GREENPOINT — A nonprofit subsidized by the city to protect affordable studio space for artists is pulling the rug out from under a handful of artists, including one woman who started renting in the late 1990s, according to court records and interviews with the tenants.
"I'm going to have to find another space, I'm not really sure how to go about it. The whole art world has changed so much," said painter and ceramicist Nancy Leigh Burton, 72, who's rented a shared studio in the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center since May 1997. "I keep hoping we could stay."
The non-profit Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center now owns and manages five properties across North Brooklyn, though the sprawling industrial building at 1155 Manhattan Ave. where Burton's studio is located was GMDC's first. It receives city money and grants to rent out studio space to small manufacturers, artisans, artists and woodworkers at far less than the going market rate in the area.
Burton has been told she has to get out of her studio, though she and studio-mate Annette Cords, another artist who's also been in the building since the 1990s, are fighting the nonprofit in housing court and filed a parallel civil lawsuit.
Their lease expired in May of 2015 and for months they were assured by management that they were going to get a new one. The lease was stalled because they were told an architect needed to recalculate the square footage of the space because of construction work needed to add a new elevator, according to emails filed in a pending lawsuit.
But instead of a new lease they were served with 30 days notice last fall and told to get out, court records show.
"GMDC has acted unreasonably, arbitrarily and capriciously without justification, in breach of its implied covenants and obligations and good faith and fair dealing with plaintiffs," Cords and Burton claim in their suit. They're asking for a new lease and $250,000 damages.
Brian Coleman, the C.E.O. of GMDC , declined to comment on the specifics of Cords' and Burton's eviction, but he said that it was a "similar situation" to what was happening in another studio with a woodworker who was subletting part of the space in violation of his lease. He was also denied a lease renewal, Coleman said.
"This is New York City. Unfortunately these things happen sometimes," said Coleman, adding that they had renewed 8 five-year leases in the last year, four of whom were artists. The 1155 Manhattan Ave. building has 80 studios in total. "That's part of doing business."
"We're a landlord," he continued.
But the pair vehemently deny they've sublet the space. The third person on their lease Dennis Bellone got sick from esophageal cancer and then died last year, and in the months leading up to his death he'd rented out his portion of the space to Quincy Ellis just to cover his costs.
Burton and Cords had later tried to get Ellis on the new lease and he submitted tax forms as requested by GMDC management, emails submitted in court show.
"When GMDC came in and it sort of changed. At the beginning it seemed more organized," Burton said. The non-profit did major fixes to the building like adding a fire escape that made her feel much safer in the building.
"There were many, many improvements," said the artist, who for years has drawn inspiration from the industrial landscape surrounding the waterfront building, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the massive silver digester eggs of Newtown Creek's Waste Water Treatment Facility. "Now it seems like, I'm not sure what they're interested in. Not us."
Cords, 52, a graphic artist, weaver and assistant art professor at St. John's University argued that artists like she and Burton deserve to have an affordable place to create their work.
"It's important that you have artistic production and creativity at all levels," Cords said. "There are amazing museums, which is great. But to sustain that overall intensity you need to sustain it at all levels, including the ground level where artists make their work."
