Tag Archives: New York City

The Art$

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It was weird.

Dear reader, your Man About Town has been to the very precipice, where I stood and looked down.  It was weird.

You see, it all started when some of the lovely folks over at the Municipal Art Society (Hi Mary! Hi Anne!  Hello Vin!), invited me to come and do a research project for them called “Who Pays for the Arts.”  The job was to tool through data provided by the Cultural Data Project (CDP) and better understand how arts organizations in NYC make their money.  To whit:  in order to apply for public funding in NYC, you have to submit, like, a gajillion data points to CDP.

Exciting!  Data geek that I am my little heart just fluttered with glee.  Numbers!  Charts!  Oh yeah!  Uh huh!  That’s right!

So I started digging through the data and the very first question I asked was, you know, what does the distribution curve look like?  Given that I’m looking at total 2010 revenues for 723 organizations, and that the whole group all mushed together made $2.5 billion, how many groups are on the high end, how many in the middle, and how many on the low end?

And this is what I found: Continue reading →

It Came from Chicago

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Reposted from by guest blog on Rooflines.

It Came from Chicago

Let’s just come right out and say it:  New York City is the best.  At everything.  We are the smartest, the hardest working, the most creative, and the best-looking.  If you trace every social innovation of the past century back to its roots, you’ll find some determined, no-nonsense, big-hearted denizen of the Big Apple looking up from their work with a twinkle in their eye.  The settlement house movement?  Yo!  The community development corporation?  Booyah!  The artisanal industry incubator?  Hoo hoo hoo!

Pro bono service provision to the public sector?  Oops, wait.

Chicago’s better at it.  And it’s coming to town. Continue reading →

In Praise of (Stinky, Noisy) Bars

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Reposted from Rooflines.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper

The vaunted “third space” isn’t home, and isn’t work – it’s more like the living room of society at large.  It’s a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect.  It’s a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection.  It’s a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle.

And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar. Continue reading →

NY City Council Testimony on Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts

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This past Friday (May 11, 2012)  I had the pleasure of testifying before a joint hearing of the Committee on Small Business, and the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations of the New York City Council.  The topic?  “New York City’s Cultural Sector and Derivative Small Businesses.”

Hello!  Mouthful!

But I was asked to offer framing comments to complement testimony by my colleagues  from the Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts Working Group.  I’ve skipped the preliminaries (you know, hello and thank you committee Chairperson for this opportunity to yadda yadda) and cut right to the meat and potatoes:   Continue reading →

What’s Next in Arts and Economic Development

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Reposted from my guest blog on Rooflines.

My latest rock musical: The Bowery Wars (Part II)

There’s something you should know about me:  I’m a professional amateur.  For the past 7 years I’ve been composing and performing music in original theater works with my wife’s company, Downtown Art.  We’ve just opened our latest piece, Bowery Wars (Part 2), a rock musical about the history of the Lower East Side 100 years ago, Tammany Hall politics, gang warfare, and Romeo & Juliet.  It rocks, and yes you should come see it.

But I’m not just here to flog my latest masterpiece.  We professional amateurs are artists who fly under the radar.  We don’t make our livelihood from our art.  We do other things to put bread and butter together.  I happen to be a highly compensated community development consultant, but many of my peers are dog walkers, administrative assistants, massage therapists, and restaurant workers.  (By the way, in another shameless plug, you should check out my brother Dan’s blog on the lives of restaurant workers and artists in Chicago).  I also serve on the Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts Working Group, and I’m currently doing some research for the Municipal Art Society on revenue trends for the nonprofit cultural sector.  In my previous work I ran an “Arts and Economic Development” giving strategy from the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation along with my colleagues Gary, Alessandra and Sam (hi guys!).

All in all, you might say I have a rather engaged perspective on the question of where arts and economic development intersect, and where they don’t.  There are four major trends right now in NYC. Continue reading →

Building a Healthy Nonprofit Ecosystem

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Hurricane flooded I-10/I-610 interchange, New Orleans, LA

Reposted from my guest blog on Rooflines:  In the halcyon days of my youth, way back in 2006, I went to New Orleans.  I traveled there at the behest of the corporation that I worked for at the time, as we had made a $2 million disaster recovery commitment to the city, and we were trying to figure out how to spend it.

Now, there’s two things you need to know about spending $2 million: (1) that’s a lot of money, and (2) it’s really not very much money at all.  When you get right down to it, in dealing with a post-crisis situation of the scale of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the troubled city of New Orleans, spending that kind of money in a way that was both responsible and impactful was a damned hard thing to do.

So there I am, the well-meaning Yankee, fresh off the plane in my shiny city slicker best, traipsing through the Lower 9th Ward.  I was there several months after the floods had receded, but it was still a silent, mud-stained, wracked and ruined wasteland.  I remember picking up a dirty and detached doll’s head (Woody, from Toy Story – a memento I’ve kept with me always.  He’s staring at me as I write this now), and thinking, well, I’ve got to start somewhere.

Continue reading →

Brooklyn’s Participatory Budgeting Process

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NYC Council Member Brad Lander

Just a very brief posting to share with you all a nice blog written about Brooklyn Council Member Brad Lander’s Participatory Budgeting process.  Council Member Lander has turned over the decision-making process for spending $1 million in city capital funds for his district to the residents themselves.  JC does a nice job of capturing both the challenges and the enthusiasm for the effort.