Trenton Downtowner June 2009
| Where industry once thrived, could artists fill the void? The Roebling complex is going to waste, but one artist has an idea for putting it to use. |
That is to say, junk. He takes trash and turns it into art. And now he has found one of the biggest pieces of junk in Trenton: an enormous abandoned factory. He believes this factory, the Roebling complex, is ripe to be recycled and turned into an artists’ colony.
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| Artist Pete Abrams has a bold plan to transform an industrial ruin into an artistic haven. Suzette Lucas. | ||
The factory was once a place where industry thrived, and Abrams, the artist who owns the Modern Metalwork studio, envisions it as a place where once again, raw materials would be taken out of the waste stream turned into useful objects. He envisions dozens of artists sharing workspace and tools, forming the core of an eco-friendly arts community that would eventually lead to the revival of the area.
There’s a long way to go. The place is a bit of a fixer-upper.
“You’ll see the roof there? It could use a little work,” he said.
Rain was pouring down and pooling in the dirt where Abrams was pointing, in the cavernous interior of the former Roebling factory on Route 129 and Hamilton Avenue.
“I’ve got a couple of different techniques that we’re interested in trying as far as roofing techniques,” he said. “There are 4,000 windows you’ll see. About 2,000 of them are in decent shape. It leaves a little room for fenestration techniques.”
Abrams favors making things by taking advantage of waste in some other area. In his studio on Allen Street, he fabricates metal fire bowls out of old elevator cable. Now he wants to take that same approach and apply it to one building in the disused seven-acre Roebling complex in Trenton; acres of old industrial buildings with leaky roofs and rotting floors and rusting machinery.
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“There are rolls and rolls of this wax paper that was left over from when one of the other buildings had a wax box factory. You take them, and, just, it’s a band-aid for sure. Maybe it won’t even work … but again there’s this paper that’s gonna get thrown away; there’s this place that needs to be enclosed. Let’s just try it. It would take a week or two weeks tops to see if that works.”
If that sounds like an off-the-wall solution, Abrams doesn’t care. What’s the harm in letting him try? No one else is using the building, he points out. The abandoned factory, built as part of an early 20th-century steel rope making complex, occupies prime real estate in Trenton across the street from the Sovereign Bank Arena. Its sole purpose at the moment is to store dirt for bull riding events and monster truck rallies at the arena.
There was also evidence of squatters on a May afternoon: a two-by-four smoldered in an impromptu fireplace made of bricks.
It’s a sad state for a building whose owners once promised it would become “Hollywood on the Delaware.”
That’s one other thing standing in the way of Abarams’ idea: he doesn’t own the site and has no intention of buying it. But using it and not buying it would be more beneficial to the city than what the previous tenants did, he said.
In 2003, Manex, the company that won an academy award for its special effects in The Matrix, agreed to purchase the property from the Mercer County Improvement Authority for $2.5 million and turn it into a movie Mecca.
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But no work was ever done on the site, except the painting of the Manex logo on the water tower, and the company soon fell behind on its mortgage.
Phil Miller, head of the MCIA, said the court battles just wrapped up at the end of 2008, allowing the county to take control of the property again and solicit ideas for redevelopment. He said the redevelopment plan, created by the county and the city, is to create a mixed-use development with shops and condominiums. There have been six proposals so far from different developers, Miller said.
But he is only considering serious offers, he said.
“I’m trying to do it carefully so that when we announce that something’s happening, it’s gonna happen and it’s going to be for real,” he said.
Abrams said he is only interested in using the building temporarily – until the permanent developer moves in and does something with the site. In the meantime, he said, the place would only take a reasonable amount of work to be transformed into the Trenton Atelier, a 60,000 square-foot haven and workshop for artists.
They don’t need heat or very much light, Abrams said. Some artists are willing to work in the cold, and there’s plenty of natural light in the daytime filtering in through the many windows.
Accessible from rail and road, the site could give artists a space to work together and share ideas and resources.
“There’s a niche of people who just want to make stuff, who want to create and want to be around other people who want to learn and explore,” he said. “They’re not interested in having the fanciest cars or anything like that. They just want to make things. And to have a place where they can do that and make large scale pieces or do whatever. I mean, I’ve got welders, I’ve got machinery. I’ve got all this crap that I’m more than happy to bring over here. And I know there’s lots of other stuff in basements and garages all over this town that people would be like, ‘Well, what about Uncle Mort’s table saw. We’re not using that?’ So there’s a place for it here.”
It’s not just a great place for visual artists, he said, but for performers. There’s an old loading dock that would make a perfect natural stage.
Abrams isn’t alone in thinking this is a good idea. Barbara Stange, a consultant and former owner of the Simply Natural Living health food store in Ewing, said she thinks the building would also be a good place for yoga, dance and tai-chi classes.
“You could create a synergy of like-minded people to go in and turn the space around,” she said. “It could be something that goes from being an eyesore to an asset for the city of Trenton and Mercer County as a whole.”
It’s not easy to dismiss Abrams as a dreamer, given his history of actually doing something much like this on a smaller scale. When Abrams, a New York City native and Princeton resident bought his Allen Street studio in 2003, he found it in a similar state of disrepair. The Allen Street warehouse is only a sixth the size of the Roebling factory, but Abrams found the resources to fix it up.
His studio is now a money-making business, with Abrams along with other artists selling fire bowls, architectural railings and picture frames. Abrams believes he could attract enough volunteers to make something similar happen on a larger scale.
He said he wouldn’t be expecting to build the Atelier on handouts.
“I have a pile of programs going,” he said. “Right now it’s just me, but the concept is working, as it turned out. For me, it’s fire bowls and picture frames, all of that sort of crap. and I could train people to make these things. I don’t want to expect people to just give me money. Something has got to be done in exchange for it. That’s why the idea about it being sustainable is that it’s not just expecting money to be rained down on you because you’re doing a good thing. People here are going to come and come home with a picture frame and spend 50 bucks … I can do that. I can make this whole thing happen on f—ing picture frames.”
There’s another building on the Roebling site - a four-story factory structure with leaky roofs and warped wooden floors. Abrams sees it as a gold mine of materials waiting for someone to make useful, even though only squatters are making use of it. There’s discarded steel cable all over the floor, and giant rolls of paper. On the top floor is the most impressive relic of all, a two story tall piece of green steel machinery surmounted by a rusty catwalk with no handrails.
To Abrams, the machine is emblematic of American culture’s lost willingness to take risk in accomplishing a goal. There are no safety cages or guardrails, so the workers there had to watch their step and be careful as they worked. He said the current generation is being trained not to think that way.
“We’re basically raising a whole generation of people who don’t have to watch where they step and who don’t have to be responsible because they know that whatever happens, they can sue,” he said.
Abrams has no interest in using the second building as part of the Atelier, however.
“I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid,” he said.
County officials have spoken with Abrams and other local artists about the idea. They have not decided one way or another, but Miller said there were several concerns.
Miller said it was unclear how much it would cost to fix the building up to the point where it would meet code for occupation.
The second concern was that once artists occupied the building, the government would have to trust them to leave as soon as the developer moved in.
“It’s safe to say there’s general concern over what is ‘temporary,’” Miller said.
Abrams said he is tired of seeing project after project in Trenton started and never finished, which is why he’s decided to take matters into his own hands.
Abrams said there is an event scheduled for June 21 at noon at the Roebling Complex to showcase the building’s potential as an artists’ Atelier. He said he believes he could raise the money necessary for repairs if he was able to persuade the county to give him permission to use it. He just wants to be turned loose.
Asked if he would need help to bring his Atelier to life, Abrams said he would need to find others willing to get on board with his vision of a community dedicated to living within the constraints of the planet’s resources.
“It’s not gonna happen by just sitting around going ‘Somebody else is gonna do it,’” he said. “It’s gonna take somebody actually doing it. As I said before, I don’t have the brains to pull this off by myself; I don’t have the bucks to pull this off by myself. The only thing I have is the balls.”
