Drive through Station North these days and you'll see the evidence of a neighborhood on the rise. The 100-acre arts district, which sits northeast of Penn Station, is flanked by areas that have suffered from years of disinvestment. But here, bars, restaurants, theater companies, and music and art venues are now cropping up, and there's activity on the streets, even after dark.

At the center of Station North, more symbolically than geographically, is the Copy Cat building, the former warehouse that has long served as an affordable home for neighborhood artists. The red brick behemoth, standing at a slightly elevated point on Guilford Avenue, draws its nickname from the billboard for the Copy Cat Printing Company that once stood on its roof. Today, it holds up the official Station North sign, faded and spray-painted in three places with the word "Love."
 
One could say that Station North—which is bounded by Greenmount Avenue to the east, the railroad tracks to the south (Penn Station, however, is not in the district), Howard Street to the west, and 20th Street to the north—was founded on the Copy Cat. J. Kirby Fowler Jr., president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore and a member of the Station North Arts and Entertainment Inc. board, says the building and its inhabitants were integral to winning arts district status in 2002 under then-mayor Martin O'Malley. The designation allows the city to use tax credits to lure businesses and investment. "If the building was not full of artists," says Fowler, "[the neighborhood] would certainly lack the charm that exists there."

But as the district gains steadier footing, its ragtag flagship building is teetering on the edge of gentrification, leading some to ask, if the Copy Cat as we know it disappears, what will happen to Station North's artists?




Built around the turn of the last century, the more-than-200,000-square-foot structure was once home to the Crown Cork and Seal Company. Charles Lankford, who also owns the Copy Cat Annex (see October '08 Urbanite), has been its sole owner since 1983. He was running a computer company out of the building when, as an experiment, he rented out some of the fifth floor as low-rent art studios. Some of the artists started living in their studios, leading to a 2001 lawsuit filed by the city to get the building up to code. Lankford eventually had the building's zoning changed to office/residential, and now it serves as live/work space for several hundred residents, many of them painters, photographers, architects, and musicians. Arts collective Wham City (and its most well-known member, musician Dan Deacon) got their start in Baltimore in the Copy Cat, although they have since relocated.

Entering through one of the green metal doors that face Guilford Avenue, a visitor can either climb the wooden stairs or take a chance on the squeaking, clanking elevator. Upstairs, nondescript doors open into spaces Andy Warhol would have loved: wide open lofts with high ceilings and large paned windows that expose a view of the city, laid out like a pop-up book below. Some apartments are more polished than others, but there are common threads: drywall partitions for bedrooms, collections of screenprinting or band rehearsal equipment, mismatched furniture, free-standing bars, and the occasional tire swing hanging from the ceiling.

Not surprisingly, the building has developed a reputation for rowdy parties and loud music shows. (There's a "NO RAVES" clause in leases.) "It's kind of like a free-for-all down there," says Abu Moulta Ali, president of the New Greenmount West Community Association. "If they have one working bathroom, they're fine." Lankford, the owner, has often clashed with tenants and city code enforcers. City housing inspectors who toured the building in March found fifty-four code violations—many of them created by tenants, they said. "Overall, is the building safer than it was ten years ago? Yes, definitely," says Jim Vose, chair of the board of the nonprofit Station North Arts and Entertainment Inc. "But there are definitely things there that are not right."

Lankford says his goal is to provide affordable housing for artists. Rents range from $450 for a small apartment to $2,200 for the larger units, which are usually shared by three or four people (at least officially—it's common to squeeze in six or seven residents, several of whom are likely not on the lease). But keeping up with the code requirements is costly, he says. "It's a very expensive building to heat, and electricity costs have gone way up." He has evicted a lot of problem tenants, he says, and annually spends $12,000 on graffiti removal and $10,000 to repair damages. (The Wham City members were "the party animals," he says. "They graffitied everything.")

Still, despite concerns about the building's condition, residents insist that the open layout—they often access their apartments through their neighbors'—and lax rules create a friendly and productive community, one that holds as many potluck suppers and life drawing classes as it does all-night parties. "[The Copy Cat] allows artists and creative types to flourish and do what they want with limited interference," says Joe Rabinowitz, an architect who lived with his wife in an art-filled 2,000-square-foot loft for five years (see July '06 Urbanite).

Michael Farley, a senior interdisciplinary sculpture major at MICA, says the building is a safe haven and a breeding ground for art. "Whole new art movements, new kinds of music [are being invented in the Copy Cat]," he says. "The way people write about lower Manhattan in the '70s and '80s, they will write about Baltimore in the 2000s."


When rumors began circulating last winter that Lankford planned to sell the building for transformation into smaller, higher-dollar apartments, residents were concerned. A core group of four, plus a rotating cast of about ten others, tried to form a tenants' union, gathering several times from January to March to share food, cigarettes, and beer. But the freethinking Copy Cat crowd proved resistant to organization. (When asked why she and her friends hadn't attended a tenants' union meeting, one resident said simply, "We have lives.") The activists had heard of other artists banding together and buying their buildings, but they weren't sure how to begin, or whether they could find the capital and the support from other residents, who often cycle in and out of the building unpredictably. They considered approaching the city for help, but were afraid officials would condemn the building. Notes from one meeting say, "IF ALL ELSE FAILS: A massive artist protest including dancing banana and all the trannys in the city to picket … and invite all press and tv."

Eventually, the rumors of a sale died down, and with them went the efforts to organize tenants. But the wolf is still at the door. Lankford says he has no sales agent or contract on the Copy Cat, but he indicates that he would entertain an offer. Joe McNeely, executive director of the Central Baltimore Partnership, believes that the building's sale and redevelopment is inevitable. The partnership, along with the Charles North Community Association and the Baltimore Development Corporation, just released a new master real estate development strategy for Charles North. The plan will encourage the city to partner with private property owners to create large-scale, mixed-use commercial and residential development, making Charles North the premier transit-oriented development in Maryland. McNeely says one of his goals is to find new housing in the district for the Copy Cat's artists before the development begins. "If we don't do it now," he says, "it'll be too late."

Several alternatives are already in the works. On the 1600 block of Latrobe Street, one block north of the Copy Cat, East-West Properties has rehabbed two strips of alley houses, leaving them mostly unfinished, with plywood and cement floors, exposed bricks and beams, and raw sheetrock walls, plus artist-friendly amenities like slop sinks. All are rented at $875 per month, and their tenants include MICA students and professors, and at least one working artist. The New Greenmount West Community Association has tentative plans to develop ten scattered rowhouses into affordable artist housing, using the same formula as East-West. In the 1500 block of Greenmount Avenue, the nonprofit neighborhood revitalization group Jubilee Baltimore, working with the Philadelphia-based Reinvestment Fund, plans to start construction in January 2010 on rowhouses and an apartment building that would include common studio and gallery space and a roof deck—a design that was influenced by focus groups of area artists. The apartments will have "loosely defined" floor plans, says Charlie Duff, Jubilee's president, and be "as open as building codes allow." Duff projects that rent will start around $700 a month, and wants to guarantee that the rents will remain affordable.

"Even though the Copy Cat is great, it doesn't necessarily serve all parts of the artist market," says Station North Inc.'s Vose. "We want to build the artists into the neighborhood across the board, not just in one location."

But not everyone has given up on saving the Copy Cat. One local developer, Kim Forsyth, says she has approached Lankford with a plan to improve the building and keep it affordable for current residents. So far, he has turned down her offers. Artspace, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit development group, has considered taking on the Copy Cat, and while the group decided the project lacked necessary city support, its November 2007 report states, "… we believe this building should remain in consideration until circumstances dictate otherwise."

For the time being, at least, the meltdown of the real estate market seems to be holding the Copy Cat in its current limbo. Regardless of who owns the building, Lankford says, "There's no likelihood that anything is going to happen for four to five years, with the market doing what it's doing."

Michael Farley, who moved out of the building this fall due to a dispute with Lankford, hopes that's true. He spent the summer of 2008 on an independent urban studies trip to Spain and Morocco and has become interested in the writings of urbanist Jane Jacobs and the work of the Situationists, a group of 1960s European artist/activists who were inspired by Marxism. "I think that space informs actions," Farley says. "[The neighborhood] needs the Copy Cat as the focal point. A cultural movement needs critical mass that you don't get living in a house next to someone else."

—Marianne K. Amoss