the rest of the building remains lifeless, one corner is transformed each week — into a political-art convention or an Ethiopian soccer festival or a Mexican Dia de los Muertos blowout, with costumed revelers and pulsing house music, flashing lights and functional art serving as furniture. Twenty bucks gets you in the door, drinks not included.
It would normally be Gale's nature to accept any group that wants to use the space, but he's learning to check his instincts in light of the stakes. That's why he checks the background of each organization before saying yes, and why he swears he won't, but always does, stay at the events until 6 a.m. to make sure everything goes smoothly. There's no way he'd be able to sleep anyway.
"Maybe people don't understand, but they don't have an $11 million project riding in it," he said. "I just can't put this project at risk."
Maybe he's working up a premature ulcer trying to pull this off, but a dream job's a dream job, no matter how late the nights.
It took Gale just an hour to both create and talk his way into this particular dream job, on a sunny afternoon last summer on a walk-through with Ariel and some artist friends, hearing about a remarkable idea for the first time.
Gale has never been burdened by such woes as a stifling job or a car payment. He's a filmmaker, writer, found-object sculptor and techie who gets anywhere he needs to go on a fleet of vintage motorcycles that are forever breaking down.
"I can live on next to nothing," he says. "I've always felt that if a job puts your self-respect in question, then you don't need it."
After a childhood in the Madison Park/Leschi area, he moved to a loft in Georgetown, where he began cultivating his taste for vast, open space and the myriad ways to fill it.
Community college wasn't really his thing, so he struck out on his own making rather obscure, low-budget films, forming his own company, Social Eyes Production, in 1989.
He eventually fell into a new occupation as a live/work consultant, helping other artists secure their homes. Tired of being booted from loft to loft himself, he started reading up on his rights. He became well-versed in building laws, fire code, seismic requirements and other legal details of live/work life. The most important option for a tenant, he says, is to buy the space.
He had picked up some of his knowledge while working for his dad, architect Fulton Gale. The rest he taught himself.
"Conan has sort of prided himself on self-education," said Kaleb Hagen-Kerr, a fellow artist who worked with Gale on his own live/work situation. "He thought that one of the saddest things about artists in work/loft spaces is that they are not educated on the law. What rights they have, they don't know, and they're easily bullied."
66 Bell
Gale experienced the thrill and the heartbreak of his live/work education in the crazy, creative world of 66 Bell, one of Belltown's best-known artist communities in the 1990s.
It was an extraordinary and prolific time for him, where he and his neighbors would hold whole-building art openings, where he learned to do a back flip on the 14-foot swing in his loft, and where no one minded if you happened to meet your muse while the rest of world slept.
"Those were the golden years," he said. "Something happens when you live in this kind of environment. When you live without a lot of the common restraints, you see more options."
Gale and the other artists at 66 Bell were eventually priced out of the building by Belltown's redevelopment and forced to the city's margins yet again.
These days, affordable urban space is hard to come by, said Cathryn Vandenbrink, a member of the Seattle Arts Commission and the driving force behind the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts in Pioneer Square, a $16.5 million, 50-unit project that opened last month. The brewery, she said, could help fill a still-crucial need.
She and Gale, she said, "have the same goal of providing affordable space for people. This is one more great opportunity for artists."
With two ambitious projects on the horizon, there's something that feels an awful lot like momentum, many in the community say. And given that few can speak of the widespread evictions of the 1990s without bitterness, it's an especially welcome change.
Some people think Gale is a punk. Others call him a sell-out.
Here's a guy trying to straddle two worlds, telling authority types that artists are vital to the community, while rattling off fire-code rules to his peers.
His position can sometimes be awkward, his colleagues say, but Gale has a flair for the tightrope.
"His adaptability and his agility comes in handy," said Hagen-Kerr. "I'm sure he steps on toes, but his heart's in it. He really wants to reach a point in time where artists aren't just the shock troops of gentrification."
Ammo against doubters
The Arts Brewery is emerging from perhaps its most vulnerable stage as the dirty work is done and the tangible change begins. With the city's approval of the project, there is one more I-told-you-so to show doubters. Which is not to say Gale got a wink of sleep until he had it in hand.
"So much of what I do is imagine things," he said. "And then force the world to make it real."
Soon, new life will creep into the familiar building, and Gale's tenancy will lend the long-deserted place a bit of home.
"After this, there's no more risk involved," he said. "There is no question in my mind that this will come to full fruition."
In tribute to this more comfortable phase of the project, he hung a banner on the building's side to announce Arts Brewery to the world. The city made him remove it for safety reasons, but that doesn't matter. He still has that rusty rooftop chair and a heck of a view.
Lisa Heyamoto: 206-464-2149 or lheyamoto@seattletimes.com
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