The Pillsbury A Mill, known locally as "the one that didn't explode," has languished for years. Its gray, craggy, sagging walls await the right plan, the right moment, the right purpose.
Now a developer wants $2.9 million in tax-increment financing to turn it into housing -- oh, and if the city could issue $65 million in housing revenue bonds, that'd be ducky, too.
If you're thinking you'd like to live in an ancient structure where mustached men once toiled in the hellish heat of a summer afternoon -- a place where the dust was once as thick as a Sahara snowstorm and one errant spark could send everyone to kingdom come in chunk form -- there are some caveats.
The plan for the A Mill: subsidized housing ... for artists.
Hmmm. Downtown used to have lots of colorful, gritty buildings in historic industrial neighborhoods (translation: insect-infested, under-heated warehouses with snowdrifts of asbestos in the hallway), and they were great for artists. They were cheap, they had huge spaces for big projects like "Tetanus Medication," a 6-foot-wide ball of rusty nails.
You weren't supposed to live there, but people did, surviving on hotplate suppers and sponge baths from the communal toilet tank. It was noble and purifying and gave you something to look back on when you sold that severed goat head packed in Lucite to some gullible museum for $465,000.
Cities need incubators like this, but the condo boom meant that affordable quasi-legal artist housing was turned into residences. It's the curious cost of progress: So many people want to live down where the interesting artists live, so the buildings where the artists work are converted into homes. The artists go elsewhere and make that neighborhood interesting. Repeat the process until artists recolonize downtown, which emptied out when it stopped being interesting.
Perhaps it'll save time and effort to keep them close to downtown with the A Mill, but here's the problem: How do we know who's an artist?
