In the early 1970s, Rick Claraval was an Indiana University of Pennsylvania student who’d drive to Pittsburgh to play at a table tennis club in East Liberty. He remembers passing a particular shuttered car dealership and wishing he lived in the space behind its huge first-floor windows.
A quarter-century later, Claraval, by then a sculptor and painter, became the first tenant in that very building. Spinning Plate Artist Lofts had 37 live/work units with below-market rents and a preference for artists. It was the brainchild of Linda Metropulos and Becky Burdick, arts professionals who knew the city had thousands of artists, many of them seeking affordable housing and studio space. Claraval lives there still.
While artists are famously resourceful, that need for housing has hardly lessened in the years since, as rents have risen and once-affordable neighborhoods have become prohibitively expensive.
Yet Spinning Plate, it turns out, foreshadowed more recent artist housing projects, including the South Side’s Brew House Arts Lofts, Braddock’s Ohringer Building, and the New Granada Square Apartments in the Hill District.
A handful of such buildings, of course, can’t accommodate every local artist who needs them. But there are far more options than before.
“Then they have to leave”
Pittsburgh in the mid-’90s was barely a decade removed from the collapse of the steel industry. It was still losing thousands of residents each year and dotted with underutilized buildings like the three-story, Art Deco-style former Constantin Pontiac on Baum Boulevard.
“We felt very strongly that artists were really important to a city's vitality and neighborhood redevelopment,” says Linda Metropulos today.
Working under the name Artists and Cities, Metropulos and Burdick also sought to combat a harmful dynamic.
“If you look at other cities where artists are often the first in, they're invited in to help revitalize, and then they have to leave because things get too successful and too expensive,” said Metropulos.
Inspired by a similar project in Minneapolis, Metropulos and Burdick persuaded two local foundations to invest $500,000 in a plan to do three real estate projects for artists. The first was Spinning Plate, which opened in 1998. Artists and Cities bought the 55,000-square-foot building for $550,000. The project also qualified for federal historic tax credits and, crucially, federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.
LIHTC, administered here by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, work like this: Developers sell the credits to finance renovations and keep rents low. (The buyers are typically corporations looking to lower their tax burdens.) Tenants, meanwhile, must earn below certain income thresholds. Of the several ways a project can qualify for the credits, one is to make sure at least 40% of the units are occupied by tenants with incomes averaging no more than 60% of a region’s median income, and to accept no tenants with income greater than 80% of the median.
And Spinning Plate gave preference to applicants who were artists of any kind — dancers, writers and actors as well as painters and sculptors.
This was well before East Liberty began to gentrify — before Target, Whole Foods and even Home Depot. For Claraval, it all translated into a one-bedroom apartment he could also work in, with huge windows, 15-foot ceilings and lots of natural light, for about $450 a month. (It wasn’t the ground-floor space he’d once coveted, though; that became the building’s in-house gallery.)
Back then, Spinning Plate was a good deal. Today, after years of gentrification, it’s even better. While his rent’s gone up to about $950, elsewhere in East Liberty, even studio apartments without working space run twice that.
And Claraval has needed that space. He spent much of his career sculpting high-density polystyrene, which comes in tall white blocks he stores in the apartment. He works at a bench equipped with saws, files and more. His sculptures — fantastical human forms — are hung from the walls, seeming to emerge from them.
He’s shown his work dozens of times in the Spinning Plate gallery, including in a solo exhibit that opened in July.
Like most artists, Claraval has never made a living solely off his art. Several years ago, after four decades on the job, he was laid off as a maker of wax molds for a local jeweler. Now retired and dealing with health problems, he doesn’t sculpt any more, focusing instead on charcoal drawings. But he still loves Spinning Plate.
“This has been great to live here, I really like it,” he said. “The notion of being with a bunch of other artists, mainly. ... Oh, and the gallery, too. The gallery is huge here. Just having a great space to show your work.”
More options
Metropolus and Burdick (who died in 2015) went on to do two more projects based on a similar model. On 43rd Street in Lawrenceville, they turned an old icehouse into Icehouse Studios, with 32 affordable working spaces. And on Butler Street, in 2005, they opened Blackbird Lofts and Artist Studios, a new building with 15 for-sale units and first-floor commercial space.
But Spinning Plate was not the first formal affordable housing for artists in Pittsburgh. In 1991, the artists who had been occupying the South Side’s old Duquesne Brewery, with its iconic clock tower, organized as a co-operative. For years the building served as a local cultural hub, providing live/work space and hosting gallery exhibits and a wide variety of live performances, from an annual puppetry festival to touring rock bands.
And subsequent projects have followed Spinning Plate’s lead in using Low-Income Tax Credits to offer affordable housing to artists.
In 2012, the Brew House co-op, which had struggled to maintain and improve the hulking brick complex, entered into a partnership with Trek Development to remake the site. The new Brew House Artist Lofts included 76 units, of which 48 are below-market, as well as a first-floor art gallery and other studio-only rental spaces. Affordable studio apartments start at $400.
In 2020, developer Gregg Kander opened the Ohringer Building, a seven-story former furniture business in Braddock remodeled into 37 affordable studio and one-bedroom apartments with a preference for artists, a community room and basement studio space. Rents start at $750. (The Ohringer too is managed by Trek.)
And in 2023, the Hill Community Development Corp. opened the New Granada Square Apartments, a new construction with 40 units of artist-preference affordable housing on Centre Avenue. One-bedrooms go for as little as $635 and two-bedrooms for $735 and up.
For Spinning Plate, a few things have changed over the years. While Artists and Cities still owns the building, for instance, it’s run by the nonprofit Action Housing, where Metropolus works as a consultant. And while Spinning Plate’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit expired years ago, as a mission-driven nonprofit, it continues to abide by the same rules for tenant income.
'They’re not working a regular W-2 job'
Still, with affordable housing ever more challenging to find for everyone, why all the concern for artists?
For one, artists as a group face unique challenges finding housing. While some artists are very well paid, most are not, at least for their art. And any income from art tends to flow irregularly.
“It’s not a biweekly [paycheck],” said artist Cue Perry, who was the first tenant at the Ohringer Building. “Sometimes you get paid every week. Sometimes you get paid every day. Sometimes you get paid every other month.”
In other words, art work is largely gig work, said Natalie Sweet, executive director of Brew House Arts, a nonprofit that works with artists, runs the Brew House gallery, and has a small ownership stake in the Brew House lofts. “They’re working job-to-job, they’re not working a regular W-2 job. So finding that proof of stable income can be a challenge for artists.”
If artists want to make art where they live, it gets even harder.
“It’s impossible!” said Michel Tsouris, a painter who lives and works at Spinning Plate. “To find a place where you can feel free to paint. The landlords, ... unless they have a warehouse, they’re really not interested in somebody doing that in their place.”
Yet some in community development see artists as desirable neighbors. Marimba Milliones heads the Hill Community Development Corp., which built the New Granada Square Apartments. The group’s goals include revitalizing the Hill District’s historic Centre Avenue corridor.
“You can’t do that without supporting cultural workers and creatives,” Milliones said. “So we’re very much focused on making sure that artists have an opportunity to stay in the community, not just to kind of contribute to a cool environment, ... but rather that they are recognized as full citizens and contributors to both the cultural and economic fabric of our communities and city.”
Indeed, affordable artist-preference housing has served as an incubator for the city’s arts scene.
When Patrick Jordan moved into Spinning Plate around 2004, he was a young actor not long out of the University of Pittsburgh, launching his own theater company. Starting with its second production, Kenneth Lonergan’s “This is Our Youth,” the troupe rehearsed in Jordan’s loft and in the first-floor lobby. Today, that company, barebones productions, is in its 22nd season and one of the city’s most acclaimed theater troupes. (Its theater, coincidentally, is in Braddock, just down the street from the Ohringer Building.)
Having such spaces is valuable even for artists who don’t necessarily live in them. Jewelery-maker Cat Luck (who uses they/them pronouns) was struggling to find studio space when they started renting a small corner of the Brew House in 2020. In those days, they were living in a series of small apartments around town, but that affordable studio was a turning point.
“Brew House has really been an essential place for me to grow my business, spread out, have access to artists, other resources and things like that — [to] be more in the community than just [in] a room in my house,” said Luck, who now has a larger studio in the building and occupies a market-rate loft there too.
'A lot of energy'
Cue Perry said he “was couch surfing and such” when the opportunity to live at the Ohringer appeared. His studio apartment is not set up to paint in, but he’s at home in his corner of the basement, where the laundry room and storage lockers share room with small studios.
“They really, really delivered for what I was looking for,” he said.
Ideally, artist-preference buildings are full of, well, artists. That’s been the case at least part of the time at Spinning Plate. Jordan recalls when he lived there in the ’00s.
“There was a sense of community to the place,” he said. “Everyone kind of had been in everybody's apartments, everyone had been invited over. It was like kind of like a cool art dorm.”
But the term “artist preference” has meant different things at different buildings over time. On waiting lists, for example, artists can be bumped up over non-artists.
But what’s an artist? Some places ask to see portfolios; others just take an applicant’s word.
That, and a natural variation in applicants, can mean the proportion of working artists in a given building will rise or fall over time.
Painter Michel Tsouris, a Pittsburgh native, has lived at Spinning Plate since returning to town in 2018.
“I was really disappointed in what I found when I got here, because there really wasn’t much of a community left,” Tsouris said.
Units were occupied, yes, but largely not by artists. Hallway walls were likewise bare of art. So Tsouris started hanging her own works. Others followed.
And gradually, she said, she saw more artists moving in.
“Now it seems we have more of a majority of artists in the building,” said Tsouris, who in the ’90s occupied studio space in the Brew House, among other places.
And even as the artistic community rebounds at Spinning Plate, Tsouris said, the building suits her needs as a painter.
“It’s lovely for me, these very tall ceilings,” she added. “It’s light, there’s a lot of energy in here.”
“I like it here,” she said. “I do like it here, I have to say.”
