Erika Mijlin, Artifact Pictures
Erika Mijlin, a panelist on The View from Amber Street in the Creative Economy 201 track, highlights the panel’s content and her experience as a filmmaker working to balance the relationship between community, industry, and the creative economy.
The View From Amber Street is a documentary film about a pair of old industrial buildings in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia. The film documents the two buildings’ ongoing evolution from the centers of textile manufacturing into landmarks of the creative economy, and a home for both art and industry.
Julie Goldstein and I produced The View From Amber Street through our media production company, Artifact Pictures, which produces a range of projects, from documentary to animation. We quickly saw the potential to invest in creating a diverse community at the Amber Street buildings and Artifact Pictures has been housed in there since 2002.
In 2005, we began collecting interviews and researching the history of the building. We discovered that many of our neighbors, who were designers, manufacturers, artists and business owners, all had a similar appreciation of the unique building we shared, and had similar concerns about its tenuous future.
The film began to take shape, telling the story of our building as part of the pattern of urban gentrification. When manufacturing and industry leaves, it is gradually replaced by cheap space for artists, who then elevate interest in the neighborhood to a point at which they are priced out and replaced by more upscale residential tenants. At the time, it seemed that the Amber Street buildings were going to buck the trend and find a way to accommodate both art and industry simultaneously.
Through the course of making the film, we learned that the building was being sold to real estate developers. This change of ownership prompted some very serious questions about the future of the buildings. How would the building fare now that it had changed hands in the middle of a condo conversion craze? What would become of this fledgling art and industry hub? We felt invested in preserving our unique balance of art and industry and formed a coalition with a few fellow tenants to propose our version of the building’s future. Our film documents this process and its outcome, a uniquely Philadelphia story which has profound implications for the creative economy concept at large.
By placing the buildings within the history of their neighborhood, as well as the larger economic forces of which they are a microcosm, The View From Amber Street captures a building, a neighborhood, an economy, and a nation in a state of flux.
Beyond urban planning theories and speculation about what happens to the manufacturing class when factories close, or to the artists who pioneer our post-industrial communities, the film is a real-world, real-time example of an ongoing creative economy transformation, documented on film, and presented with a live discussion by the film’s participants. The film provides a unique perspective on this history in the making, made by people directly affected, and focusing on the intricate relationship between industrial and creative production.
As creative businesses, Artifact and our fellow tenants all respond differently to the pressures that we face. A few are featured below.
At Geiser and Son, one of the last bookbinders in Philadelphia, Allen Geiser and his sister Sandi have been running their shop for over 25 years. As the industry changes, they know what it means to be adaptable. As artists and musicians move in around them, the Geisers occasionally question their value as tenants to a building with a changing demographic, but gradually realize the common ground that a bookbinding business shares with the artists populating the building. “I’ve realized what we have in common with artists,” says Allen Geiser, “we have the ability to take raw materials, and through our own ingenuity, create something beautiful. I like to think of us as artists. In fact, my business card says Craftsman in the Art of Bookbinding.”
Mark Lueders owns and operates The Ceramics Shop, which manufactures and sells specialty products for the ceramics and pottery community. Mark believes in the power of creative businesses to innovate, adapt, and change the face of neighborhoods and cities all over America, but he also acknowledges the need for some support from the public sector. “If they could do something to help us stay here, or to grow, that would be great. I’m all for it. But they don’t always understand the problem. One group recently held a meeting about promoting local manufacturing, and they were handing out promotional mugs that were stamped ‘Made In China’! So that was the last meeting I went to with that group…”
Karen Bogut is one half of the clothing design studio Heyne Bogut. At their studio on Amber Street, Karen and husband Paul Bogut create hand-dyed and handcrafted items, and have built up a loyal audience of boutique retailers over the years that they have been in business. As experienced clothing designers and manufacturers, they have weathered the storms of textile outsourcing, deflated clothing prices, and the fleeting availability of affordable workspace. As Karen says, “It seems like as soon as artists like us take root and draw attention to a place, rents go up and we’re effectively asked to move on. It’s a very real situation we’ve faced repeatedly. We need landlords and cities that understand the value of our creative energy not only for their bottom line, but for the sustainability of ours, and for the bigger picture of where this city and this country are headed.”
