"At Fort Point studios, artists feel betrayed; Midway Studios was a cherished housing enclave for artists until hopes were dashed and a military helmet firm moved in" by Geoff Edgers | Globe Staff, March 18, 2012
David Rogers wrote the infamous note on Valentine’s Day. He was scrambling to leave the office at 15 Channel Center St. to take his wife to Legal Sea Foods when two artists stopped him.
The artists lived upstairs and, like many other Midway Studios residents, they were unhappy with Rogers’s plans to expand his company into the downstairs theater of the building they shared in Fort Point. The artists felt Rogers’s company, Ops-Core, which makes military helmets, shouldn’t operate at Midway, a building designed as live-in studios for artists.
Out of frustration, Rogers dashed off a blistering note on his cellphone as he waited for his table.
Just like usurious banks and Wall Street crooks.
He continued: “The majority of the people we are protecting are under 20 years old and have signed up for military service to earn money for college. They are not living off their parents, trust funds, welfare, or mooching off the American taxpayer like many of the residents of this building.’’
Or like banks, war-profiteers, or Israel.
The conflict between Midway’s residents and Ops-Core boiled over last week in a packed, three-hour-plus community meeting.
The fight at Fort Point!
The battle, though, is rooted in the larger and more complex history of Midway Studios, and of the city’s efforts to create an affordable enclave for artists. It is about the hope the complex offered when it opened in 2005 and the failure to deliver on its original promise that residents would be able to eventually buy the spaces in the building they were renting.
“Midway is a complete disaster,’’ says Nicholas Ortolino, 42, an assistant professor of industrial design at Wentworth Institute of Technology and a Midway Studios resident since 2005. “It was nothing but a bait and switch.’’
Others disagree and stress that despite some of the problems encountered after the opening, the building has made Fort Point better.
“Did Midway turn out the way we originally envisioned? No,’’ says Cheryl Forte, a former manager for the project. “But is it better that Midway Studios exists today? I’d say yes.’’
Rogers’s blowtorch of a message aggravated the artists’ feelings of betrayal, and added to the distrust of Keen Development, the building’s landlord. A week later those feelings further intensified when a crew hired by Rogers to refinish floors failed to properly vent the space. Polyurethane fumes poured into the brick studios. Some artists were driven out overnight....
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