You learn in Economics 101 about the market. Supply and demand. The allocation of resources. What the market will bear. And how it all works pretty much magically. Something about an invisible hand.
And then there’s the story of a Staunton art gallery named Kronos, whose owner kept things going in the face of the economic downturn by shifting the focus from art to music and from adult coinosseurs of high-dollar art pieces to kids that often didn’t have five bucks to plunk down for a ticket.
We could call Kronos a particular sometimes offending finger on that invisible hand of economics.
“A fait accompli” is how Kronos owner Kevin Postupack described the series of events that led to the gallery being forced out on the street over the weekend, beginning with the visit to the Wharf location from the Staunton Police Department last month to address complaints about the people, by and large teens, hanging out front of Kronos before and during events, then the followup visit from the city fire department a week later that ended with the fire marshal informing Postupak that the venue could not be used to host concert events in the future given the lack of a second ingress/egress point to the upstairs space.
Which is, like supply and demand and the rest from economics, perfectly logical. Safety is paramount in terms of considerations, and having walked the stairs up to the old Kronos a couple of times myself I can easily see why the fire marshal would not bend on that point.
Just as I can understand why Postupack is having such a hard time finding another space downtown. He had a good deal, a sweetheart deal, really, in the Wharf, paying $500 a month, including utilities, and what he’s getting in terms of offers from other downtown property owners and managers is nowhere near that. Postupack told me the best deal he’s been given to date is $1,500 a month, with two and three and four thousand a month a part of the mix.
“I’m from the point of view, like Proudhon, that property is theft,” said the outspoken Postupack, who marketed his gallery using the catchphrase “Art is Dangerous” and otherwise doesn’t shy away from saying precisely what’s on his mind.
“Four thousand a month is $48,000 a year, and that’s a good salary for someone working five days a week, eight hours a day, 52 weeks a year. And they’re making that just owning something. To me, that’s immoral,” Postupack said.
Postupack offered a … well, interesting, if nothing else … idea for what Staunton can do to fill up the empty spaces downtown that are on the market at sky-high rent prices. “I think the city should nationalize downtown, sort of like they do in South American countries. All the buildings that are vacant for three years, get them filled,” he suggested.
He’s a bit extreme on that, but I can understand his frustrations. “People think we made money here. We would never claim to be businesspeople. We’re not. We put our heart and souls into this place and got to know the kids who come here all the time. They love what we’re doing, and they know we’re being honest with them. We’re not trying to get rich off of them,” Postupack said.
“The point is, we’d be doing that to pay these landlords to do nothing. Why can’t we keep the shows cheap? Why can’t we pay the bands well? We don’t make that much money, but we keep going,” Postupack said.
But there is a reality check in terms of the market and the invisible hand and the rest. The city isn’t going to nationalize downtown. Obviously. I have heard of localities enacting ordinances putting additional taxes and fees on owners of long-term vacant buildings that are aimed at encouraging movement on their part to either lease or outright sell their properties to new and you’d think more forward-thinking interests. I’m also hearing talk on an idea to go at the vacant-building issue another way by providing tax incentives to property owners for site and building upgrades.
None of that resolves the Kronos dilemma in the here and now. Why that’s important goes back to the teens that made Kronos their hangout the past couple of years.
“We can’t lose Kronos,” said Charlene Schillinger, a recent R.E. Lee High School graduate who will be attending the Savannah College of Art and Design in the fall. “Just within my circle of friends, seeing the growth culturally and artistically, Kronos just brings people together, artists and bands and just people. You can’t get rid of something that good,” said Schillinger, whose art was the feature of an exhibit at Kronos this past spring.
Schillinger and R.E. Lee junior Patrick Austin-Good are spearheading a public-relations campaign to save Kronos. They have more than 100 signatures on petitions and were able to get a good number of the Kronos kids out to a City Council meeting last week to plead their case.
“Kronos is the one place that I can come where I can say what I think and be just me and enjoy good music at the same time. I really don’t want that to die. This is the only place in Staunton that’s like this,” Austin-Good told me in an interview a couple of hours before the City Council meeting on July 9.
This is another area where the story gets complicated. Postupack and the Kronos kids are asking for the city to somehow help them find a new home, which, hey, you have to say is clearly not a city-government responsibility, to say the least. And yet local governments have for years tried with our tax dollars to address the age-old issue in the Greater Augusta area about how there’s really nothing for teens to do here.
Nothing against the various and sundry programs sponsored by the Central Shenandoah Office on Youth, but inherent to tax-supported programs is a bit of censorship and watering down to the message that kids being savvy are going to pick up on and avoid if they can at all.
So them’s the particulars. An art gallery morphed into a cultural center for teens quite by accident, and in the process set the stage for its own demise if its Proudhon-inspired owner can’t hold his nose and work out a deal on a new space that won’t push him to the brink of insolvency.
Of course it wouldn’t be the city’s fault if Kronos has breathed its last. But does it matter whose fault it is? I’m not sure that it does, just that we would have had something good, and don’t anymore.
– Story by Chris Graham