(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 571: Growing St. Louis’ Arts and Culture District

This week we’re joined by Vanessa Cooksey, President and CEO of the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and Chris Hansen, Executive Director at Kranzberg Arts Foundation. We chat about growth and investment in St. Louis’ Grand Center Arts District and talk about the people that make it work. We also discuss ensuring that the public can enjoy the arts while making sure artists benefit from their work in the community.

Regional Arts Commission St. Louis

Kranzberg Arts Foundation

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Below is a full unedited transcript of the episode:

We are the largest public funder of the arts in the St. Louis region.

So I grew up playing drums and percussion and really studying different cultures through music. So I got really enthralled in the musical process. And then I’ve spent most of my career kind of building the bridge between art. So for me it was just ingrained in early the creative process is something that’s so finite and magical and to protect it and serve it and align it with the opportunities that ensure that it can build capacity and sustain.

It’s just been a lifelong professional work since I’ve been in my early twenties.

During Shirley Franklin’s administration and then moved to St. Louis to start my career in corporate philanthropy. And so now being atrac, I get the benefit of investing public dollars that add quality to life in St. Louis and supporting the artists and arts organizations that make St. Louis a great place to live and visit.

And so I like to think of St. Louis as an arts town. We have great sports, but we also have amazing arts. And both those work together to make this a great place to live.

our local operas, one of the few doing original works going out to New York. we just have prolific theater scene. We’re retaining our artists because we’re, we’re putting the type of support and capacity around them, where they live, where they work, where they present. So you’re seeing more and more artists get famous and stay here.

So we’re right now, in a moment in St. Louis where, we feel like we’re one of the great. And music and entertainment capitals in the world, and we know we are, we have it in our legacy, we have it in our infrastructure. And now the city and the region is starting to really identify that this is one of the things that makes us unique and sets us apart from other cities that we have to compete with for jobs and talent retention and attraction and tourism.

But don’t mess with it. Don’t take what it does. Don’t always put so many, be nimble with the way you support it. Be patient and just put it in proximity and things happen and grow. And I think, one of the things that really drives. Our position, our sector’s position in the larger conversation in business and civic are the creative.

So they’re strong, they’re solution based. They’re showing up in community, they’re building these neighborhoods and they’re unabashedly proud and vocal. And then it takes agencies like ours that can connect those voices to those rooms where those voices are less heard. And I think we work really hard at that, at really active listening.

Showing where people are not asking them to always come to us and trying to build that bridge. And I think we have a really strong connection between the street level energy and where decisions are made now, and that is really affecting change.

We’ve invested $115 million into a sector that generates almost a billion dollars in economic activity and 12,000 jobs. But I like people to understand. Arts as civic infrastructure actually dates back in St. Louis to the early 19 hundreds. You can see a through line throughout our history where our elected officials at the regional level have found mechanisms to ensure that public dollars invest in.

Arts and culture resources here. So we’ve got a Zoom Museum district, which provides property tax dollars that supports our major institutions like the St. Louis Art Museum and the History Museum. And what that does is ensure affordability. It also creates a platform for, and an environment for public private partnership.

And so I want to ensure that, people know arts have been important to St. Louis for. Centuries. And it will continue to be because of how we’ve organized our public support for the arts.

But we had this, large upswell and rising populations and things like that. And then the fall to a certain extent, which was done in part by planners, but doing urban renewal and things like that. But. I’m interested in that kind of like wave that you’ve followed too since early on. As you mentioned, Vanessa, like you all have been investing in the arts for a long time, you had that rise in the fall and then you’re coming back again and using that initial infrastructure as something to build on is really interesting to me.

But civic and cultural identity and how we tell the story of our community really, I think is the through line for the rise and fall. Chris can speak specifically to Grand Center and how that has developed over time.

Louis, there’s just been generations of stakeholders and really important. Institutions and businesses and families over the years that have led. And so it’s not a singular effort, it’s decades of investment from St. Louis University to the St. Louis Symphony, to the Strauss family and the Fox Theater, grant Center, Inc.

Who’s been our kind of neighborhood association that’s done so much to. Continue to move the needle. Our organization, the Queensburg Arts Foundation over the last 10 years, really carrying that momentum and starting a groundswell, really. it used to be a place where art graduated and where the biggest institutions and the highest of art existed, but now it’s filled in a bridge between where you can discover a neighborhood without a ticket in your hand.

There’s more community benefits ingrained in ensuring artists can afford to be here, and there’s more access than there’s ever been. There’s more diversity. And that is through intentional arts based community development. And I think that approach to using real estate, which St. Louis is one of the few markets of our size with stock in an urban core, so close to downtown with so much institutional strength and neighborhood strength around it.

But you could still find blighted vacancy and to be able to take those buildings. Through a call to action from community and align them through the needs assessments of artists and creative industries and nonprofits, and then just give them that space to do their work. That model of nons, speculative active listening art space, community development is really proven to be something that makes place job creation, economic development, but rooting community interest.

Putting artists at a place where they can be the solution maker. And so it’s a powerful combination when you have the stock, have a value driven development and a neighborhood that already wants it. And I think St. Louis is getting. Much better at fixing and breaking old systems and putting new mechanisms around broken systems that we’re, we’ve defined and led in areas of redlining and kind of systemic segregation and racism and all the things that St.

Louis has challenged in our fragmented personalities and geography. This style of development works in a city like this, I think is a model at how you can do both hands. you can have community benefits, you can provide subsidy and be patient for those that need it, but you can also move the market and generate jobs and generate wealth.

And so whether it’s they’re going to the schools or bringing children to their locations, having activities available for families. When so many of our arts organizations are intentional about outreach to young people, you start to develop patronage and you start to ensure that, people feel like this is, for me, it’s accessible.

I enjoy it, I am learning, and of course, all of the health benefits that come with engaging in the arts. But I’m particularly impressed at how our outreach to young people has been consistent over the years. And so by the time they get to be adults. They’re engaged in voting. They want their elected officials and their civic engagement reflects that value.

We’re a regional organization. we have initiatives broadly. We have affordable housing initiatives for artists and neighborhoods that call to action, but this was an area that had so much already going for it, but still had some gaps. It had missing teeth where there wasn’t community improvement districts.

There was still a lot of blight and vacancy. There was still a lot of disconnection. So the Grant Center Arts district was an obvious area. For us to focus and centralize our energy. this started because one family believes so much that the arts in St. Louis pound for pound, no one can beat us in the world.

And that it’s the soul of the city. And they wanted to impact it, not just the bigs. They wanted to impact the smalls. They wanted to impact the small orbs and the. The 150 cap black box theaters for new line theater. And, they just believed in it. they built their entire art collection around purchasing local art or from local dealers.

So they just loved the city, they loved the creatives and they wanted to lift it up and protect it. But we didn’t really have a north star because when you’re not speculating and you’re building based on need and call to action and active listening, you don’t know what the next year’s gonna bring.

And I think for the first 10 years. Every year brought a new call to action that we were able to take our model and say, we can find the right real estate, we can put the right mix use around it, we can support it and find a way to sustain it. And we have certain boxes we have to check to say, yes, that fits our model.

But once we do that, we can go and what we did is we first rooted the nonprofit and the artists, then we built the commercial tenants around it to support it, and we put the patron amenities around it that made it a 365 district. And it really just. One thing led to another, and it was that nimbleness, that institutional strength nimbleness, but also that understanding that you had to make the economy around the artwork, right?

It couldn’t just be buy the building and subsidize everything, and then you just, you bleed out all the time. We had to find the sustainable model so that nimbleness. Is how we got here. But now to protect it and ensure it’s, it lives. It lives and lives for generations and ensures that it’s part of that, that sharp tool in the toolbox.

We have to be more strategic. We have to build better partnerships with the public sector. We have to focus. On the things that typically you would’ve to focus as a privately held foundation. We have to worry about the streets and the trash and the safety and the connectivity of the pedestrian experience.

So it’s been an amazing ride to do this work. But I tell you, it, it’s really because of. That individual creative. I think oftentimes we forget that all of this is only because the individual artist here is so strong that the, all these orgs can exist to support ’em and all this infrastructure can exist to support them ultimately.

And, it’s been a great honor and the family, it’s blown their mind that we’ve been able to accomplish what we’ve been able to accomplish. And it wasn’t because we said we’re gonna go buy 20 buildings and do this. It was patient, it was nimble, and it was informed.

Part of what makes Grand Center East work and the work that the Kranzberg Arts Foundation is doing is because of Chris, and I think that, his leadership is informed by the fact that he’s an artist and who knows better on how to bring. People and things together to create something that didn’t exist and to ensure that it can be of benefit to others than artists because whether it’s the politics or assessing the economic value, I think Chris’s lens is informed by him having been an artist, and he brings that, and ultimately he knows and acts according to.

People as our greatest asset. I

And I think that’s really important to never lose that connection to the creative process in the creative.

And I think that we miss that a lot of times in cities around the country. we’re focused so much on trying to get back on track to where maybe we were before, but there might be a different path forward that we weren’t looking at. I

There’s all these archaic tools that have been complicated and polarized communities, and there’s a distrust of development. There’s a distrust of aligning incentives for it. and so you have to really roll up your sleeves and figure out new ways to do it. And, but more importantly, I think, than.

A lot of times in traditional development it’s about stacking the sources and the incentives and all the greatest design and the best laid plan and takes all this time and money, but you just still don’t have that thing where someone wants to be. And I think that’s the difference when you put art to work, it creates place immediately.

You’re not using art. And I think that’s what a lot of cities do. They use art. If you protect it and invest in it and nurture it, it’ll pay dividends for you when you get behind that process. And yeah, getting people to all wanna be in that same place at the same time is one of the hardest parts. And I think that’s one of the things that a lot of traditional development fails at or find it the hardest thing to do.

And then it’s. The fee, right? It’s about finishing development base and not actually that you’ve actually created something that people wanna hold.

Louis that we get to then invest in lasting civic infrastructure. So it’s a win for both the residents and. Visitors and I think that when arts are seen as civic infrastructure, they power both community connection and cultural energy. And so when you go to a place, what do you talk about? The people that you experience there through.

Different activities and arts. And so nobody wants to go to a place that’s boring. Nobody wants to live in a place that’s boring. And the arts creates these environments, like Chris said, the place where neighborhoods are walkable and you’ve got music and galleries and restaurants, that really creates the.

Kind of experience that people want more of. Either they stay in place, they continue to live where they live, or they routinely visit because of that cultural energy. And the arts does that better than most sectors.

Just, the buildings are impressive, historic, there’s a lot of walkability. It’s easy to get around. It seems like. I’m curious what the work is to connect some of that urban fabric together, because it’s obviously not all the buildings are in the same street. But it does seem to be like a cohesive place.

And so we’ve got something that very few areas have, and the challenge for us is to connect that. And so a lot of our work at the foundation over the next coming years is to connect the dots, and we’re doing that through public art, through a mural initiative called The Walls Off Washington. To not just make the streets more walkable, but to even make the alleyways feel walkable to continue to work on public-private partnerships that invest in infrastructure.

Not handing developers’ money, but getting the streets and the traffic and the sidewalks and the lighting. And we wanna wake up in 10 years and be able to walk from the Fox Theater to City SC, which would only take you 15 minutes roughly to walk there, right? It doesn’t take you that long, no matter how fast you walk.

But we just wanna be able to do that in a way where everyone feels safe, it’s accessible, it’s connected, and when you’re walking, there’s vibrancy, there’s door pulls, and there’s things that can entice you to enjoy it or view it, learn from it, and there’s more people living here. So I think a big part of that is in a city like St. Louis where there’s a lot of fragmentation, there’s. Multitude of taxing districts, community improvement districts, SPDs.

We’ve really worked on setting that broader table across Midtown and into downtown to help build that bridge. And I think this is a moment where those public-private partnerships, really getting stakeholders that have invested their time in treasure from faith communities, residents, small businesses, nonprofits, bigger institutions, and city government to really start to work together to meet the moment in an area that is our greatest cultural asset.

And we believe this, believe this through real data that Grand Center in Mid Town is the most important and greatest cultural district in North America, and we’re gonna prove it over time by making it easier to enjoy it because we still have too many flat surface lots. We still have harsh conditions. We still have lack of accessibility and connectivity. We don’t need a lot more big things.

We need small things now, lighter, cheaper, faster. We don’t need another huge development. Couple hundred more residential units, few more mom and pop restaurants, a little more retail and more, most importantly, walkability and safety. And we’ve got Mecca.

And so being able to come to a place where for just however many hours or time, you don’t have to worry about all these things that divide and separate us. We have an amazing festival, MATI, and when people are out together, it’s This is St. Louis. It’s not my particular neighborhood. Like we’re bringing all of the best of us to a place to experience something together. And so that density of creativity and humanity, especially for a time like this, I think is so important. And KAF does it better than anybody.

You mentioned some numbers before, just under 900 million, almost a billion dollars in local impact, tens of thousands of jobs. the impact there. I’m also curious though, about the non-economic impacts, and you just mentioned that Vanessa a little bit, the economic driver for folks that is supported by folks who not, aren’t necessarily, in it for the money, but they get the culture out of it, if that makes sense.

So I’m curious what like. The value that’s derived from the scene that isn’t quite monetary, that you can’t quite calculate, but you can feel,

We really have that here. And it’s because people feel comfortable, they feel safe, they can show up as who they’re, and so I think ecosystems like this. To be themselves and feel comfortable being themself around a lot of other people. So I think there’s a lot of just wellness, mental wellness and peace with that.

The other thing is it’s a big civic pride booster and cities that focus on that civic pride quota. Are just healthier and wealthier, and there’s real data behind that, right? There’s real data that points to cities that love themselves do better. And so I think that’s an important piece of this. It’s just making people feel like, wow, man, St.

Louis is cool and I like it here, and it’s fun and I see people like this district and music at the intersection, Maddie. When you walk around, you’re like, oh, this is what St. Louis looks like. It can be very fragmented if you’re in not the wrong place, but if you stay in certain areas, it might not look as rich and diverse.

And so I do think that civic pride building and a sense of wellness and community is something that people long for and when the arts do it right, they’re part of health and wealth.

when you talk about the social, there’s also meaningful health benefits, how people feel. How long they live and their quality of life. I think it’s the added quality of life experiences that matter and are reinforced by the presence of art.

The ideas of, figuring out how to reduce loneliness and figure out how to get people together and build social capital and how that impacts people’s health. And I think that’s a really important point just because when we measure. Economic impact. Sometimes I think it’s too much about the dollars and cents, but there’s all these other impacts and obviously a public health impact is a monetary impact if you’re spending less on hospitals, if you’re spending less on people getting medical treatment for things.

There’s a wonderful book called Root Shock by Dr. Mindy Fola. And she talks about how basically if you remove people from a place, they disconnect from their friends and their loved ones, and it impacts them from a health perspective. And over time, there’s this idea of the biomedical model versus the bio-psychosocial model.

And the biomedical model is just treating people when they get to the hospital. But the bio-psychosocial model is treating the place and the people that live there and connecting them with each other. And I think this arts district is actually part of that bio psychosocial model. And it’s. Improving people’s lives in a larger sense than maybe just the monetary value that’s generated.

We have many different faith communities here that are like strong stakeholders. Just across from my office at Washington Tabernacle, missionary Baptist Church, Martin Luther King spoke there twice deeply tied to the civil rights movement. This is a place where people learn, the home of public media.

So it’s like you’re saying, and we have. Hospitals all around us. We have counselors and therapists embedded in our ecosystem, and so it is, this is a whole place. It’s not just an arts district, it’s a full connected neighborhood where everything in real life happens, but it’s happening across, like you can go to the Hilo in our literary cafe in the morning or afternoon, the blueprint, and you can see every walk of life, billionaire donors.

It’s a struggling artist to a neighbor up the street that’s trying to find resources for reading to nonprofit arts leaders, to St. Louis University and Herto students. So this mashup is, I think people take that back to their neighborhoods and we all like our little five Toms here, we have 91 I think municipalities and, but when we go back.

We go back with that sense of what St. Louis really has to offer and what it looks like, and we spread that positivity and that energy and that ripple effect pays dividends for the city. But you’re so right and I think Grand Center to just identify with it as an arts district isn’t enough. It’s arts prowess is so strong, but what anchors it and makes it possible to have that armature are the things that are around it.

57% of our artists are registered voters, and the participation in local elections is twice as high for artists than it is for citizens. And so as you can imagine, and when we talk about engaging. And being involved in owning the place that you live and having some sense of responsibility for that place, the presence of that is a lot higher when it comes to people who are connected to the arts because they tend to want to be involved.

And like I said, it’s that ownership.

And then it’s extracted by others who come in later. But I’m curious if you’ve seen that in St. Louis. Like the value that you’re creating it is not harmful, I don’t wanna say, but like you’ve seen some impacts. Outside of the area from the housing market or from displacement of folks, or those types of things that we see sometimes in these coastal cities.

But you want an economically viable district that generates taxes and jobs and, but you wanna ensure that those that can’t afford have access and that there’s a nice amount of that assurance that these places are for those orgs and those individuals, but still the market can move. But in other areas like our affordable housing initiatives with the St.

Louis ArtPlace initiative, it’s about ensuring affordability and perpetuity. Not to build a house, subsidize a house, and then let the house move with the market after 10 years, or to have the house appraised for. Below where the market’s at or have it appraised for much more. So you’re really trying to stabilize and not interfere with the market, but you’re trying to ensure that artists can always afford to live in a neighborhood that is in a gentrification mode, right?

Where all this stuff’s happening in around where artists are starting to get squeezed and a neighborhood says. We wanna preserve our artist community, and we need help with turning vacancy to vibrancy. And we want the artists that generationally lived here to always be able to afford to live here. And we want artists not just as renters, but as owners and stakeholders in a broader conversation.

We built a wealth and equity path for low to moderate income artists to actually own a home without a land trust, without a ground lease, with a loan and a covenant that gives them a whole mortgage with a bank, 30 year fixed terms. And they build credit. They’re showing up in the, in a neighborhood that they’re generationally connected to and they can afford to live there.

And when they wanna leave, they get their principal back out. They have a relationship with the bank. They got their credit built and the next artist can move in at that same a MI range. And so that house generationally stays affordable. And if that artist wants to stay there for the rest of their life, they can.

But if they wanna move, they don’t get to sell it and take a big windfall. Another artist gets to afford to live there. And it’s a very unique model, and I think that’s one of the ways that we’re trying to counter that effort. where an area like Cherokee, like it starts with grassroots arts and then development comes in.

Artists can’t afford to be there and they move to another area, right? And then they do the same thing over and over. we’re putting mechanisms in place that are ensuring that doesn’t have to be the case. And we’re starting to see that other developers in the city and other partners are realizing, oh, that’s a good model to ensure for that.

But it’s a constant issue. And I think St. Louis gets it right now more than it ever has. And I think we have examples that other cities. Can learn from. We went down to Austin at South by Southwest a few years ago and spoke to Austin folks about their challenges with that and showed ’em how we did things.

And they were like, man, I wish someone would’ve thought about this with us. and I think some would like to see that level of growth, and I think we all would, we’d love to see St. Louis have a period of just high growth without having to. Uproot and undermine these ecosystems and neighborhoods that are rooted with the people and businesses and organizations that made it the place that everybody wants to be at now.

And I think we’re better positioned to receive that wave and protect the creative and protect the art and that industry broadly and sector broadly.

And so again, making sure that public-private partnerships are. Part of how we start to think about solving community problems like gentrification, and one of the things that RAC has been focused on for the last 30 years, and we’ve really accelerated it over the last five years, is capacity building for artists.

We created a program called the Community Arts Training Institute, which really brings artists. Civic business leaders, social workers together to think about how to integrate arts into solving community problems. And one of the mantra of that is with not for, you don’t come into a community and say, this is what you need.

No. You engage the community in solving their community problems. And over the last four years, we’ve partnered with MidAmerica Arts Alliance on a program called Artist Inc. Live that talks about the business. Of arts, and so we just don’t subscribe to the starving artist mantra, right? There are things that we can do to help artists build their capacity and their knowledge about the business side so that they can make good decisions and invest their dollars in, assets versus being depleted and or exploited.

there’s some really amazing initiatives, the Brick Line Initiative to really connect these areas downtown and north and south. Have a walkable bikeable path. So we’re seeing these integrations come closer to the district. There is good public transportation throughout the district. we have a really great metro transit system.

lots of folks are still driving here and those that live here can walk. But I would say we’re still seeing most of the traffic come through vehicles. Not public transit and not pedestrian bikes and walking, but that’s some of the conditions we’re trying to solve. Mod DOT’s got big plans right now.

GRG and Brick Line are moving through the district and around the area, and then that public infrastructure that makes that walk. The theater, the contemporary art museum, all the way to City Sea, feel vibrant and connected and safe. that’s one of our challenges as a city to get people more comfortable with parking and walking or taking public transport.

But for the most part it’s vehicular.

And I personally think that, good government should be quiet, seamless operating, doing what the residents need it to do. And so it’s not that we need RAC to be known all over, but in times of. Challenge where it’s, budget shortfalls or politics that the residents know, wow, I have a direct benefit from the Regional Arts Commission.

It is the investment that they’ve made over the last 40 years that makes St. Louis a great place to live and visit so we can find. Ways to cut here, there, and everywhere, but we wanna make sure that, arts isn’t a luxury for us. It’s part of who we are. And we’ve been doing that, since the early 19 hundreds.

So just being able to connect the dots between what good government looks like and its impact on people’s everyday experience.

a lot of times folks just look at it like, gimme money. We’re supporting through a different way. So sometimes it’s just you just wish they’d make the right ass. So you could say yes because we like saying yes. And the other one is. What can I do to help? Like mutualism, like a lot of times like, oh, you got it.

Oh, you’re gonna carry it. It’s no, what? before I even ask, Hey, what can I do to help? Sometimes, when you do the work and you’re leading in work, people forget that, you need support in that work and you desire their input. So you just want people to keep showing up and informing.

I guess that’s the other thing. What, maybe not ask, but if you get a seat at the table. show up every time, right? stay engaged. I think more than ever the right people are in the right rooms. Artists are informing our process as leaders like Vanessa and I try to connect their hopes and dreams with the opportunities and.

The bigger structures that feel daunting and these big black boxes that feel impossible to break through. I think we’re demystifying it a little and bringing it back to the people and keeping our feet on the ground while we do it. And we don’t get to leave these things to our children. that’s like the physicalness of these buildings.

Like I might have had a vision for things and know how to put it all together and manifest things into reality, but we’re stewards and servants of gifts. Or public dollars in Vanessa’s case that we’re just trying to make sure that, these things are generational, that our children get to and desire to stay in St.

Louis and their children desire to stay in St. Louis, and that these are things that you know, are coveted and held and protected for generations.

Where can folks find out more about what you all are doing?

M-A-T-I-S tl. For a one of a kind festival and conference that you can only find here in St. Louis. And it’s a world class event and we hope people from all over the world will travel here and they already do, but want more and more. And hopefully folks out in San Francisco will think it’s, something that they would even be excited to come to.

So you can find us all over the webs and socials and the LinkedIns and all that.