Eric Rudd Provides Space for Ambitious Artists and Creators
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Artist, community activist, former candidate for mayor, author, property owner, and businessman — Eric Rudd of North Adams is a multifaceted person.
He considers himself first and foremost an artist, but the quick sell-out of space in his Eclipse Mill Artist Studio Lofts project in a long underutilized mill on Union Street in the city has brought him to the fore as a developer and businessman in recent media reports. He announced his plan for the 120,000-square-foot building last October, and all the space was spoken for within a couple months, surprising many.
"It's not rented. These are condominiums, so they're buying. They're moving to North Adams, and essentially they're buying a loft," Rudd said in a recent interview in the mill.
"The whole project's sold out," he said. "I'm not surprised, but I'm surprised by the speed. I didn't think it would happen like this.
"What's interesting is just how fast it all happened. The Eclipse Mill was vacant for two decades. It would have been vacant for another decade."
There will be 36 live-work units, and seven or eight retail work-only studios or galleries.
"Each floor has a gallery, and then there will be an additional two or three galleries. So I would hope by this time next year there's about seven galleries operating in the mill," Rudd said. "And we're going to have open studios."
There will frequently be show openings at the galleries, he said: "So there will be a certain energy going on here."
Renovation of the mill is going slowly, but Rudd is hoping to get a few residents into the building by May.
"Everybody's had a hard winter. It's always something. I come here and there's a little puddle in the basement that's not supposed to be there. Luckily the plumber's here," he said. "We've had a few bumps, and I've just decided that life is too short to lose sleep over it. I mean if there's that much demand, everybody can wait an extra month or two. We're not talking about years.
"It's not a fun project, mills are never fun. And even though I think that I know as much about renovating mills as anybody else, there's always new surprises, and they're not always fun surprises," Rudd said. "They're rarely fun surprises."
"I'm hoping by the end of the year the whole project's essentially finished," he said. "And that's a little bit of a push, but it probably can happen. There's a critical slow point, where it's just all the services and utilities and figuring out things."
"What we're doing now is a lot of the slow stuff," he said, "a lot more the planning work."
One task is to create five chimneys to rise up 60 feet in the interior of the building. However, when main utility lines are put in, "then it's like cookie-cutter. Then you can do one [unit]. You do one or two, then you learn all the mistakes, and then the rest should be a breeze by comparison," he said. "The first steps are the hardest."
"Many of the people who are purchasing units will want to customize the interior," he said. "And so we're allowing time so that they can figure out what they want to do."
Rudd is owner of the Beaver Mill on Beaver Street, which houses both his own artistic endeavors and the non-profit Contemporary Artists Center. He successfully revitalized the "Flatiron Building" on Eagle Street, and has installed his artistic Chapel for Humanity in a former Unitarian church building on Summer Street in the city. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of North Adams in 1997.
He is author of the recently released self-published books "The Arts Studio/Loft Manual: For Ambitious Artists and Creators" and "The Art World Dream: Alternative Strategies For Working Artists."
"People have moved to North Adams because of the books. I mean I kind of tell the world this is really a great place to be as an artist," Rudd said. "But it's hard for artists to move to the area, because they need studio space, and the studio spaces are difficult to come by. We're talking about spaces that are more than the size of a room, so a room in a house doesn't really make it.
"So that's why the Eclipse Mill's very important, because all of a sudden these people can have 2,500-square-feet," he said. "There's a few other mills that could be converted. I don't think any mill's going to be as inexpensive for artists as this one, because we're taking advantage of the fact that a lot of work had already been done to the mill and because I'm doing some other cost-cutting measures.
But as other mills get done the spaces will be smaller and they'll be more expensive.
"But there's room for, I'd say, at least 500 more units in North Adams," Rudd said. "I think that North Adams in two-to-three years can have 500 more people. And that will bring $7 million a year to the local economy, and it will bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. I think the potential of North Adams is really unlimited right now."
Artists of all kinds are coming to North Adams from all over the country: painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, writers, multimedia artists, he said.
"I'm hoping that the Eclipse Mill is a major stop after MASS MoCA, that visitors will stop at the Eclipse Mill, go to the galleries. There will be quite a few artists who would want to participate in open studios.
"And after that, of course, go to the Beaver Mill, where there's the Dark Ride Project and the Contemporary Artists Center has five galleries, so there will be these other stops to make," he said. "And then they'll be all linked up with other things like a Chapel for Humanity and Studio Works ... and other kinds of alternative galleries and spaces around town."
"So I go back to what I've been saying for 12 years is that my dream for North Adams is a cultural theme park where Mass MoCA is sort of the roller coaster attraction, and then the Beaver Mill and the Eclipse Mill are the other big rides," he said.
"And then there are maybe 20 other places to go, and organizations like the Contemporary Artists Center, Inkberry, Main Street Stage [which] all contribute to making this kind of a very lively environment."
Rudd said typical developers will chop up a mill building into segments to rent to artists cheaply, and when the building becomes valuable they push out the artists. This is why he encourages artists to purchase their studios.
"I'm an artist who happens to be doing some development work. A full-time developer would have taken the Eclipse Mill, divided it up for artists. Artists would have come here and said ... 'not interested,' " Rudd said.
"It was the way I designed it, it's the way I programmed it, it's the way that I'm doing a lot of detail work. It's the way that I hope that this building will be linked to other things going on in North Adams that makes it attractive to artists and resonates with artists. And I'm an artist talking to an artist, and they understand that.
"Also, I think that it's a very careful collaboration with the city, with the mayor, with the building department and the fire department, electrical department, because this whole notion of live-work is pretty new and runs contrary to normal building codes," he said. "Other cities have done it and they've generally been a failure wherever it's been done."
"Now, there are ways to do it very simply and at a reasonable cost to create a safe environment for artists and one where they can live," he said. "But it has to be done with a lot of thought, and most big cities don't have the people they can talk to to coordinate all those things. In a small community everybody knows one another and we can get in the same room and we can say: 'Let's figure it out.' They're doing that here.
"And it's a work-in-progress, and the Eclipse Mill's pioneering it to a certain extent, and once this is done there will be opportunities for additional buildings to be done. But this is going to be sort of setting the example as to how it should be done."
Tags: Eclipse Mill, mill reuse, Real Estate,
